Sarah Janiszewski

TE 846: Accomm Diffs Literacy Learners 

As I began my graduate school journey, one important aspect of the journey was to renew my teaching license with the State of Michigan. For renewal purposes, one requirement was to take a reading class. Taking Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners course met those requirements. Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners allowed me to explore a topic of literacy and pushed me to work with a student struggling in the area of reading, writing, or speaking. The overarching goal of the course was to collect pertinent data, then adopt and differentiate our teachings using a variety of literacy strategies to educate our pupil and reflect upon the outcomes. 

CEP 810: Teaching for Understanding with Technology

As I continued my Lifelong Educational journey, I took CEP 810. This course explored the idea of teaching for understanding using technology. The five fundamentals that serve as the foundation of the MAET program were focused on: learning about the theories of learning and understanding, becoming familiar with TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Theory (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) , exploring essential mindsets of teaching with technology, developing professional learning networks, and learning creative uses of technologies for learning. My big project for the semester was to teach myself something that I always wanted to do, while only using YouTube or Help Forums as resources. As a result of this course, I not only embraced the TPACK theory and felt at home with my studies, I also learned to make sushi compliments of YouTube. 

CEP 800: Learning in School & Other Settings 

In CEP 800, I studied habits of minds and became more familiar with our style of teaching and how it paralleled with technology. I explored how students learned and how we as teachers can use this as a driving force to teach. My big project for CEP 800 was to pick a learning theory that best suited my teaching needs and developed a video portraying it using technology. The iMovie that I created showed how project based learning and collaborative learning can be effective in the classroom. The catch of the project was that we had to include a "twist" using technology. My twist of technology was the Makey-Makey kit that I was previously introduced to in CEP 811. I used the kit to demonstrate how students can create and develop their own musical instruments to go along with our Music Month in March celebration at school. 

CEP 822: Approaches to Educational Research 

In CEP 822, I studied alternative methods of educational research. Thanks to YouTube and my statistical skills, I was able to analyze data and challenge myself. My big project of the course entailed identifying a researchable problem in education and develop a research proposal. The researchable problem that I studied concerned how to effectively use social media as an educational tool in the classroom. More particularly, I focused on the following questions:

• How does social media impact/affect learning in the classroom?

• How are schools using social media to enhance learning?

• What social networking tools work best and how to deploy them?  

• How do you manage social media usage, i.e., administrative concerns, security, privacy and sustainability?