Assignment 1: Community Contributions

The establishment of your learning portfolio and five contributions over the term. These can be written in an informal manner, but you should make use of the web format by integrating links, images, videos, podcasts, etc. into each post where appropriate. Each contribution should be at least 500 words.

Potential writing prompts for the five posts:

  1. What is the reality of education technology in your context (district, school, classroom, etc.)?
  2. What education technology issue, topic, or theme are you most interested in?
  3. What does the literature say about the issue, topic, or theme identified?
  4. How are you organizing yourself to engage with research about educational technology?
  5. Reflections from the first term or the MEd program, learnings from your group presentation or in viewing your peer’s presentations, and your plans/hopes for the future.

Due: ongoing through the term. | Value 30%

Assignment 2: Team Research Presentation

In pairs (or alone if you prefer), you will conduct research and deliver a 15-minute presentation distilling an issue, topic, or theme in educational technology research in Elementary or Secondary Grades.

You are welcome and encouraged to engage the audience with an activity (using a talk structure or educational technology tool) during the presentation. The presentations are scheduled to begin in the final week of October and will be conducted during our weekly class time.

Due: presentations will start in late October. I will seek volunteers for presentation dates or draw randomly. | Value 40%

Team Presentation Rubric 

Criteria will be assessed according to a not met, met, and exceeds rating scale and feedback will be provided with indicators for each.

  1. Opens with a concise summary of the issue, topic, or theme that is the focus of educational technology research in Elementary or Secondary Grades. The summary should be grounded in the literature, include a brief description of the issue, topic, or theme and how it is relevant to educational technology in elementary or secondary grades.
  2. Reviews and synthesises 3-4 articles in the category of original research papers, case studies, or literature reviews on the specific issue, topic, or theme. Presents a summary of the empirical evidence gathered in each paper, research context, research methods, conceptual or theoretical frame, and a summary of key findings.
  3. Employs a multimedia strategy in the presentation by using text and one or more other media to enrich your presentation and help make it more engaging. Media obtained online should be sourced from the commons and used with appropriate permissions and attribution. When using presentation media, slides should not be full of text, and be used only to highlight salient issues or help structure the presentation. In short, we should not be reading your slides!
  4. Presenters demonstrate facilitation skills, planning, and distribution of tasks among presenters, keeping the session running smoothly. Presenters are clear and audible, and time is used efficiently while presenting.
  5. If applicable, prerequisite tasks, readings, or setup needed for the session are communicated clearly to your instructor and peers and provided one week in advance of the presentation date.

Note: You are not limited to 3-4 articles by any means, but you should dive deeply into the method, context, conceptual or theoretical frame, and a summary of key evidence on the topic for at least 3-4 articles as part of your presentation. You may use additional articles or citations to provide the summary and a description of the topic.

Assignment 3: Demonstration of Technology Integrated Research Practices

Throughout the term you will organize and annotate relevant research and start to build a database of literature related to your research interests. This should be done explicitly and intentionally using a citation management tool such as Zotero, while developing an annotated bibliography, demonstrating an ability to cite within an editor such as MS Word, and an understanding of APA citation practices.

This will be assessed through a one-to-one 15-minute video meeting with Michael in which you will show how your research database is developing, highlight contributions to an annotated bibliography, demonstrate an ability to cite within a text editor such as MS Word, and use APA.

In the meeting you should be prepared to demonstrate the following:

  • Share your Zotero (or other) citation management environment.
  • Show and explain how you are organizing your research, if using folders, tags, notes, or collections.
  • Share how you are engaging in sensemaking with regards to the research you are reading. This may be done via document highlights, comments in documents, notes, and/or external documents, etc.
  • If applicable share the different content types (research papers, blogs, video) that have been collected and address any questions related to storing and using different content types.
  • Discuss any insights or questions you have about collecting and collating research using a reference management tool.
  • Demonstrate citing a paper from your collection in Word or another document editor (I encourage that Word be used over GDocs especially as your documents get larger)
  • Demonstrate citing a paper from Zotero using only the date rather than a full in-text citation e.g. “Paskevicius (2022) found that…” rather than (Paskevicius, 2022) and demonstrate citing a paper with a direct quote page or paragraph reference (Paskevicius, 2022, p. 22).
  • Generate a bibliography in your document of works cited.

I believe you will find all that you need to support these practices in the Zotero Tutorial section on the website, but I am also happy to help!

Due: after reading break in November. I will schedule meetings with each one of you based on your availability. | Value 30%