ISTE Blog Post Week 1

#EDU643 #Week1 #ISTEStandards

This week in EDU 643 was heavily centered around social presence in the online or blended-learning environment. Social presence can essentially be thought of as the set of interactions between classroom stakeholders and the interpersonal relationships developed through such interactions. Typically, we’re talking about the interactions between an instructor and their students or interactions amongst students, i.e. the peer-to-peer discourse that takes place within a course. Overall, social presence can be thought of as just a portion of the larger Community of Inquiry framework for robust educational experiences, which includes ample amounts of teacher presence and cognitive presence as well.

The vast majority of our recent graduate-level work can be tied back to ISTE standards. For instance, while analyzing a specific educational technology tool and discussing its implementation within the classroom, individuals within the course not only had to set professional learning goals to explore and apply pedagogical approaches made possible by technology and reflect on their effectiveness (ISTE Standard 1a), but we were also able to model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning (ISTE Standard 2c). One could also argue that, depending upon the tool selected, our recent endeavors allowed us to use technology to create, adapt and personalize learning experiences that foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs (ISTE Standard 5a) while also fostering a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings (ISTE Standard 6a). As previously noted in our EDU 643 SP Tool Analysis, I believe the specific ed tech tool that I selected, Socrative, set the foundation which will allow me to do just that.

While the ISTE standards are an excellent guide upon which to build your online classes, I do not believe they do an adequate job when it comes to encouraging educators to foster a positive learning environment and meet the social-emotional needs of their students. To elaborate, when I examine the nine ISTE standards they appear to be focused solely on content-related material or data-driven results. After focusing so heavily this past week on social presence in the classroom, I believe there needs to be an additional standard to address this fundamental factor that seems to be missing from the current ISTE standards. The proposed tenth standard should encapsulate the social presence model by promoting high levels of instructor involvement and encouraging community cohesion, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of affective association in the classroom and the role it plays towards building community cohesion. It is critical that such variables be addressed in order to better meet the social-emotional needs of students and cultivate a learning environment in which all students feel comfortable to the point that their understanding of the classroom content is their primary concern.