Getting Started
As stated on the home page, the purpose of TCH 432 is to explore how technologies are used in and across academic disciplines and their associated career fields. We'll look at technology use across curricular areas, as well as take a deep dive into chosen academic disciplines. Along the way, we'll also look at examples of specific tools and integration approaches that are well suited to various disciplines.
As graduate students in education, your experience and expertise in education is taken as a given, as is the expectation that you will take this class as an opportunity to critically reflect and make changes to your practice. We all know that in education, time and opportunity to reflect, plan, and prepare is far too limited!
How this class works
This class has been structured to help you explore ways to integrate technology into a chosen discipline (content area) at your own pace. You will find a series of lessons that are paired with challenges that allow you to experiment with the ideas of our class, challenging you to expand your understanding of lesson design, tech integration, and what it means to be a content expert.
Each lesson involves four steps:
-
Read and/or watch the texts posted to the challenge page, annotating your thinking as you read or watch.
-
Explore additional resources to prepare you for the upcoming challenge.
-
Take the challenge and post your work to our shared course blog--tagging each challenge to make them easy for others to find.
-
Read and respond to your classmates' work.
Want to know more about the structure of the course and how to use this site to be successful? Check out this video that walks you through my thinking!
Course syllabus
You may access the syllabus in the reader to the left, but you may also use this link to access a PDF file that you can download.
Badging
As you read in the syllabus, this course is designed around a series of lessons and challenges that will push you to explore and apply course content. To help you keep track of the challenges you have accomplished, I will assign you badges that will appear in your profile. Please note that this is optional. IF YOU DO NOT WANT YOUR BADGES TO BE DISPLAYED PUBLICLY, PLEASE MESSAGE ME PRIVATELY IN SLACK. You will notice that while there are eight course challenges, there are nine available badges (all nine are needed to satisfy the requirements for an A in this course). That ninth badge is the Engaged Learner badge, which is earned through actions that result in a positive contribution to our learning
community. This includes (but is not necessarily limited to) creating an introduction post in the Forum, regularly tweeting and responding on Twitter with our hashtag #tch432, being available and responding to peers and instructor on Slack and in the Forum, responding to your classmates posts on the blog, and thoughtfully annotating and responding to annotations.
Annotation Tools
Hypothes.is
Hypothes.is is a social annotation tool that allows you to create multimedia annotations on any webpage or PDF online. You can post annotations publicly or to a group. I have set up our class as a private group so that your annotations will only be visible to that group.
Your first two steps will be to 1) set up an account and 2) join our group. (If you already have an account, you can go straight to joining our class group.) The Quick Start Guide provided by Hypothes.is will walk you through that process and how to use the app with screenshots of what each step looks like. Here is the link to join our TCH 432 Summer 2021 Annotation Group.
Whenever you annotate, make sure to toggle from Public to our TCH 432 Summer 2021 group. Once you do this one or two times, it will become second nature. Also, I highly recommend using Chrome for this and using the annotation extension so that you can quickly begin to add annotations to any page.
Additional Resources:
-
Set up an account: Quick Start Guide for Students
-
Make an annotation: Annotation Tips for Students
-
Video on how to make sure that annotation is posted to our group: Annotating with Groups
-
See our TCH 432 Summer 2021 Annotation Group for all of our annotations across the various documents.
VideoAnt
VideoAnt allows you to watch a video and write annotations that get linked to certain timestamps in the video. You can then reply to others who have annotated the video. Your first step will be to sign up for an account, if you haven't done that before.
We will use this for Challenge 3. You can access the link to the video on the challenge page, which will take you to the VideoAnt platform to annotate and see the other annotations on the side of the video screen.
Introduce Yourself
It's important to know who we will be interacting with in our learning community over the next four weeks. Introduce yourself by going to the Introductions thread in the Forum. You'll see I posted a video to introduce myself. Create an introduction to you in whatever form you'd like. Make sure to include a picture of you so we can visualize who we are communicating with. In addition, make sure to add a picture and short details about yourself to your profile.
Want to have some fun with your introduction? You can also add (in addition to an actual photograph) a cartoon-version of yourself. I created this royal image of myself using the app Voila.