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:

1. Keyboarding skills all differed.
2. “Panic” of students.
3. Unfamiliar with testing on a computer.
4. 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!