Mapping My Professional Tech Use Over Time

Below are two components to an assignment I worked on this week for my TCH 430 course. Dr. Smith asked us to map and annotate our technology use – I chose to do this over time. I created a timeline on a website called TimelineJS.

Please note that you can view my timeline in the embedded video below. If you want to view the actual timeline product I created, please click HERE. I could not get the embed code to function well on WordPress at this time.

I enjoyed using this website and plan to share a video in the next few weeks on this blog demonstrating how to use the resources this website offers to create timelines. This will be for an assignment in another course I am taking right now (TCH 579).

In creating this timeline, I chose to verbally annotate the technology use that occurred in my teaching and students’ learning. What emerged the more I dug back into past lesson plans, photos, and files was that not until the last 18 months or so was my use of technology approaching a level of higher student-centeredness. I explain this realization in greater detail in the annotated timeline video above. I based my assessment of how my students and I used technology over the years using the Technology Integration Matrix (TIM), created by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida, College of Education.

I found the experience of creating this timeline very enlightening. I realized that while I have been fairly adept and using tech and can learn how to use new devices and applications fairly quickly, that didn’t immediately transfer to teaching with technology. What took me at least six years of my career to develop what Naughton (1994) calls “other knowledge,” which he notes that technology users “get from experience, craft, apprenticeship, and other sources” (p. 12). That ‘other knowledge,’ in my case as an elementary teacher, was greater mastery of the content I teach as well as the pedagogical knowledge to support students in meeting learning goals through effective technology-driven strategies – I describe examples of this growth in the timeline video.