Module 7 — Hunter College

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  Posted by Ifeoma Nwoke (she/her) on June 13, 2023 at 6:26 pm

  After reviewing the visual resource, “Powering Connections: Teacher candidate perspectives on Computer Integrated Technology”, please respond to the following questions in this thread:

  What are your thoughts on the teacher candidate visual resource? What surprised you? What resonated with you? What other perspectives do you wish had been included?

• Brian Collins

  Participant

  June 19, 2023 at 10:36 am

  I enjoyed reading the “Powering Connections”, it was a fun way to read about different perspectives when using technologies in education and elsewhere. Nothing particularly surprised me about the different users experiences but it did remind me of the difficulties we often encounter when using technologies. The student’s initial troubles with accessing emails and logging into the multiple CUNY systems that caused her to almost drop out of the program is very real. Often the tools we use to allow students interact and learn do the opposite and prevent them from accessing the materials which is obviously frustrating.

  I also think about the recent immigrants and asylum seekers. Many have been expected to access services on apps that don’t work and with WiFi. It seems as though technology is purposely being used in these cases to exclude and keep information away from certain groups.

  • This reply was modified 1 year ago by Brian Collins.
  • This reply was modified 1 year ago by Brian Collins.
  Dominika McPartland (she/her)

  Member

  June 20, 2023 at 11:20 am

  The relationship that teachers and teacher candidates have with technology has always been “a love-hate”, we have all been there. We found ourselves in awe of how great and efficient technology can be (using zoom, peardeck, nearpod, flipp grid etc.) opened our students’ voices and minds, but we also noticed how all this has shut them down…( wifi not working, passwords not working, multiple log ins).  We also witnessed the gaps between students who were provided access by simply having the right technology or having parents/guardians who could support them.

  We further see technology (AI) replace tinkering with our mind  (I really like this word lately)in the classrooms, so as we move through this process – just like the students did, we need to always consider the bigger picture. As much as I am enjoying the modules that we are moving through in CITE, I would also like to see more unified models. The tinkering is the way of learning by experimentation and when the time allows, but using technology in crafting curriculum, lessons and teaching that centers on  learners, needs to be more purposeful and  timely and that’s what I would like to bring to my teacher candidates – a tool that makes their life in schools easier and more efficient.
  Ann Ebe (She/Her)

  Member

  June 20, 2023 at 1:06 pm

  I really enjoyed reading through the visual resource highlighting those empowering and disempowering experiences that CUNY students / teacher candidates have had with technology. The graphic novel format was engaging and so much of the content was relatable! Rolla reminded us to give students opportunities to tinker in low stakes way. Warrick had students explore digital privacy in a very creative and memorable way.  The story about finding support at Lehman resonated with me as a program lead who often gets these questions.  There is SO much technology to navigate and I feel like I am still learning about it too. We need to be mindful about what we present to students and need to develop user-friendly guides on how to find things online. I also find that I get many students coming to me for information because I respond so quickly. They are often very grateful. However, systems for making information more accessible are really important. The section on teacher candidates growing up without much technology and they now have students and children who are digital natives. The concerns about use of technology are real. I live this with my middle school children and hear from teachers about this.

  Finally, I absolutely love the algorithm poem written by Michelle Ortiz talking about injustices. It is so very powerful! It reminds me of the bilingual poem The Library Card by Jane Medina about access to books. I would love to use this poem in my teaching if permitted. Overall, the idea of technology being used in positive and negative ways comes back to the communities built in classrooms.
  Jody Polleck (she/her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 10:32 am

  I really enjoyed the “Powering Connections: Teacher candidate perspectives on Computer Integrated Technology”. As a fan of graphic novels, I loved the format that was used and I loved the centering of student voices. It made the research accessible and I was able to think critically about how I might utilize some of the ideas. The primary takeaways that I got were…
  (1) Scratch! I want to figure out this as a tech tool to use with my students in the future for sure. Right now I teach a children’s literature course where students create their own narratives. They can write a children’s book, they can do storytelling, they can write the first chapters of a book, or they can create a graphic novel. They have options of doing this hands-on/old school or digitally. I feel like Scratch could be another cool option for them!
  (2) I also really appreciated the student who wrote a lesson for his students on critical digital literacies. In my current literacy class, we have students create several lesson plans, one for reading and one for writing–but why aren’t we asking the to also create a critical digital lesson plan! I think this is what I want my final project to be: Take those two weeks where one week is critical literacies and one week is digital literacies and ask students to create a lesson that incorporates both!
  Beatrice Tony-Jean (she/her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 12:14 pm

  yes, your points about the ways that asylum-seekers are forced to deal with City apps that crash and require wifi that isn’t as strong as it needs to be to secure their place in line with social safety nets or make an appointment with ICE or to find employment – it’s infuriating and feels purposefully broken/exclusionary!
  Beatrice Tony-Jean (she/her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 12:25 pm

