Earlier this summer, a unique opportunity was offered through our weekly state conference call with Canvas. The Virginia Department of Education was sponsoring seats in the upcoming round of Canvas Certified Educator certification…for FREE. This certification involves 6, 6-week classes at $180 per class. When the certification was first announced, I wondered, with 7 years of experience, what more could Canvas teach me? At the time, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the cost.
However, in that time span I’ve seen educators that I know and others on Twitter say how valuable and worthwhile this experience has been and how the program goes into more than just the features and tools available in Canvas, but really sinks into pedagogy and instruction. I haven’t seen one negative comment, so I applied and got in. The program started on August 2 and will go on until May.
My goal is to try (very much note this word, try) to keep up and document my experience in this program.
The first course that I’m starting with is Foundational Frameworks. The focus of this course is leveraging Canvas tools to enhance student-centered teaching and learning. In my first assignment, I needed to find a previous lesson or professional development workshop that integrated technology and evaluate each activity in the lesson for its level of SAMR and Bloom’s Taxonomy. I felt a workshop wouldn’t register with the assignment the same way a lesson I designed with a teacher would, so I chose a project from our Hospitality and Tourism class that was a few years old.
But as I was searching through previous lessons, I was surprised at the number of lessons that didn’t really have a level of SAMR. I’ve been teaching others about SAMR since about 2017 and would have thought more lessons would have had this included. But as it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who noticed this as in our group discussion board at least two other people felt the same way!
In this project, students researched a specific region or country and created a virtual tour in Adobe Spark Page. Except for designing the virtual tour itself, I found the activities used in this lesson fell on the lower side of both SAMR and Bloom’s.
So my takeaways from this first assignment is to: 1) Redesign this lesson to include more time for students to collaborate in the preparation stages, 2) Offer more than one choice to complete the tour, such as a digital webpage, podcast, or video, and 3) Look at some of my previous lessons and how I can update them, whether it’s one I’ve used for years or one that has been on a back burner for awhile.
I will say I may have underestimated the amount of work that will be done throughout this program. I haven’t been in a “class” since 2017 when I finished my certification in English, which took me several years to finish. I’ve done a few fun classes here and there since then like the Classy Graphics course with Tony Vincent, but the first week of this program felt like I was back in grad school again. I’m really going to have to think about putting a learning schedule together to help me stay on track, besides using this blog as a way to stay accountable.
Have you taken participated in the Canvas Certified Educators course or are you thinking about? Please post any comments below!
Ms Priester EDU 