Educational Technology Certificate: Merging Instructional Technology and Emerging Technologies

With an ever-increasing adult student population seeking to update and improve knowledge, skills, and abilities it is vital those in the instructional technology field integrate emerging technologies more thoughtfully into instructional technology settings. Understanding the conflict or disconnect between emerging technologies and adult education and training environments will lessen or mitigate the divorce between instructional technology and participatory culture and learning. The venue to link those in the instructional technology field with the emerging technologies of our digital technology age is an Educational Technology Certificate through an educational lens. My cognate project "Educational Technology Certificate: Merging Instructional Technology and Emerging Technologies" is an opportunity for those in the instructional technology field to nourish a vision and ideological sense to learning, knowledge, and literacy in our emerging technologies digital technology age.

The Media Literacy Classroom

Johnathan's thesis, The Media Literacy Classroom, is a curriculum plan incorporating media literacy and social media into a Language Arts classroom. The 21st Century Student has an expectation of a certain level of technology in his or her life, and teachers miss an opportunity to engage them in compelling and accessible learning activities by ignoring this. Even the most basic internet-capable computer lab can give young learners access to a powerful set of student-centered tools. This curriculum uses progressive education techniques, emphasizing critical thinking on the part of students to create a media-literacy classroom, which maps the tools of analyzing and understanding the student's own media landscape onto more traditional forms of literacy. Just as a traditionally literate student produces written work to demonstrate content mastery, so to will a media literate student produce audio and video productions to demonstrate their understanding. Many traditional language arts texts, such as the works of William Shakespeare, lend themselves to this form of analysis. The goal of the media literature classroom is to empower students to turn their analytical minds from the classroom into the media landscape itself, and to demonstrate how they can have a voice in the world.

Johnathan Wright's MA Portfolio