  This visual resource reminded me in look and sentiment of the graphic novel CITE mailed to all of us along with the pack of cards.

  I liked reading through and considering the various perspectives of students who were participants in some of our colleagues CITE projects, but I found myself wanting to know more and connect these teacher-candidate reflections with the spot-lights we looked at in Module 4 and 5.

  For example, I wondered:

  1. What did Dr. Ting Yuan at CSI do to teach Rolla Scratch so that she felt confident to create a project with Arabic letters/sounds that helped her students practice these combinations?
  2. Warrick helped his students explore digital privacy through a role-playing computer game…but where did he get this game? Did he code it, himself? (also curious how his Hostos professor, Dr. DiSanto, framed this assignment and what rubric he used to ‘grade’ student efforts)
  3. Account access (whether it’s Blackboard or CUNYfirst or our @login emails vs our school emails) and feeling lost with setting up technology in the classroom are obviously themes we can all relate to but one thing that frustrates me is that we expect folks to “just ask a friend who DOES know how to do this and they can show you” instead of going back to fix the original source of confusion at the onset of the process.
  Yang Hu (She/Her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 12:28 pm

  I was just discussing about centering and affirming learners in Module 6, and now Module 7 is all about centering learners! I enjoyed getting to know these learners featured in the Powering Connections, and their experiences with technology in and outside the classroom. Lisbeth’s experience at the new student orientation with technology reminds me of some of my students who were left feeling disempowered and literally locked out of the Hunter community and resources because of issues with different Hunter systems that require different log-in credentials. Not all students can navigate technology with ease. Unfortunately for some, they were left behind until their access was eventually restored. I was also struck by Michelle Ortiz’s poem, Algorithms that Reinforce Racismo. Good for her for speaking out and naming the injustice! This goes along with what I discussed in Module 6, that equity work must also include recognizing and naming inequity and systems of oppression.
  Kendra Miller (She/her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 2:38 pm

  The experiences highlighted in Powering Connections exemplified both the challenges and the transformative power of technology use. Feeling shut out or locked out of experiences or access to information because of the challenges with navigating various platforms can be so frustrating. I also felt a lot of empathy for those who spoke about their concerns with young people’s technology use and access to harmful information and misinformation. I was also really impressed by the teacher candidates’ resilience and creativity.
  Virginia Gryta (She/her)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 5:10 pm

  First I love the way this content was presented. It felt interactive even though I consumed it as a printed document. I’m a fan of visuals in learning and think they can add to the content in ways that some students would otherwise not be engaged. I enjoyed the various experiences shared and am curious about using Scratch to generate content for my classes. I hadn’t thought of it. I have a yearlong class in particular that has many moving parts and the roll out of the class is always overwhelming. I have adjusted the content and tried to have a workshop model and a giant all-sections orientation, but I feel like a simple graphics-based look through the year incorporating student experiences would be so helpful. Fun to think about (Yay, joy!)
  Rhonda Bondie (she/hers)

  Member

  June 21, 2023 at 11:24 pm

  I agree the article was lots of fun to read. This reading made me think of two connections. One, how a teacher recently expressed concern that students don’t sit with uncertainty after COVID – they just want to google an answer quickly because they know the answer is there – so why think about it. Another teacher wondered if technology is really freeing our minds to do more creative and complex thinking – or if we are just not thinking very much… The second connection was with the CITE framework – it is easy to see connections to learning from, with, through, and against technology in every story about technology use…
  Sean (He/Him/His)

