I am a Teacher Technology Coach with Regina Catholic Schools in Regina, SK, Canada, where I support teachers and schools as they look to implement technology into the classroom. I’m still getting a feel for the role, but in short, I get to do awesome things with awesome people every day.
Prior to this role, I taught 7/8 here in Regina for two years. With no background with that age group, I was quite challenged in teaching Math, ELA, Science, Religion, Arts Ed, and everything in between at that grade level And, before that, I taught high school Math, Science, and STEM in St. Louis, Missouri for two years. I completed by B.Ed. in Secondary Math and Science from the University of Regina in 2012. If you would like to learn more about my past work experience and education, take a look at my most recent resume at resume.kylewebb.ca. (updated most recently in June 2016).
I am most active on Twitter at @webbkyle and encourage you to reach me there if you are looking to connect with me. In addition to Twitter, you can find all the other places I have a presence by clicking the icons at the top of this page. I’d love to connect with you about anything you see on this site, or anything else you’re interested in for that matter.
]]>In the classroom, I find reflection and feedback the most valuable tool I can provide my students. I don’t care about marks and numbers to represent learning, but I do care about giving students the tools to improve themselves. Learning doesn’t end. Even though our schools call for us to have definite start and end points, we can’t confine every student within those boundaries and expect them to thrive. As my role as a teacher coach, I find myself able to really apply this philosophy. Luckily, the teachers that I work with are looking to improve themselves, want that meaningful feedback, and allow me to push them reflect deeply and challenge their practices in an attempt to strengthen them.
The best thing I believe that we can do for learners, no matter their age or context, is to create learning opportunities that are authentic. Ideally, these opportunities will reflect real life, relevant situations that learners can engage deeply with. However, realizing this is not always possible with the curriculum presented to teachers, I believe that even if the learning task and outcomes may not be truly authentic to learners’ lives, at least the process in which they learn can be. By utilizing the tools and resources that students use regularly outside classrooms and learning spaces, we can offer students the ability to strengthen learning skills and mindsets no matter the content.
We know each student learns differently, and that our approaches to teaching work to varying degrees of effectiveness with each. That’s why we differentiate. However, this often gets lost while providing professional development for teachers. Like students, it is imperative that we differentiate for teachers and meet them where they are at. A big part of this is building relationships with learners. If any teacher hopes to make meaningful changes in learners, it is essential that they start with relationships to understand their learners’ worldviews and work towards understanding them. Only by starting there can teachers start to encourage the risk taking and mindsets needed for real learning and growth to occur.
As a classroom teacher, I always struggled with collaboration. Not that I don’t play well with others, but how to find time and ways to make it happen with teachers who have little to no time available to do so. As a coach, not only can I collaborate with so many people all of the time, I can create opportunities for others to collaborate. I value this so highly because I have seen how effective collaboration of teachers can be and increase student and teacher experiences in the classroom. It is a personal and professional goal of mine to collaborate more and share as much as possible.
As I’ve already articulated, learning doesn’t end. It definitely will not end here for me. I have a skillset and knowledgebase that will allow me to connect and collaborate, share and learn with so many other like minded teachers (hopefully some of my ETAD classmates!). I fully plan to continue to Tweet and connect with others through the wonderful platform and Twitter Chats. I also hope to engage again in professional, reflective blogging as a way to keep myself honest and pushing myself to learn.
One of my biggest gaps in knowledge is in Treaty Education and First Nations Ways of Knowing. I went through my undergraduate degree with very little coursework surrounding it and, while teaching in the United States, it wasn’t the same level of importance as it is Canada. I hope to continue to learn as much as I can about this through personal and professional development and by asking the tough questions.
I feel the need to share that this philosophy has been scrapped, rewritten, and changed more times than I care to count. I fully anticipate that it will continue to change and develop into something I am more pleased to share as a representation of my thinking and how I approach learning and teaching.
