It’s amazing how much we (as a cohort) and individually we have done in a relatively short period of time. It has been a lot of work to get through designing our course and thinking about work in an online context (despite being part of the program for over a year now).
The biggest treasure that I will take away from this is my personal growth as a learner. Nothing happens all at once. With each passing day, I have felt stronger and more confident as an online participant and this course might have been a comfortable “breaking out party” for me.
This blog has been a comfortable place for me to synthesize some of my learning and I look forward to completing one in every course. Perhaps even one to celebrate the MET journey (am I getting ahead of myself for the final course?). If nothing else, it is a digital journal to document those “a-ha” moments.
After all it is the lightbulbs that we look for in both our students and ourselves that makes education so awesome.
As I built the Quiz within Moodle it didn’t quite feel right for my students. I’ve never felt right about “testing” my students on a computer. There were too many factors that would interfere with being able to assess them properly:
Keyboarding skills all differed.
“Panic” of students.
Unfamiliar with testing on a computer.
Time constraints of computer lab and individual student’s abilities.
I did complete the assignment (albeit a bit late due to an improper submission, oops! — I’ve learned my lesson now though :). This past week as I brought my students onto our classroom Wiki, I went by to the idea of a quiz and tried the idea with my students.
I did it again with Google Docs: Forms and asked them to complete one during class time. Instead of making it a “quiz” I called it a survey. I asked my students to complete a Halloween Survey. This computer period reminded me of the challenges of having my students completing a task on the computer.
lingering issues for some students to remember their computer login and password.
understanding how to access a specific url
lack of basic reading and writing skills.
I reviewed the results afterwards and was overjoyed with their enthusiasm and responses but realized that it wouldn’t be fair to “test” my students on the computer because of lack of literacy skills. I could, however, engage them in the idea of a timeless survey as an experience. This idea can be further extended to be an online learning experience where they complete a “survey” as a worksheet while learning to surf through websites to find information. With lots of practice my students may be ready to take a quiz online, however, at this time we are still practicing how to log in quickly (ie. less than 15-20 minutes). Until then the quiz will probably remain “hidden” from them and appear in the form of a survey!
I should probably reedit that to read “Done Thinking About The Proposal”. But the past few week’s exercise has been a struggle as I try to put it into context of my young Grade 2-3 students.
“Why do my young Grade 2-3 students need a Moodle?”
As I say this, the answer couldn’t be more obvious — yet it seemed to escape me for a while. As I conducted my research and I thought through the process while watching the rather unsuccessful Wimba session earlier this week, it finally hit me so hard — I wondered where I was the entire time. Eureka.
The past few years I’ve been playing with Wikis. How to get neat wikis up with students. I was quite successful in my approach as I reiterated on the approach year after year. Then last year, my Grade 2/3’s where challenged with the basic prerequisite of using a wiki, “are you able to read/write?” This ultimately became a stumbling block, that just needed to be adapted to. If kid’s couldn’t write full sentences, then they tried. The beauty of the wiki was that it was collaborative. It allowed anyone to jump in, no matter what level. Students helped students — and parents were involved in the process. I had even extended it to another classroom. Imagine that, working across the internet with another classroom.
But there were problems. Everyone could see everything. It was difficult for me to setup course pages without it being effected by an eager student who accidentally edits or deletes a page. Sure, I can reverse the whole process — but what a pain.
*Trumpets blare* — Moodle Time. Imagine instead of having just one or two classes we had five. Then we’d need a system to manage the students. But imagine that I could have all my course content online, while collaborating with other teachers on a unit that we all teach over and over again. What if we made it about interactivity — and creative process — collaboration… using the wikis, and having students work with one another? Wow. I might be dreaming a bit, but if there is one thing that my students never stop doing is amazing me everyday by raising to the challenge.
I remember quite vividly a teacher telling me that the Wikis wouldn’t work with the 3/4’s. It worked really well (it took the second try to work.. but it was beautiful). Onwards with the challenge!
That was the task for this past week. With each meeting this past week our group encountered many challenges and great discussions (also some big headaches). Let me bring you up to speed. We were tasked with producing and rubric to select and appropriate rubric for a fictitious scenario that involved a group of University students that needed an LMS to manage their videos captured for annotation purpose.
We set on the task using Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS (2003) as a framework. The initial brainstorming procedure was a lot of fun. We were drawing on our experience using UBC’s Vista, WEBCT, blogs.ubc.ca and even Connect. This started as an enjoyable experience. All we had to do was think “what did we really enjoy about our current LMS?” and “what did we dislike about it?” It became a wish list!
I even got thinking about the temporary shutdown that UBC Vista experienced at the beginning of this 2012 term! It was our DREAM LMS! Surely by putting this all together we could make it about learning and not about the technology once again!
Of course as each subsequent meeting progressed the decisions as to which points were truly of value and how to rank them in order of importance became more and more difficult. For example: 1) Was online security more important? or 2) Complex video player for playback? Or was it a case of both of them being equally important? Many great discussions occurred but the different timezones also caused headaches to occur as the week progressed (fatigue, but also beginning to doubt ourselves). Right about to the release date, we still spoke about how to score it properly. What should the rubric look like? (ie. Checklist?, Meeting Expectations/Exceeding?)
I should conclude that in the end we came to some consensus on the project but we were glad it was done. I’m pretty sure inside if the professor knew about our struggles, they’d be jumping with glee — the task had engaged us completely in arguments, discussions and thoroughly challenged us!
This was an important exercise in the process of developing an LMS. How are we suppose to design an effective one without knowing how to evaluate one? Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but the obvious just became more clear.
