Description of Core Competency
Professional development related to incorporating technology in the classroom. Technology in the classroom should facilitate learning and improve performance by creating and using technological resources.

Workshops
Incorporating technology in the classroom
Led by: Stephen Thomas, Cathleen McGreal, Stephen Grandchap
CCT Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing Michigan
Workshop date: 9 May 2013
 
Workshop description
in this workshop I learned how to incorporate outside technology into the classroom and how to engage students using technology. I learned that including technology in the classroom curriculum is most effective when it coordinates content knowledge, teaching knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. We learned how to engage students by using video to help break down complicated content knowledge, such as cellular respiration. We were introduced to Camtasia, a software designed to help educators incorporate video content into their classrooms. Using this software, we were instructed in how to create video lectures to allow us to flip our class room so that lectures were observed by students outside the classroom and inside the classroom students engaged in constructive learning activities.
 
 
Incorporating technology into my classroom at Michigan State University
 Google Earth, iDigBio, and ImageJ
 
In my Fall 2018, Spring 2019 and Fall 2019 Organismal Biology Laboratories at Michigan State University I incorporated technology in the classroom using Google Earth, iDigBio, and ImageJ.
 
Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery.
 
ImageJ is a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation.
 
Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), the National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) funded by the National Science Foundation. Through ADBC, data and images for millions of biological specimens is made available in electronic format for the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public.
 
 
Skills students learned
How to extract data from publicly available databases, iDigBio.
How to take longitude and latitude data from databases and plot specimen locality is on Google Earth.
How to take morphological measurements of photographs of specimens using image J.
How to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint

 
Project
Students wrote proposals, went through a proposal approval process, collected data, analyzed their data using appropriate statistics, created posters with data visualizations and interpretive text, and presented those posters in a poster session open to the public during the last week of lab.

Artifacts Rational
I use technology in the classroom to facilitate student driven learning.  I modeled how to use technologies (Google Earth, iDigBio, and ImageJ), and coach students on how to combined these technologies to construct research projects.  The experience and skills gained from using these technologies in the classroom enables students to facilitate their own learning outside of the classroom.  Incorporating technology in the classroom allowed me to facilitate learning of content knowledge (interactions between morphology, geography, and bioclimactic variables) and facilitate learning the scientific method, peer review, and the scientific publication process.  In addition to using technology in the form of Google Earth, iDigBio, and ImageJ, students also gain proficiency in using common software such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint; giving them additional technological experience and skills that are transferable to many careers.

These are my students and their posters they created using Google Earth, iDigBio, and ImageJ technology. They put a lot of work into their research and posters. They were so proud of their accomplishments at the end.

Interpretation/Reflection
In the workshop Incorporating technology in the classroom, I learned to structure courses to incorporate technology into the classroom effectively by making sure the technology was presented in a way that was easy for students to access and learn and by making sure the technology aligned with both the content knowledge and the pedagogical practices.
 
Incorporating Google Earth, iDigBio, and ImageJ into my students laboratory projects was challenging but it was also rewarding. Challenging because many students did not understand how databases worked, or how to harmonize, organize and clean large amounts of data extracted from databases. But once that challenge is overcome students would extract other data from the iDigBio and play around and explore it. Before being in my laboratory they were unaware of public databases of natural history collections and occurrence data for species. Using Google Earth to plot specimen localities with satellite data fascinated the students because they could see what habitat from the aerial photographs species were collected. Students use the Google Earth features to make effective and creative maps that they put in their posters and some hung on their walls in their dorm rooms. By incorporating this technology into my classroom my students were exposed to freely available biodiversity information that they did not know existed before and had access to and created maps and answer questions of their own. It was a challenge to teach so many students new technology using different operating systems and different levels of computer skills but it was worth it when they started playing around with the data and the maps on their own asking different questions that were not required for lab.