]]>This course was largely discussion based and built around the readings in our course textbook. Our weekly discussions were guided by classmates and many provided opportunities to pick from a selection of responses and to participate as much or as little as possible. Having struggled with deeply engaging in message board interactions throughout my entire ETAD journey, I especially appreciated the option to engage at a level comfortable to me. Some weeks I would post multiple times on multiple days, and other days I was quite content being a fly on the wall and watching the discussion of my classmates unfold. I really enjoyed being able to moderate for a week, and, unsurprisingly, I found myself the most engaged in the discussion that week.
For our major assessment, we were tasked to create a design plan for a distance education course. Initially, all students were placed into groups of 4 to explore this task and, although I would have loved to work with those I was assigned to work with, I took one last big risk for my learning and opted to explore the project on my own. Taking on the work of a group of 4 by myself was without a doubt outside of my comfort zone, but I finally had an opportunity to use my coursework to create something that I would get to actualize in my current role. Building upon an initiative that I am a part of from my school division, I decided to build the design plan for an online course that would serve all grade 7 and 8 students in our division. With the diverse range of learners I would have to design for, it would be essential that I consider how to best motivate learners in this situation, since they will not be have the motivation to take the course like adult learners may (Simonson et al., 2011).
Had I not taken this course or had the opportunity to build a design plan, there is a very good chance that I would have jumped right into creating the course content. Because distance education has often been a trial-and-error approach, it is valuable to consider theoretical frameworks while designing for distance education (Simonson et al., 2011). This course pushed me to consider the full picture before diving right in. In the design process, I had to consider how institutional factors impacted my design, considering the stakeholders and potential barriers I may encounter. By looking at the pedagogical factors, I was also forced to think deeply about the learner needs in the context of this course, and consider how the knowledge could be broken up logically and implemented in ways that would meet my learners’ needs (Simonson et al., 2011). Although not a major part of my project, articulating the technological needs and processes was valuable so that those outsider the organization could understand how we were able to implement this within our infrastructure. Evaluation of the course would also prove to be an integral piece of the project. To evaluate, I will look to employ an AUIOU (accountability, effectiveness, impact, organizational context, and unanticipated consequences) model because of the valuable formative and summative information that can be gained (Simonson et al., 2011).
Ultimately, the exciting part of this course was the fact that I have the opportunity to turn my design plan into a fully implemented course that is scheduled to be rolled out to all schools in the 2017-18 school year. Moving forward, all of the differing theories, design choices, and approaches will influence any work I do with distance or online education.
References
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S. E., & Zvacek, S. (2011). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education.
Artifacts
Course Design Presentation
Final Course Design Plan
]]>The focus of 805 was to independently explore a topic of interest that we had a motivation to learn about. Having implemented Genius Hour in my own classroom previously, I was excited for the opportunity to pursue a passion of my own again in a Masters course. Like nearly every single student I have ever presented with Genius Hour, I initially found myself frozen and unable to find a topic that I wanted to go ahead with.
Luckily, due to the very tight time restrictions of the course, I forced myself to make a choice: one-to-one computing programs in schools. I’m first to admit that this isn’t exactly a passion of mine. But, I had taught in one-to-one environments previously and I knew that I would be helping implement a program to support teachers in one-to-one classrooms in my upcoming role in the fall. Being an advocate of technology in classrooms, I haven’t been immune to the nonstop criticisms of technology in classrooms and am often confronted with questions about this when I tell anyone about what I do and how I do it. So, I figured this would be a great opportunity to dive into some research and get well versed on both sides of the issue.
Aside from my research paper, practically the only other requirement of the course was to review a peer’s draft of their paper. Thankfully, and likely by design, the classmate I was assigned to peer review was investigating a very similar topic: BYOD (bring your own device) policies in the classroom. Through his paper, I found additional sources for my paper and I ended up strengthening up some portions of my paper after reading his arguments and receiving the feedback. That opportunity to deeply share my work and review someone else’s work was something I really did not understand the true value of until I had the chance to do so.
Although not directly an outcome of the course, I think my biggest take away was the need for a solid plan for any research that you plan to do. With my tight time constraints, I had to find the discipline to work on my paper daily and in non-traditional settings, like the car or on a picnic bench.
