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

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

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

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

[Veronica Paredes (she/her/hers)]

I felt the information of the resource was better received because it was also visual. I felt the play by play visuals allowed me to navigate the stories quickly, but also more meaningfully. The teacher candidates’ personalities, shared excitements and apprehensions were more palpable.

The disempowering points shared by Evelyn and Lisbeth resonated with me because keeping up with the tech programs along with all their log ins and particularities can be challenging, time consuming and discouraging for all teachers when no support is given. Sometimes after getting the hang of a particular digital tool, the following year administration decides to switch to a different program. The learning curves of tech can be frustrating and I definitely resonated, but I noticed that many of the hurdles were dealt with by seeking help and learning from others intergenerationally. There were many important issues raised in relation to technology’s effects on the youth (ex: cyberbullying, self-esteem issues) that I appreciated.  Demonstrating how algorithms “hold us back”  through Michelle Ortiz’ poem resonated with me and is something I feel my students will be able to connect with too. I am inspired to explore alongside them how else software might be reinforcing racism and thinking of what that means for my artifact design process.

[Michelle Ortiz (she/her/hers)]

I really enjoyed the visual resource for this module! I felt like I was reading a graphic novel and I found it to be engaging and insightful as I learned the perspectives of teaching candidates and their experiences pertaining to technology. I thought this was a really interesting way to present the material and I appreciated the artistic and creative nature of the work. 

A great deal of this material resonated with me. Starting with the narrative of Rolla, when she explained how she used Scratch as a way to focus on very specific phonetic lessons to help her students hear certain Arabic sounds. I found it really empowering that she created videos that were very specific to her students and their needs versus spending hours searching for them. In particular, this struck a chord with me because as a former ENL teacher I can recall spending countless hours trying to find the right video or visual for my students. For example, one year I had a newcomer class and Thanksgiving was approaching. My students were curious about the holiday and the American traditions that are often celebrated. Since they were in middle and high school, I couldn’t quite find the right visual or video example, the content felt either too young or too focused on the history of the holiday. Eventually I settled on something that didn’t quite fit what they needed, but it was the best I could find. Now that I have knowledge of more tools and computing, in hindsight, I could have just created my own. In addition to Rolla, I resonate with Lisbeth and Evelyn who expressed overwhelming feelings towards technology until they received help and support. I often feel this way towards technology because it is something that I have always shied away from because I never felt “good” working with it. Typically when asked to learn and apply technology, I’ve always learned the basics and had to ask for help or attend support sessions to feel more confident when using it. One takeaway from reading their stories is how common this experience is and that asking for help is the key factor to changing a more negative experience into a positive one. 

One topic that this module made me think more deeply about is how my student teachers feel their first few weeks when learning the technology in their classrooms. Many of them feel unprepared and an overall lack of confidence, which often prevents them from initiating to take the lead on lessons early on. This is making me think about how I can better support them and their relationships with technology during the first few weeks of our seminar classes.

[Cristina Montagna, EdD (she/her)]

Thoughts About the Resource: The teacher candidate visual resource is wonderfully illustrated with intentional graphics and narratives that highlight student experiences with technology.  The resource is very meaningful for the reader because it enlightens teacher educators about our students’ unique perspectives on, and amplifies equity issues related to, tech in education.  The qualitative data presented can assist us in making more informed decisions when designing computing-integrated content and learning activities throughout our course designs.  The resource truly imbues the message that we can design computing integrated teacher education in a manner that will equally empower us (i.e., teacher educators) and our teacher candidates to “teach and learn about, with, through, and against technology” (CITE, 2022).

What Surprised and Resonated With Me: I was pleasantly surprised by the use of a graphic storytelling modality to bring qualitative data, collected from CUNY teacher candidates, to life!  The data presented in this way made it more relatable to the reader and much more appealing than reading the “Results” section of a traditional peer-reviewed article from an academic journal.

Other Perspectives: The themes pertaining to technology in relation to: (a) empowerment, (b) disempowerment, (c) digital tools, (d) digital privacy, (e) supporting learner agency, and (f) its influence on society, along with (g) its role as a “harm” and a “help,” were well fleshed out and supported by teacher candidate narratives.  These perspectives uniquely represent the voices of our CUNY student bodies.  Qualitative research designs lend themselves to explore any number of perspectives, but, those explored in this resource were insightful and did not leave me wishing other perspectives had been included in this specific project.

References:

CITE. (2002). CITE Framework. https://citelearning.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cite-framework-2/#CDLs

[Yoon Joo Lee (she/her)]

<p style=”font-weight: 400;”>I think the visual resource Power Connections is a very powerful and effective way to tell the stories of teacher candidates.   It is easier for me to engage with the contents.                                                  I was surprised by how much I am not knowledgeable about different technology tools so I was impressed by how Rolla and Warwick created meaningful and interactive activists for their students.  I have so much room to grow in terms of technology tools.  Evelyn’s story resonates with me because sometimes I need personal support to learn different tools.   I also met some students who were not very tech-savvy and lost patience when working with them.  Also I feel sometimes there are barriers in CUNY technology system (e.g. access to the portal, CUNY First, etc.)  Through reading Evelyn’s and Michelle’s perspectives, I realize the importance of interpersonal support for all the learners to feel empowered with technology.   It is not all about fancy technology tools but it is support behind the tools.  I really need to examine carefully how experiences with technology in my classes may be empowering or disempowering my students.  Poem written by Michelle Ortiz is very powerful illustrating how injustice and lack of access are created by technology.                                                                                                                    I wish more stories about the growth of individuals who were able to problem solve when they faced the challenges with technology. (E.g. more stories like Evelyn’s)