  Member

  June 23, 2023 at 10:22 am

  I really enjoyed reading the article – and the use of digital tools (multimodal) as a means for students to share their journeys and experiences. The visual mapping was important to me in the storytelling. Too often – I hear (and experience) disconnects particularly around the many different log ins (SOE gmail, to CUNY to CUNY first) – and how they don’t interconnect (particularly if students come from another CUNY) – but what was powerful about this – was that some of these types of issues were shared in digital narrative format – which made the story and journey very interesting – particularly when we see where problem solving and collaboration and discoveries took place.
  Maria Mavrides Calderon (She/her)

  Member

  June 23, 2023 at 8:13 pm

   

  What a fantastic way to present information! The graphic novel format was highly engaging and easy to understand. I would love to learn how to illustrate my material using a graphic novel approach. Beyond the format, the narratives from different teacher candidates seamlessly highlighted the relationship between equity and technology. These narratives informed how I would introduce assignments, keeping my students’ needs and technological identities at the center of my lesson objectives.

   

  There were specific testimonies that resonated with me. The testimonial of the student from Lehman, who was feeling overwhelmed with the amount of information received during orientation, is a common occurrence among my students and parallels my own experience. As new technologies are introduced (and often mandated) to faculty, I have experienced a sense of panic navigating new platforms, often in the middle of the night, when no one can help. Recognizing that frustration is part of learning has helped me mitigate my anxiety toward technology, and I hope to encourage my students to embrace that same mindset.

   

  The other extremely powerful testimonial for me was the bilingual poem (by Michelle Ortiz) that presented the racist side of technology. It was eye-opening to understand how algorithms target vulnerable populations, almost in a predatory way. This particular testimony clarified the connection between systemic bias and technology. The idea that technology could be used to further inequities and political agendas was always evident since I have analyzed social media as part of my research. However, reading the poem humanized this issue and made me wonder what I could do in my classroom. How can we teach our students to counterbalance the adverse effects of these harmful technologies by using algorithms for advocacy and social justice? I need to educate myself more about this (I would love to find resources about this!)
  Jennifer Gillespie

  Member

  June 24, 2023 at 10:28 am

  I enjoyed this unique way of sharing teacher-candidate experiences. Rolla’s use of custom-made videos using Scratch reflects the challenges I have seen with my teacher candidates. Often they search for a video related to their topic/skill and end up with a tangential video or book rather than one directly aligned. Understanding technology would allow them to use these tools meaningfully rather than just using technology because it ticks a box on their lesson plan form.
  Maite T. Sanchez

  Member

  June 25, 2023 at 7:41 pm

  I love the CITE visual resource by Nwoke, Posner & Vogel (2023)! After having been using text as a primary source for the previous CITE modules, I found it very refreshing to engage with this visual document. This is a reminder for me that I should make more efforts to include different types of texts in my classes. While I do give videos and podcasts in several of my sessions, most of them are still very heavy on readings.

  All the examples resonate with me as something that teacher candidates at CUNY would experience. The one that surprised me in a very positive way was Michelle Ortiz’s poem. What a powerful text! That’s clear example of how a CUNY faculty (Prof. Espinosa) asked students to engage in a critical analysis of technology and of a student’s use of translanguaging to show the connections between technology algorism and racism in a very tangible way. I could feel the injustice and the pain for Michelle’s community -and for all of us- really.

  In terms of other perspectives that I wished had been included, I’m curious about teacher candidates’ experiences in CUNY courses that are more traditionally taught in terms of the professors’ low use of tech. I wonder how these students expand the content that they are exposed to (or the way they work together) with tech tools.
  Imani Irving-Perez (She/Her)

  Member

  June 26, 2023 at 2:01 pm

  Reading the Nwoke et al (2023) – Powering Connections Comic visual resource was engaging and interesting! To present this information in such a visually stimulating way, depicted the diversity of thoughts and experiences represented here. Evelyn Hernandez’s experience stood out to me because it is an example of early childhood educator’s ability to empower and build capacity within families to feel not only competent with their children but in this case with technology. As both a parent and teacher candidate, Evelyn was able to go from feeling disempowered with technology and unable to do follow through on the teachers lesson plan, to getting the support from her son’s teacher, which made her feel like an “expert”. This piece makes me wonder: How can we survey/assess the range of technological ideologies and competencies of our students, before they are asked to use technology in our coursework? How can we empower our students to feel like experts with the platforms (google, flipgrip, office) before we teach them to master the content?