Cindy Leach Plunkett's ETEC 565a Blog

I used Animoto to author my digital story [http://animoto.com/play/Gotqpc7sQnCYzCXDYzPoXA?autostart=true].  For such a cool polished look it is remarkably easy to use, however, that doesn’t mean that it is not time consuming.  First of all, when using something so visual it is incredibly hard to get good pictures – especially those that are free to use.  Then there is all the time spent trying to create the ‘story’ make everything flow, play around with it again and again…..Only in the end of course to still not be satisfied entirely with your offering…but that is the artistic process.  I do still love this tool though.  I chose it after seeing an offering made to advertise a new wellness program, our inter-hospital fitness challenge.  Our wellness co-op student created the video and said how ‘easy’ the software was to use, taking ‘minutes’ to learn.  Well that was a big sale for me, especially considering how great her video looked.  I couldn’t wait to try it out!  The other big selling feature was the price point.   I could create a 30 second video for free (not long enough for my long winded intro), pay $3.00 for one video (which I was only too happy to do), or purchase a subscription for $30.00 (which I will be doing for my group so that we can make some cool videos!).  I loved this tool because it allowed me to create an Instructor introduction that was more meaningful to me.  The old addage that a picture conveys a 1,000 words, not too mention the fun I had finding the ‘right’ music.  Which reminds me of another great feature of this tool – they have music that you can use and not worry about copyright – how great is that!  Anyhow, I thought that creating the Instructor Introduction in this way allowed me to show my students a side of me the a simple bio document or voice over could never have done.  Using this tool actually led to more ideas of how I would like to put it to use, including having the students ‘test drive’ the 30 sec free video to provide a quick glimpse into themselves as an icebreaker activity.  I  can’t wait to see how well it works, I think this will add a new dimension to their self-introductions and allow myself and their peers to get a better idea of who they are and what they value.  I also think they will be more keen to do an activity like this because it is fun and different and allows for creativity, which self-introductions do not normally allow.

This was a very interesting and unique activity.  We did a Wiki Activity in ETEC510 whereby myself and a partner took and existing Wiki entry, we edited the entry, re-vamping it in a way that we felt flowed better and added content.  That activity was very much in line with my conceptualization of how a wiki would be used in an activity.  This was very very different!  I have never used a wiki in this sort of interactive way before as a large group activity.  In some ways I found it much better than the discussion groups.  The ‘sightings’ were all in one easy place.  In order to properly prepare to add to the ‘discussion’ tab you needed to read and synthesize all of the sightings.  There wasn’t the constant regurgitation of the same knowledge that I find in the discussions ( I myself am guilty).  With everyone working together unique and interesting items were added to the Strategies and Challenges.  I enjoyed this activity a lot more than I thought I would.  When I initially read the requirements I was very pessimistic about how it would work, but once I wrote my sighting and read my colleagues I started realizing key themes and was able to leverage from their sightings an unique contribution to the ‘Challenges’.

The more I explore and create in the MET program the more I love the interactive and collaborative abilities of Web 2.0 design.  Discussion groups, chat.  Collaboration using Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Second Live, Blogs (Blogger, Word Press) Google Docs, Flickr, Wikipedia…. All of these wonderful ‘communities of practice’….and yet my ability to integrate this into my current teaching is halted before it begins.  We just upgraded to a new LMS, SumTotal’s Total LMS.  I’m sure if we had purchased the entire program I might have a different opinion, but right now it’s a fancy database to be able to house non-interactive learning modules and do lots of reporting for managers.  Where is my Moodle?  The course building module was not purchased so there is no ability to set up classes, create discussion forums, chat, assessment…..How very deflating and disappointing.  How do I deal with this obstacle, I have recommended to my manager that we pilot some of our current in-class interactive courses in Moodle.  We have the server space, I don’t mind creating the modules and for our content you need to be able to actively engage the learners in the course, they cannot be passive learners, it defeats the purpose of why and how the course was developed…As for a number of the other tools, well, just try to get to them, you receive a nice page that says “Sorry, this is unauthorized content”.  We are currently trying to work through a strategy to help the higher powers understand the benefits of sites like Second Life etc. to the education of our staff.  It’s not easy and if anyone else has had to do so and has tips I welcome them.  I have seen many a doctor lobby for sites that are banned, only to be denied.  The majority of our staff are professionals, we should not be censoring their access to sites like they’re children, but we do.  It is very difficult working in an environment where eLearning is the new concept, let alone any of the ‘gadgets’ that make it worth while.

I have just recently been looking at the Bates & Pooles SECTIONS question ‘Interactivity: what kind of interaction does this technology enable?’ when considering an LMS.  It has been very interesting the timeliness of looking at the SECTIONS framework as I have just been lamenting to my director the implementation of our new LMS (it goes live mid April).  As a legacy system we have Pathlore’s LMS, SumTotal purchased Pathlore and offered an upgrade to their LMS SumTotal’s Total LMS.  The ‘powers that be’ decided to move forward with the upgrade, however, they were selective in the modules they purchased.  Our group was brought into the loop at the ‘this is what we’ve bought and here’s your vendor training date’ stage.  How very disappointing.  The system is a glorified secretary.  It handles registration of online and in-class courses and does reporting beautifully.  It also nicely houses and manages eLearning modules created using Captivate, Articulate, and Dreamweaver nicely, but interactivity does not exist.  I suspect it could if ‘we’ had purchased that 1 final module, but as-is there is no chat, no discussion forums, no wiki, no glossary, no blog, lots of frustration.  This is one of those ‘ignorance is bliss’ situations.  If I wasn’t taking all of these great MET courses that show me how important interactivity is and if I hadn’t been exposed to using and utilizing all of the wonderful features in Moodle, I wouldn’t know any better.  So now my group is faced with the ‘rock and hard place’.  Do we tow the line and use the corporately purchased fancy expensive system and try to deal and work around with its inadequacies, or, do we install Moodle on one of our servers and become the ‘lone wolf’ using a different system.  There are political pros and cons to both, we’re in the process of sousing them all out right now.  To be continued……

