Assignment 3: Educational Technology Course Community Contributions and Weekly Reflections (30%)
Addresses all ISTE Standards and all UVic TEP Outcomes

Your blog and other social media will play an important role in the learning for this course, and will act as a communication tool between you and your instructor, as well as other course participants from your own or other sections of EDCI 336, UVic Education, and the open learning community.

Blog Writing: Each week at a time that works best for you, you are expected to read/review the articles/resources/websites provided by your instructor, guests, and student facilitators (via blog posts, our course Twitter hashtags, and class activities). You are asked to curate these resources on your blog and reflect on them to compose a well-reasoned blog post response to the weekly topics. Care should be taken to ensure posts demonstrate critical reflection on the innovations or technologies discussed with attention paid to the how they impact philosophical, cultural, and pedagogical stances as well as their practice. Text-based posts are acceptable, but learners are also encouraged to employ multimedia strategies for reflection (e.g., podcasts, vlogs, or other formats). Posts should utilize social writing strategies such as hyperlinks to blog posts (e.g., trackbacks) or to articles/resources consulted, images, embedded media, social sharing (e.g., Twitter), evidence of reading/integrating the posts/thoughts of others, and/or soliciting feedback from prospective readers.

Learning Pod: You will work together with a group of four classmates to help one another with the learning process. You will take turns showcasing your blog progress, where one learner shares their work to date and the other three provide peer assessment and review and comment. You are also asked to identify one specific “learning partner” whom you can work with and turn to with questions along the way. You are welcome to invite any EDCI 336 alumnus, practicing teachers, or other educational stakeholders to comment on your blog or provide help with your inquiries.

Twitter Engagement: Learners will be invited to develop and maintain a professional Twitter account for this course to begin to establish connections to other professionals in the field of education in order to expand their personal learning networks. A learner’s Twitter account should show evidence of:

  • a professional-looking photo and biography (within scope of one’s privacy preferences)
  • evidence of course-related reading and resource sharing
  • evidence of networking and engagement with other educators and content experts
  • a link to your professional blog once ready

Responding: Learners should also be regularly reading and commenting on classmates’ blogs and Twitter posts. This can be done by using tools such as Feedly to follow blogs and Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to follow accounts on Twitter. You are expected to follow peer blogs and responses (“comments”) should be posted to students’ individual blog posts for any of the three assignments.

Assessment of this assignment will be based primarily on the quality of a learner’s weekly responses as well as on evidence of students’ engagement with others in the class on individual blogs and Twitter (within the scope of their privacy preferences). Where possible, students are also encouraged to assist each other by answering questions in the course community. The category “weekly-reflection” on your blog will be used for this assignment.

Criteria for completion requires incorporation of all of the required educational and technology competencies in either this assignment or Assignment 1 or 3. Please refer to the educational and technology competency lists that will be handed out in class and posted on the course website.