Marla Robertson

Incorporating Technology into LIST 4378

Marla Robertson, PhD

Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UT Arlington

Dr. Marla Robertson is a Visiting Assistant Professor-Literacy Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education. She teaches courses to undergraduate pre-service teachers and graduate in-service teachers who are returning to get additional training in literacy instruction.

Her research centers on the intersection of literacy, professional development, assessment policies and practices, and teacher education. She is interested in better understanding how teachers negotiate complex education systems and continue to learn and grow as professionals. She has a particular interest in human systems dynamics as applied to education systems, writing instruction, and technology integration.

In 2015-16, her Professional Learning Communities (PLC) project was on Incorporating Technology into LIST 4378 (a course for future middle grades teachers designed to teach pedagogy on reading, writing and literature) through the incorporation of blogging, flipped lessons, and digital recording of presentations.

Peggy Semingson

Marla

I enjoyed hearing about this! I have taught this course a few times and so could visualize your implementation to the literacy-focused content.

Love your use of visuals in the presentation itself. Way to go on the flipped videos.

I have never used Camtasia. How challenging is it to learn? What aspects of Camtasia are most useful to you?

Nice job!

-Peggy
- Marla Robertson
  
  This is the first time that I have used Camtasia. It is similar to other movie programs that I have used (MovieMaker and iMovie), although I didn’t try to do anything too difficult. It did like that I could take out mistakes I made in the audio without having to mess with the video (like saying “um” or saying something incorrectly. I knew that if I made a mistake I could repeat it correctly and could then go back and delete it. That was a great feature. I liked that I could use a PPT because I don’t like to record myself. One of the sessions I went to in New Orleans the presenter said his students in a blended class didn’t feel they needed to see his face because they saw him in class. It might be different for an online class, though.
Catherine Ortiz

Hi Marla,

Great project and use of flipping classroom instruction! I especially like the idea of using the rubrics for students to evaluate their presentations and then be able to make improvements rather than just seeing the result of their work in one rubric at the end of the course. I am also intrigued by the journaling aspect in terms of helping you keep track in a detailed fashion of the ongoing progress and how students are responding to the videos, etc. I would definitely benefit from doing something similar to track student responses to new techniques, especially in terms of comparing my campus classes vs. web classes. We haven’t moved to hybrid classes for lower level Spanish, but I think it is on the horizon…. 🙂
Kiva Harper

I really enjoyed the blogging. I plan to incorporate that in some of my courses in the future.
nakiaspope

One of the great things about what you’re doing is the modeling. I know that’s an explicit reason you’re incorporating the technology in your literacy course, but the research journal is good action research modeling as well. Do you plan to share any of the research notes with your students?
- Marla Robertson
  
  I do plan to share with them how the three technology pieces worked together in the class and have them provide me with feedback. I was not as happy with the way the blogging went this semester as in times I have used it in the past. I will get feedback from them to see how I could have organized it differently.
Regina Urban

Marla, I found it interesting to see how you incorporated blogging and student creation of videos in this course. I would think that the feedback they receive from these assignments would be very helpful. What a great way to help them have a sense of their classroom presence (presentations) and to have an opportunity to blog their thoughts based on your prompts for the course. There are so many ways to think about the pedagogy of reading / writing and literature. I am hopeful your students experience some ah-ha moments and share them with you in their evaluations.
Kim Breuer

What was the reaction of the students to the blogging requirement? Did they need additional support technologically or did they embrace it from the start?
- Marla Robertson
  
  Most of the students really took to the blogging assignment. A couple of them chose to use Tumblr and discovered after they had started that it does not allow comments anymore. This was disappointing to them because they did not have the opportunity to read comments from their classmates. In the future I will recommend that students not use Tumblr. The students were very resourceful in figuring out how to set up a blog.
Alex Hunnicutt

Your use of technology seems marvelously well-adapted to the course subject matter. This approach is a fine simulation of some of their future real activities. I imagine this was very helpful to the students. Do you plan to extend and expand on this approach?
- Marla Robertson
  
  I really enjoyed the opportunity to record student presentations. I think the students also appreciated the chance to see themselves and set goals to improve their future presentations. Presentations are always a part of my courses so I am excited to take what I have learned from this project to future courses I teach.