I chose to add a chat activity to my moodle site.  I am actually using this site as a test for transferring a course that we currently deliver in class into an online offering.  During the in-class we utilize case studies to I could think of to transfer this to an online activity was chat.  Discussion groups would work too, but I find during class the way that the clinicians feed off of each other doing this in real-time provides a unique energy and interaction.  That’s why I chose the synchronous chat option.  The purpose of this course is to have clinicians reflect on their practice after we provide them with some tools and I think this tool also fits with this objective.  I would be there as a facilitator but I see the students driving the discussion, analyzing the case and piecing out what went wrong.  With multiple clinicians feeding off each other I see a lot of ideas being generated – given that I have framed the activity properly of course.   In Moodle the chats can be tracked and I have chosen to keep copies of all of the sessions so that I can go back and review who participated and the quality of their contribution.  I’m not sure what other tools there might be for chat?

I am also exploring using Discussion groups in my Moodle site, these I want to use for some probing questions.  Depending on the size of the chohorts I would definitely be setting up groups for the discussions.  If you have too many people involved things get a little overwhelming.  During the in-class we cap attendance at 12 clinicians, so I think I would have discussions groups that were a max of 12 as well.  I am still exploring all of the discussion group options, but am having fun with this.  I also need to set up an area for individuals to reflect on their own on some questions in regards to their practice.  I don’t want this to be a punitive or judging environment so I would like to keep this area individual…still need to figure out how to do that.

I’m sure a lot of people have experienced my current frustations.  I am part of a very large healthcare organization with multiple departments, all of whom are stakeholders in eLearning.  However, historically, one specific dept had the budget to purchase an LMS so they alone chose the vendor.  Now the rest of the organization is very much on board but we are stuck with a vendor that does not necessarily meet everyone else’s needs.  The more I am exposed to Moodle, the more disappointed I become with our current solution (  We are so limited with what we currently have… so does our department now choose to go out on our own, or do we tow the line and deal with what we have.   Tought decisions ahead, glad to be learning more and more through MET to help support making decisions about our flight path here )

Can I just say that I LOVE Google.  Googled ‘Moodle Forum Grade Greyed Out’ and voila, a discussion forum with the answer…IE.  I popped open Safari and was able to do the task.  It’s so interesting, I had never used Safari or Firefox until I started the MET course.  Now I find the need to have them installed and use them regularly as a lot of the open source and other tools used during this course do not play nice with IE.  Interesting on a number of fronts, I’m not sure that it’s not intentional by some companies, but it is kind of like cutting of your nose to spite your face when IE is currently the most highly used browser globally.  Just interesting.   Always good to learn new tools though, I now find myself leaning towards using the Safari browser more often just b.ecause of the visual layout

OK, have to be honest, I started building my course in moodle before I started to create the icebreaker discussion, and have only just now come back to that activity so that I could do the reflection.  Up until this point I have had a lot of fun playing in Moodle.  It’s like pealing back layers of an onion.  There is so much to learn and do!  I’m really have a blast with this product.  The downside is I have run into my first snag.  When I select under Grades the Average of Ratings option it doesn’t then allow me to select ’5′ , this section is still greyed out.  So, I am off ot the mightly Google to try to remedy this situation – hopefully.  Either than or on Sunday when the course is back open I will plead for help from my classmates ;o)

OK, finally over the last 2 weeks I have been trying to get caught up on the peripheral activities.  This one in particular is dead easy!  Well that would be for me anyways.  I have done a lot of burning of CD projects over the years.  Back in the late 90′s and very early 2000 we did a lot of this to send out training materials to clients )  The actual burning of the DVD isn’t difficult at all and it’s a 1x pain to burn multiple DVDs.  The longer part is creating and putting together the materials that go on the DVD.  Of course it’s easy to overlook the testing of the DVD to make sure it plays but it is a necessary step…I’ve been burned by skipping this one before so take it from someone that’s been there!  There were really no surprises in this one, but again, I’ve had lots of experience.  I expect there to be lots of suprises and difficulty with ramping up on Web/CT and Moodle!

Well, kinda overwhelming, but I am loving being able to much about with Moodle!   I’m a little disappointed with my Proposal mark but I guess we all misunderstand assignments from time to time.  Right now I’m trying to go back through the course and see what has fallen through the cracks.  I know there are some things I need to go back and reflect on and I really want to take this opportunity while the course is dark to really dig into my Moodle assignment.  Taking 2 courses in MET as the same time when you life is already very busy may have been a strategic error.  Any how, took a vacation day today and hope to get a bit ahead, we’ll we )