Designing
Reflecting on Mobile Education, Wearable Tech, and Forecasting the future! This was, by far, the most memorable group project of my MET journey! When I first started the MET program, I was nervous and hesitant toward group projects, because I believed that distance communication can be challenging. However, group projects quickly became one of my favourite parts of MET, and when given the opportunity to either work alone or in a group, I generally selected a group. Throughout MET I have learned how to coordinate with people internationally through tools such as Google Hangouts, Google Documents, and website sites such as Wordpress, Google Sites, Weebly, Wix, and more! The Recon project was created by four of us, with our locations being Vancouver, Calgary, Taiwan, and Hong Kong! ETEC 565M, Mobile & Open Education is a course solely focused on mobile teaching and learning. The course focuses on analyzing existing mobile applications, and encourages students to consider what is needed in the mobile learning realm. In addition to that, most of the course and the content we viewed and created in ETEC 565M was viewable on a mobile device. This course taught me the importance of always looking forward and considering where the future of education and technology will look like. Being mindful of the future pushes us as educational technologists to think outside the box. As the world's technology continues to advance, and more people continue to use mobile technologies, I believe that in my experience it is important that educators stay on top of the technological trends and gain experience with developing content in varying mediums, particularly on mobile mediums, as it is estimated that 73.4% of the international online population was accessed from a mobile phone in 2013 (Pulla, 2017). That is why it was important to me to ensure that my ePortfolio is accessible and viewable on a mobile device. This project was a forecasting project; we were asked to "author and publish an original media property that presages a prospective future aspect or dimension of mobility - one that does not exist now, but could or should" (ETEC 565M project description, 2017). So, I, along with my team, created Recon. A wearable device designed to enhance social emotional competence and facilitate a movement towards authentic reconciliation. Recon is an original idea collectively developed by Aaron Lam, Joyce Kim, Edrick Lin and me. We were inspired by the potential of wearable devices. As we discuss in our project website, "consumers, especially younger customers, desire wearable technology" (Grace Collage, 2017), so that is why we chose to explore wearable tech in classrooms. For our project we developed a mock-up design of the Recon device, we created a video, and we created a website to house additional information and resources. This project encouraged us to think outside of the box. We had to be innovative as designers and educators to create something that we believe could benefit learners. While we would all agree that Recon ultimately would need a bit more work to be successful, it was an innovative step towards enhancing intercommunication and emotional understanding for children. Recon uses modular learning to help customize the learning experience for each student, and each module that recon offers monitors a different biological response - by designing the Recon "emotokei" it was our hope that we could increase the emotional understanding of students and their peers through light and aura interactivity. This project taught me the importance of designing outside of the box. While not all projects like Recon can be successful in real-world scenarios, the practice of brainstorming and creating is critical to advancing education. Click the image below to check out sites.google.com/view/recon565m
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DesigningDesigning is about creativity and about thinking outside of the box to create innovative tools and solutions for intended learners. Design is an important aspect of TPCK as "...design experiments narrow the gap between research and practice, between theory and application" (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p. 1019). As well, as Mishra and Koehler (2006) discussed, when "...given opportunities to thoughtfully engage in the design of educational technology, teachers showed tremendous growth in their sensitivity to the complex interactions among content, pedagogy, and technology, thus developing their TPCK" (p. 1046). Designing is critical to understanding the connection between learners, teaching strategies, information, and technological tools.
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