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Teaching


I came to GVSU in 1999 with no experience teaching in K-12 or higher education settings. When I first started teaching, I struggled to balance my expectations for students with their available time, interests, and capabilities. My teaching style is based upon guided inquiry, where I provide scaffolding as well as activites, and our collective learning shaped by other students and digital materials. We read and discuss peer-reviewed research in the field of educational technology and I facilitate these discussions as a forum for collegial exploration of the complexities associated with technology use in instruction and assessment. I also model constructivist learning and incorporate enhancements that technology provides for both instruction and assessment. Because my research is focused on understanding how technology can support teaching, learning, and assessment, and I have an interest in online and hybrid instruction, it follows that my scholarship and my teaching are intertwined around these areas.

Philosophy

Coming from a socio-cognitive theoretical perspective, I have integrated ideas from articles and books, student and peer evaluations, and my own reflections of my teaching that have shaped my instruction and assessment, especially how and when I interact (intentionally) with students online. Reading articles and books on online instruction, attending conference sessions where faculty demonstrate and discuss their experiences, and drawing on my own experiences teaching graduate courses to adopt effective instructional activities demonstrate the results of this ongoing work. Technology, when used effectively, provides opportunities to extend and expand traditional teaching and learning. I have also conducted research on my own teaching, sharing the results in scholarly journals and conferences. 

Role of technology

As an educational technology faculty member, it is critical to demonstrate for students how technology can improve instruction, learning and assessment. So I have adopted innovative teaching methods supported by a variety of technologies and have integrated technology in various forms into my teaching and assessment practices. Examples include use of the Discussion Board in BlackBoard for stimulating and assessing student knowledge, synchronous chat to promote social development and support in hybrid and online courses, and student virtual poster sessions to demonstrate knowledge of a topic of interest in educational technology while making an argument and drawing on the published literature to support their point of view. Over the years, I have added chat sessions (synchronous CmC) to my hybrid and online courses to promote a sense of classroom community or develop social presence, incorporated scholarly writing instruction and assessments into EDT 621 of the graduate educational technology program, measured student’s project and thesis documents for evidence of improvements in theoretical perspective, incorporated audio commentary into my lectures and offer podcasts of lectures for students. Recently, I've begun developing and using learning objects in most of my courses. My plans are to share these objects with colleagues in the future.


I have posted a page with links to videos of my teaching.

I coordinate the graduate Educational Technology program and teach all (or most) of the courses we offer in this program in face-to-face, hybrid, and online formats. In the past, I've also taught a foundation course - ED[F] 660 Educational Inquiry and Evaluation - as well as our undergraduate educational technology course (ED 205/EDT 370). For more information on our program and the courses we offer, please visit our program website

Version: 1.0 (February 5, 2014)