Artifacts
Final Paper
One-to-one laptop computing programs: Impacts and challenges on students and teachers
Image Credit: IMG_4590” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by bionicteaching
]]>Through the length of this course, we engaged in discussion boards, developmental activities, group presentations (as a part of the discussion boards), and a culminating research proposal. I especially appreciated that our developmental activities were directly applied to our research proposal and that I was able combine them to make up a huge chunk of the final research proposal.
For my group project, I was placed within a great group. We divided and conquered our presentation and I was quite proud of the product we produced and shared with the class about Evaluation and Action Research (see below). We utilized the collaborative power of Google Slides and were able to combine all of our research effectively. I really enjoyed diving deeper into action research, since this was the first time I had formally investigated with it.
For the needs and wants of classroom teachers, I found that action research finally gave credibility to the work that so many teachers already do in efforts to improve their own students’ learning and school environments. The missing element is often the reporting piece, but I do believe that more teachers would share if there were less intimidating ways to share than journals. What I really connected with was the need to reflect. Reflection allows for researchers to best evaluate and synthesize their experiences, something that is extremely familiar for teachers already (Gall et al, 2007). However, ethics must always remain a significant consideration in the process and researchers will likely find additional ethical considerations while trying to balance the role of teacher and researcher, while still serving students needs and professional requirements (Gall et al, 2007).
My choice for my research project was largely motivated by stress levels at the time. I decided to investigate the Mindfulness trend and how it could potentially reduce or impact student stress levels in a middle years classroom environment. I had no plans of doing a thesis or formal, full research during my masters (I personally couldn’t imagine juggling that with a full time teaching gig), so I welcomed the opportunity to only focus on the proposal piece of research for the culminating task. Through this, I realized how complex and intricate going about research can be. I learned a lot about my topic just from the literature review, which I could apply into my classroom teaching and personal life. Prior to this course, I gave very little though to the validity of results and ethics in educational research, but quickly realized how important these were to consider if your research were to add value to the body of knowledge in the world.
I still don’t really see myself pursuing formal research any time soon, but I certainly have a much greater appreciation for the process of research and an increased respect for those who dedicate so much time and effort to it. My biggest takeaway from ERES 800 is the knowledge of the process which has given me the tools to critically look at research, allowing me to identify the strengths and limitations and, ultimately, how it can apply it to the work I do with students and teachers every day.
References
Gall, M. D., Gall, J. P., & Borg, W. R. (2007). Educational Research: An Introduction (8th ed.). Toronto, ON: Pearson.
Artifacts
Group Discussion
Final Research Proposal
]]>This course took a different approach than all of the ETAD courses from the U of S that I had taken. The course’s homebase was in Google+, a social network that I had always wanted to explore further, but never had an avenue to do so. It was also the first graduate level course I took that had weekly synchronous meetings, which was a nice change of pace at this point in the program, where I found myself starting to get quite comfortable in the discussion board style courses.
EC&I 831 was focused around the use of social media and idea of open education. Throughout the course we were exposed to a number of relevant topics: ranging from Snapchat to trolls to connectivism to activism net neutrality. Throughout the course, we blogged regularly about our reflections on the topics and commented on each others’ blogs each week. Through blogging and Tweeting with each other, a sense of community quickly emerged in the class and the dialogue and thinking was constantly being pushed, not only by classmates but by people outside of the class who were able to access us due to the nature of social media.
My learnings of the course can best be summarized by the podcast that I created as a summary of learning for the course and is embedded below.
For a major assessment of this course, we were challenged to work towards a personal learning project. Through this, we could learn about anything we wanted. Anything. The only requirement was that we needed to access open educational resources and share our learning in real time as we worked through the project. Seeing the golden opportunity this was, and the creaky, nearly-broken coffee table in my living room, I decided to learn more about woodworking by building myself a new coffee table. Because we documented our learning on-the-fly, you can look back at my personal blog to see how I progressed through this challenging task.
