Deepening Course Content Through Professional Networking and Online Media
I’ve been teaching the grad course, Technology Integration for School Leaders (EDIN 653) for over a decade. Serendipitously, as part of my ongoing development of course content, I found a vehicle through which I’ve been able to express my own unique take on the field of Educational Technology, along with my passion for K-12 education. This aspect of my teaching has resonated deeply for me, and I feel it has enriched my own professional understandings, as well as affording my students a far deeper view of the field. Let me describe a few of the ways this has played out in my teaching.
Staying Current in a Dynamic Field
I stress in my live ZOOM-based classes from the very first meeting that Educational Technology is a dynamic, ever and rapidly changing field. Consequently, it behooves all of us involved in it to put in focused efforts to stay current. As the former, now retired, Director of Educational Technology for the New York City public school system, long ago I began to turn my email In-Box into my personal radar screen for what’s happening and what’s new in the field.
Currently, I subscribe directly to a good number of publications devoted to the field; magazines and journals like Technology and Learning, eSchool News, and EdTech Digest (a publication I personally write for on occasion), as well as others. I also subscribe to a variety of EdTech news aggregators, like Smart Brief, as well as YouTube channels and Facebook groups devoted to the field.
The upshot of this is that in effect, I expose myself to a great deal of content of high relevance to my teaching. Frankly, this would be an overwhelming amount of content if I felt I had to dutifully consume every bit of it offered. I simply give myself the luxury of reading what appeals to me, sometimes simply scanning headlines and the summaries of full articles that publishers provide, looking for trends and the most salient, digestible takeaways from this huge body of material. And, at some point when I feel I’ve mined a particularly rich vein of news, I’ll take a deeper dive to get the details.
The "Class EXTRA" Info-Stream
This is great for my personal self-education. But also, I generally send my class two email notices a week, one of which I label “Class EXTRA” in which I include some items from my In-Box “Info-Stream” with my invitation to the students to read it.
For some of it, I include annotation as to why I feel items are of particular interest to our class inquiries. It is often the case that I will have short discussions of these items in the following or subsequent class meetings or cite them when giving feedback to student essay assignment responses. Alluding to news and prominent opinions, I find, is a powerful way to bring class themes alive with a high degree of authority from cited sources.
Podcast-Style Guest Interviews
Another aspect of teaching my course that I feel has worked out beyond my expectations is the ongoing hosting of class guests. When I first began to teach my course, I viewed the requirement to host a ‘guest speaker’ as simply one more thing to do. Gradually, in casting around for colleagues to bring in, I realized that my personal network of colleagues I’d worked with over the years was filled with interesting, accomplished people.
Rather than task these folks with preparing a formal presentation, I handled their visit as an interview, something I was familiar with from podcasting projects I had done previously. It’s a format that I know often brings the best out of guests. While being interviewed represents little extra work for my guests, it is I who puts in the effort to craft and send them, ahead of their visit, a body of focus questions calculated to draw rich responses from them. Many of the people I’ve hosted are authors and speakers on EdTech and its impact on teaching and learning and, as a result, some truly wonderful conversations have taken place in my class.
A Real-World Example: AI and Education
Here’s an example of one guest conversation that worked out quite well. A colleague from way back in my Department of Education days, Dr. Camile Dempsey, accepted my invitation to visit the class. She had recently been named director of the newly formed Center for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies at Penn West University.
We had a great discussion about the need for such a center and where AI is taking the field of Education. I decided to write this up as an article which was published in EdTech Digest: “A New Map for the AI-Education Frontier” (June 06, 2025).
As I’ve been exploring using YouTube to share the riches mined in my class, I created and uploaded a video based on the conversation that I had with Dr. Dempsey (my videos never include student voices or identities, simply me and my guest). In addition to the exchanges of our voices, I included the illustrated focus question notes that I shared over ZOOM as we spoke. The result is a video that communicates ideas both through audio and visual illustrations.
Modeling Best Practices
A fortunate dimension of inviting high profile guests is that they find the possibility of my producing and posting a video derived from their visit, and my write-ups of it that I submit for publication to popular-in-the-field publications, to be strong inducements to say “Yes!” to my invitations.
The video approach to preserving the value of guest visits fits in very nicely with my course assignments in which my students must plan and create videos to support their own teaching as well as that of their school building colleagues. I feel this is important currently, as teachers and students alike reap benefit from on-demand videos of core course info.
In all of the practices I’ve described here I am modeling, through what my students experience in my class, ways that they may improve their own.
Looking back on these instructional developments of the past few years, I can see how my following the ongoing evolution of the field of Educational Technology and my organic responses to it in bringing new possibilities into the way I teach my course, have afforded me professional and personal growth for which I am most grateful.
— Mark Gura