[Edward Birzin (He/Him)]

I found the graphic novel style of the resource to be fun.  I wonder if that whole comic was hand drawn or created using a computer program? Although I found it to be a fun resource I also felt like it just scratched the surface. I mean, I can understand Rolla’s use of Scratch in order to teach the Arabic letter to her young class, and Warrick’s lesson on digital privacy makes sense to me, but I didn’t quite grasp how Lisbeth and Evelyn’s stories connected to the students at CUNY, especially when it seems that the student teachers we work with might be more technology literate than the instructors. I guess I am feeling like there is so much to do with technology and because the menu is so big, I am overwhelmed with what programs we should choose to work with. From the last few weeks I certainly see positive and useful programs like Scratch, Flipgrid and Padlet, and I know there are more brilliant applications out there, so I wonder if we will one day agree on a certain list of programs to use in education? In a way it reminds me of choosing books and creating syllabi and thinking through the semester as a teacher because there are so many options and it is up to the educator to set the course.

I can’t say anything surprised me in the text, but the piece about being a parent and not wanting one’s child to spend so much time in front of the screen resonated with me. I have two young children and my 8 year old son spends a lot of time on his ipad. This began during his Kindergarten classes on Zoom and has become something of a problem in our house. I guess I am old fashioned in that I don’t want him to waste a beautiful day in front of screens, and I am also worried about the algorithms and harmful content on the web that might start shaping his young brain. My wife and I had our son go to coding classes and we were proud to see him become confident with these programs, but I didn’t really see how important they were for educational purposes. Minecraft is fun but is that education? With all that there is to do with technology, again I feel overwhelmed and not sure of what to do. I have also had students in the same class who were on opposite sides of the technology spectrum, that is, some students are professionals and others are novice users. How do we keep both sides engaged?

The perspective I would have liked to be included is that of the CUNY teacher who is working with the teacher candidates. In a way I guess that perspective was there because these stories come from CUNY classrooms, but I want to “look under the hood” and understand why the CUNY professors chose the programs they chose? What did they assign or was it about tinkering? I truly sometimes feel like we are reinventing the wheel with some of these computer programs, and I wonder if that is education? The more I tinker and think about how and why to use these programs the more questions I have. Above I complained that I felt my son was spending too much time in front of the screen, but I too spend way too much time either looking at my iphone or working on my computer. I am dismayed by the algorithms and how they suck me in and how easily my emotions are stirred by the things on the internet. The advances in technology have made some parts of life easier but I also feel they have made us into zombies who must use the technologies if we want to stay afloat.

This all reads rather pessimistic, and yet I am not only pessimistic about tech. Yet it feels like I am on a rollercoaster still with highs and lows around what this tech is and how it translates into “education”? So many of my students have complained that they never learned practical skills in school (i.e. how to manage a credit card, how to apply for a loan) and I believe they were taught certain skills that could lead them to being able to do these “practical” things (they learned to read and write, they also learned math in school), so I wonder if the technology we are asked to use and share with our students is basic enough in that it will transfer into other more practical uses or is it already “practical”? Will people use Scratch or Flipgrid in the “real” world?

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[Anonymous]

I thought that the teacher candidate visual resource was very interesting. I enjoyed reading through the visual resource which highlighted those empowering and disempowering experiences that CUNY students and teacher candidates experienced with technology. The format that was used for this visual resource was similar to a graphic novel which I am not that familiar with but really enjoyed. I think anyone reading this can relate to this resource because we have all had our own experiences with technology whether they were positive or negative. I felt like I related to Evelyn who had a disempowering experience and didn’t have any way to navigate the technology in the classroom she was in. Seeing the visuals of the incorrect logins and being locked out of the accounts brought back some memories from when I first started teaching. It visually shows how overwhelming technology can be sometimes and how it is important to be organized with all of your accounts and passwords. Nobody ever teaches you how to do this but like Evelyn, I also asked questions to people that knew what to do and eventually my positive experience helped to empower me to use technology in my classroom. 

 

This was really a fantastic way to present information because it was highly engaging and simple to understand to anyone reading it. I would love to show my student teachers how to make something like this for their elementary/middle school classrooms because it seamlessly incorporates the content with technology. Since we are living in a digital age, we need to keep up with our students and be able to connect with them. Using this format has many benefits that I feel it outweighs the negatives of technology. Something that surprised me is the fact that we are not alone in our journey of using technology. Sometimes it feels isolating when we are alone navigating technology because we can encounter many difficulties but it feels good to know that we are not alone and other people experience this discomfort as well. Another positive surprise was all of the graphics that were included in this document. As I was reading, I wondered how these graphics were made and how much work/time went into making something like this. 

 

Another perspective that I wish had been included was a CUNY student using this with their student teachers. I think even having the student teacher perspective of using technology in their classroom with their students would have been interesting. As new teacher it can be very overwhelming to navigate through the digital world. Having these perspectives would enhance this document even further.