I enjoyed the opportunity to step outside of the typical ETAD realm of courses and see how a different institution approaches master courses through digital platforms. Although I struggled with keeping up at times, I did find the blogging to be a very valuable tool and would be a great alternative to discussion boards, while keeping the same sort of discourse and dialogue open. Now that I am wrapping up my graduate studies and will find myself with more time, I hope to continue to blog as a way to further develop my thinking and learning as an education professional.
Artifacts
Blog Posts
http://blog.kylewebb.ca/category/eci831/
Learning Project – Coffee Table
]]>I found it extremely valuable to go through a formal front-end analysis , forcing myself to clearly define and articulate goals and challenges of my design project. This is definitely a skill that I have taken forward with me and I now force myself to do front-end analysis-of-sorts with every large task I take on. Also, breaking down the learning outcomes formally and making concept maps and flow charts were valuable to show how learning will progress and identify need prerequisites and assessment opportunities. Specifying learning outcomes and categorizing them, allows for instructional designers to avoid inappropriate and ineffective procedures and evaluations (Smith & Ragan, 2005). Thirdly, identifying the major design choices and being forced to justify them proved to be challenging, but a useful exercise and practice for my current role where I make decisions like this on a daily basis. Throughout this entire process, it’s important to by aware of cognitive load theory and consider strategies to help learners, like off-loading, segmenting, and eliminating redundancy among many others (Smith & Ragan, 2005). Lastly, the need for evaluation emerged. Without having an evaluation, including usability testing and the like there is a missed opportunity to improve and make a better prototype moving forward. Smith & Ragan clearly articulate the need for validity (does it measure what its supposed to?), reliability (is the measurement consistent?), and practicality (is the measurement realistic to implement?) when considering evaluations of learning (2005).
For my major task, I again went for something practical and picked something that would be directly useful to my classroom teaching. I wanted to create blended learning resources that would be used by Math 7 students, and their parents in an effort to free up more class time for small group instruction and one-on-one instructor time. Although I was very pleased with my design plan, I wasn’t as pleased with the final results of the website I developed the prototype that was built never made it in front of my students. If I had more time or resources to dedicate to the topics, I certainly would have rectified this and made the modifications to get it to that level.
My biggest take away from this course was mostly a way of thinking, a way of approaching problems. Before jumping right into problems, I now know how valuable it is to take the time to define and articulate all aspects of the problems and use those learnings to inform design decisions. This is the course that took me beyond the flashy quick solutions and looking into deeper, more time consuming, solutions with very focused and purposeful intentions.
References
Smith, P. L., & Ragan, T. J. (2005). Instructional design. Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley & Sons.
Artifacts
Final Collection of Assignments
Design Prototype
803 was centred around six themes: text, web page design, audio, image processing, video production, and virtual tours. To top things all off, we would create a final multimedia project which would combine all of these themes together into one place.
With the added free time of summer break and a strong motivation to learn more, I hit the ground running in this course. To a large extent, I missed the regular interaction with classmates (not much beyond posting our assignments), but I was thriving in the independence of the coursework.
With a conscious effort to be practical with my final project, I decided to create a resource that would be useful as I ventured into the world of Math 7 the upcoming school year, a course I was not at all familiar with. I knew that I would be implementing some form of the flipped/blended classroom model and saw this course as the perfect opportunity to really develop some of those resources ahead of time, instead of on-the-fly like I probably would have otherwise.
With that goal in mind, I set forth to create something that would engage my students, be a valuable learning resource to them and any other student who stumbled across the resource, and be a beautiful, functional space on the internet.
Although I didn’t get a chance to implement and reflect on the project during the course, it was an exciting class the day that I showed my 33 grade seven students the website. They couldn’t believe that this was something I made and they loved the functionality of responsive design that I built into the course. Unfortunately, I opened a can of worms I should have seen coming: they wanted this for every unit of the year. Had I continued teaching grade seven this year, I may have looked into how to build this project out into something larger and manage it using a CMS, rather than raw HTML and PHP as I had for this course. I am quite proud of the result and am, to this day, continuing to strengthen my web design and coding skills as a result of this course.