Oh, by the way here is our current draft (version # 789, still in beta form I think… )
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003).A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.
Being an EVA (Educational Venture Analyst) might not be as easy as it seems. Evaluating this week’s assortment of “marketing pitches” I was able to suss out my favourite pretty quick. I ended up going for this one:
I was pretty confident with my decision. I did note in my decision that I felt he would be better off with a more experience advisor by his side. Despite his lofty $100,00 request — It was his charisma and personality that made me a believer. More over than anything else, I knew what he was selling.
This came in sharp contrast to many of the other products, who gave polished presentations but gave you the feeling that behind all of the “big words” and key phrases they used there was no substances. In fact in some cases, I wasn’t able to determine exactly what the product was. Although I didn’t watch this entire seminar by David Shore, I found out that delivering a succinct message about what product one is delivering is key.
As the weeks progressed with the discussion one after another, my colleagues posted that they would not invest in this young entrepreneur. I was beginning to doubt my decision. My peers represent individuals that are knowledgeable in the educational field but how could I be the only one to support this pitch? In the middle of the week I began to think that I had voted for this CEO with my heart and not my head.
I noted that many of my colleagues didn’t support this venture due to the high figure that he was requesting. I wonder if their minds would changed if he had purposed this idea on Kickstarter where money is diffused amongst a crowd. Albeit the payback is a lot less and no one gets a percentage in the company, people like this young investor would probably get a lot of people, pitching in a few dollars.
As the week is coming to a close, I stand by my choice (without my money–easy to decide when it’s not your money ;). I still feel that an elevator pitch is based on a solid idea and the charm and charisma of a CEO. Anshul Samar has both. More so than the other pitches, this wasn’t a polished product but an idea from a youngster. I see these cards in the hands of kids in elementary school all the time. Even if they were to play with them for only a month, some educational benefit would come out of it. Would I likely see a return in my investment soon? I’m not sure, but I really like this idea as an educator (I would buy one!). At the end of the day, this investment might not make me rich — but I love the idea of making chemistry interesting for students.
So did I make the decision as a teacher more so than an EVA investor? Probably, but this idea gets me excited. I’m rooting for this CEO.
Did I forget to mention that he presented at a TED Talk a few years later and early this year he even released an iPhone app to promote and allow individuals to design an personality for the chemistry elements? Go Anshul!
This week’s discussion questions got me thinking about SUCCESS SECTIONS (Bates & Poole 2003) again. In particular the idea of “Cost”.
In our forums we were responsible for discussing a fictitious character “Benoit” who had to decide which platform he was going to deploy an upcoming post-secondary course on. A forum that he was familiar with but lacked a responsive tech support team or a new open source model that wasn’t supported by the university but had many of his peers using it.
Naturally this question doesn’t have a win win and is acting as more of a conversation piece but, it got me thinking about the hesitations of many of my peers (K-12 Teachers) who are reluctant to make switches to technology. The old adage of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The question in response might be “what if you are missing something from not using technology?”
The problems that can arise from technology are numerous, sometimes that means a tech support that is bogged down in so many requests that they aren’t able to tend to them. In addition, the cost of one’s time and energy invested into making a system work can be taxing. It may be like opening a can of worms.
The last discussion question was asking how much time we thought it would take Benoit to build his course from scratch. I have built a wiki for my classroom (in no way is this a course) but it was interesting to think how much time I had invested in the project. The recess and lunch hours trying to make it work. Not including the weekends and evenings fixing, monitoring and posting new material. I had never sat to think about it because to me it was all worth the effort for the students (they still use it to micro-blog on it 2 years later!). It’s difficult to think what else I could’ve done with that time, but I guess that is why we are teachers.
I’ve been recently engaged and piqued by some great conversation pieces on Vista with another MET colleague, Kathy, about how we are attempting to access course material through our course LMS, Vista.
As a result it got me thinking about SECTIONS from Bates and Poole (2003). In my own personal teaching context, I made a big deal about “Ease of Use” and “Cost” as Elementary schools are very cautious about spending public dollars on areas they are unfamiliar with (fair enough). When I become a student after hours, I feel like “Ease of Use” combine it with the idea of accessibility becomes a huge issue in my current situation.
I recall quite vividly early this week on Monday in the evening Vista simply crashing. I naturally hit up Twitter to see if it is just me or if there are others experiencing issues ( I find this interesting that I go to Twitter to check if my situation is unique, not sure what to think about that — but I find it definitely resourceful). Here is what I found:
christina_prc
Why is Vista always down when I actually wanna do my readings… #ubcproblems #ubc #raaaage 2012-09-10 6:15 PM
s_arahwong
Omg ubc vista not working, i need to print my notes!!! 2012-09-10 9:28 PM
I went through a few emotions pretty quickly. I was elated that it wasn’t my computer (since I just spent a small fortune on it), next I was revelling in reading all of these Tweets that affirmed my own anger (still happy), then it turned into a little anger (I had put this time aside to due my coursework and I couldn’t), then to rage as I thought about how SECTIONS (2003) wasn’t successful at all, and finally a little more elated that I had just made a connection with a reading from my coursework (thanks 565a).
I of course went into a small tirade about how ridiculous this whole scene was. Naturally, UBC was working on the situation and just as I prepared to tuck myself into bed — Vista was ready for me to learn again. 🙂
References:
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003).A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.
Flight Path is posted up and live! I had to double check whether to post it as a page or a “post”. Small nuances mean big things. I’m still learning about them all. Let me know what you think of them. Here is the link.
