Final Reflection

The Instructional Technology cohort through UNI has helped me become a more rounded professional by providing me critical understanding of educational pedagogy. As I shared in my introduction, my background is almost exclusively in family support programming, a world that is much different than education. I challenged myself to this cohort because I believe the future of family support is changing. While I believe our supportive services are more necessary than ever before, I also believe that our field must find a way to reach a new generation.

Through this cohort I have learned a variety of methods to help people learn content in meaningful and engaging ways. Although I don't work in a traditional classroom setting, I spend every day working with people that are learning new things. The focus on pedagogy and instructional approaches to learning have been invaluable. For example, in the class Designing and Developing Online Learning, one of the projects I created allowed me to combine my new understanding of pedagogy into a flipped, online classroom environment that I was able to use in a real training environment. I found that this project made my work in the "real world" more efficient and allowed me to spend more of my face-to-face training time focusing on facilitating skill aquisition. This opened up several additional opportunities to create PD experiences in a similar fashion. This project also allowed me to test Instructional Technology theories, such as flipped classrooms on my leaners and generate feedback on how to improve my practices in the future (Brame, 2013).

All my artifacts were adapted to take classroom strategies into a world of family support and professional development. I feel this experience has made me a better trainer and has provided me with concrete tools to enhance learning. The courses provided throughout this cohort have strengthened my skills and my ability to generate new ideas for using technology for professional development purposes. Specifically, I was able to create technology-rich approaches to support content, such as gaming, flipped instruction, and video-editing. In one artifact from the course Digital and Social Media, I share how I turned one of our competencies for family support professionals into a game to facilitate understanding. A unique aspect of this game, that I am currently trying to incoporate into a professional project, is the demonstration of skill aquisition as defined in our competencies. Our current method of assessing family support professionals' adherance to the competencies is in the form of a test, targeting only knowledge and understanding. I am interested in using the information I was able to obtain for this cohort to focus more on skill demonstration and transfer of learning. Since I created the gaming project, our competencies have changed slightly, so pieces of that particular game are no longer relevant. I was, however, able to take this concept back to my professional team so that we could get to work on building a system that would capture the unique competencies needed in family support.

In addition to understanding our compentencies, my professional team is also focused on creating online learning opporunities that address 21st century approaches to learning. These approaches include student-centered, collaborative, contextual and integrated learning experiences (Nichols, 2018). Through the development of The Insitute for the Advancement of Family Support Professionals, we have been able to put these concepts into practice. We provide opportunities for family support professionals to choose learning that is relevant to them, and have created an innovative web-application that takes data from pre-assessment and module interaction to identify specific content areas that learners need more support in achieving. We are also developing a 360 video-learning system within the Insitute that will allow learners to immerse themselves in real-world situations, and allow for deeper assessment of competency skill aquisition and transfer of knowledge. This approach makes our online learning content student-centered, while integrating their learning and allowing for collaboration with other professionals. Additionally, our focus on skill aquisition and transfer of knowledge fits in with the projects and work achieved in the course, Understanding Instructional Design.

Moving forward, my professional goals are centered on creating a culture of technology-rich approaches to family support. As I have mentioned several times throughout this portfolio and within my artifact reflections, I believe that family support professionals must first understand how technology can benefit their own learning before integrating it into the work they do with families. My ultimate goal, which I believe my research paper prefaces, is to find and promote ways in which the field can use technology to significantly improve family access to necessary parenting supports. I am looking forward to continuing the development of my skills to advocate for, provide guidance on, and lead change through instructional technology in family support.

References

Brame, C., (2013). Flipping the classroom. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved 6/1/2018 from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/

Nichols, J.R., (2018) 4 essential rules of 21st century learning. Teach Thought. Retrieved 6/1/2018 fromhttps://www.teachthought.com/learning/4-essential-rules-of-21st-century-learning/