Artifacts
Collection of Assignments
ETAD 803 Assignments (click to view site)
Final Project
Addition And Subtraction Of Integers (click to view site)
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Like many of the graduate courses I took, I was able to apply my learning and understanding directly a project of choosing. As an undergraduate student, I worked at a summer science camp through the U of R called EYES (Education Youth in Engineering and Science) and felt that it was a perfect candidate for a program evaluation. Having an intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the program, I looked at the recruitment workshops and how effective they were at getting kids from their classrooms to registered in camp for the summer. I outlined a document review of already existing data, use of questionnaires for students and teachers, student focus groups, and random observations of classroom workshops. It became apparent really quickly that survey design would be critical and that many outside factors that may impact student enrollment would need to be considered.
The standards that we covered prove to be a good guide to approaching program evaluation. Ensuring evaluations have utility by serving a specific audience who can utilize the evaluation, feasibility by making a realistic plan that can be actualized, propriety by planning ethically and considering the wellbeing of all that may be impacted, and accuracy by utilizing techniques that produce accurate, useful, and meaningful information (Taylor-Powell, E. Jones, L. Henert, 2003). Following these will ensure quality, meaningful work is done through the process of a program evaluation.
Initially, I had no idea the timeline or budget costs that would be needed to be able to conduct a thorough program evaluation like I had planned. The process of going through a logic model was a very valuable experience and a tool that I will draw upon again in the future.
Although I struggled with a practicality of 809 at the time, the course turned out to be some of the most valuable learning that I employ and refer back to regularly in my new role working within my division’s Educational Technology team. With financial challenges facing Saskatchewan schools and school divisions, being able to properly evaluate and make decisions on educational programs is an extremely valuable skill set.
References
Taylor-Powell, E. Jones, L. Henert, E. (2003). Enhancing Program Performance with Logic Models, 1–216. Retrieved from http://www.uwex.edu/ces/lmcourse/
Artifacts
Program Evaluation Plan
]]>I fondly remember the start of the course and struggling so profoundly with getting my head wrapped around epistemologies. It was a mess. To be completely honest, my brain still starts to hurt if I get thinking too deeply into them. We looked deeply and critically at various learning theories, something I hadn’t really had the chance to do up until this point. I found myself the most engaged by the topics of constructivism, connectivism, virtual learning communities, and instructional design. This is largely because they spoke to my current teaching practices and philosophy of teaching at the time.
In my classroom, I have always attempted to ensure that knowledge was being constructed by my learners through as much collaboration as possible, in alignment with constructivism (Driscoll, 2005). Through my attempts to push the collaboration pieces and expand them outside of my classroom, connectivism hit home for me causing me to ponder how knowledge fits within network and systems theory alongside social learning theories (Siemens, 2004). I was especially drawn to connectivism because of how it states knowledge rests in diverse opinions, that capacity to know is more important than what one knows (in line with growth mindset), and that being able to see connections is an essential skill (Siemens, 2004). Further to that, the concept of VLCs (Virtual Learning Communities) spoke to me as a way to actualize both constructivism and connectivism. By designing and creating intentional digital learning spaces, we can craft VLCs that foster high levels of learner engagement (Schwier, 2001).
Throughout the entire course, I found myself asking “what’s the point of this?” or “how does this even apply to my classroom today?”. I had a tough time taking what I was learning and applying it to my teaching immediately. Although these questions made me extremely frustrated at the time, it pushed me to think differently, which has had a long lasting impact on my approach to teaching. My notes, articles, and textbook are valuable resources that I have referred back to multiple times in later classes and in my current role.
If I had to pick one course to go back and take again, it would without a doubt be this course. The more I learned, the more I realized I did not know. I would have loved to have been able to dive deeper into all of these topics as a more experienced graduate student, with the skills to manage my learning much better than I did at the time.
References
Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction. Boston: Pearson Allyn and Bacon.
R. A. Schwier (2001). Catalysts, emphases and elements of virtual learning communities: Implications for research and practice. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 2(1), 5-18.
Siemens, G. (2004, December 12). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm