Assignment #1: Flight Path
Britt Hanson
September 18th, 2016
The proposed content of ETEC 565A had me excited from the description when I first entered MET. Unlike the core courses, I believe the content of this course moves beyond the academic to the practical and allows users to try and test which technology will work best for them in their unique individual contexts.
Many of the issues tackled in this course directly relate to my current teaching position at Navigate/NIDES as a blended learning and online teacher. Part of my role in the school is the curriculum development coordinated and in this role I do a great deal of technology and software selection as well as supporting and implementing course design and development projects at the secondary level. I am very familiar with the inner workings of D2L and have designed and ever-greened many courses with this platform. I am also a D2L ‘super administrator’ at my school and this allows me to understand the functions of D2L beyond the role of a course teacher. Through my undergraduate degree and now the MET program, I am familiar with Blackboard Collaborate as a learner in this system but have never experimented with the platform from the perspective of a teacher or course developer. I am also familiar with the learning management system, CANVAS, as I have built a course for school district use on this platform. I would, however, be interested in learning about MOODLE and its capabilities, as well as experimenting with the capabilities to share and sell courses for profit. Specifically, which system would house and store a course securely for students to access if their school decided to purchase the course. I am interested in this because we work with two companies at my school, eDynamic (based out of the United States) and Content Connections (based out of the Comox Valley) that create online courses for secondary students and sell them through licenses to schools who wish to offer quality content that they are not responsible for maintaining or building and I am unsure how they are able to do this as I have a limited technology background in this area. The research behind my interest in course design and development stems from a independent study I did through the MET program. I discovered many “best practices” in course design that have led me to refine my practices about creating quality online content and what/what does not make a great online course for particular target audiences. I have included some references on this topic below for further reading and to discover my motivations and interests in this area.
This year, I have taken on a new role as the curriculum support teacher for many small distance learning (DL) based programs around the province. In this new role, we are using Google Apps for Education (GAFE) as the main platform of communication. Although I have used google drive (and several apps) for my own personal use and small scale classroom use (google documents for collaboration), the large scale of tracking student learning plans, report cards and several other critical documents was new to me and is a steep learning curve. We are also aiming to implement ‘Fresh Grade’ which I have no experience with.
Below, I have outlined the three areas I would like to further explore over the duration of this course and spend time experimenting with the functionality for the context in which I teach.
Moodle
The slogan for Moodle is “community driven, globally supported” and I like the idea that Moodle houses one of the largest open sourced teams in the world. However, I have hesitations about the Moodle platform has peers have told me that it is not “user-friendly” and is “difficult for teacher developers to work with.” As I would like to work with Moodle to discover how to create online course content, I will begin by working within Moodle’s Sandbox as this does not require download to check out the features.
From there, I would like to discover how Moodle needs to be ‘housed’ on a server and if you can use Moodle as a secure platform for online courses to be purchased and to gain access through license fees. Part of this learning curve is understanding how Moodle integrates with other popular LMS platforms as a course is of no use to a school if they cannot integrate it into their existing platform. Much of this is beyond my knowledge base and I will be looking to others in course and the instructor for guidance around this.
Google Apps for Education
I am familiar with the mail and google documents, spreadsheets and the sharing capability within these. I would like to learn about Google Forms (to conduct student and parent surveys), Google Expeditions, Google Classroom and Google Sites. I am unsure about the interface of Google Classroom and Sites as a replacement for an LMS and am curious as to how others have used these platforms and the ease of use for teachers and students.
An Image from Google Expedition, ”https://www.google.com/edu/expeditions/#about”
An image from Google Classroom, “https://www.google.com/edu/products/productivity-tools/”
An image from Google Sites, “https://apps.google.com/products/sites/index.html”
Fresh Grade
Fresh Grade seems to offer options for sharing grading information that connects the dots for parents, students and teachers. The program I am working in allows parents to act as the home facilitator for their children and Fresh Grade seems to allow you to capture work through photographs on your everyday devices, such as an Iphone or Android phone, through their app. Fresh Grade said you can capture learning moments in real time through video, pictures, audio or notes and can share with individuals, groups or the entire class. The technology seems like a more realistic, engaging and meaningful way of reporting for parents, students and teachers but I need to spend time looking into how it is set up, how it transfers to the systems that are already in place for K-12 reporting (MyEd BC) and whether it is useful and easy to use for all involved. If it is difficult to implement, start-up or use, it will likely fall of the radar after the first few months of school with the busy lifestyles parents, students and teachers lead. Fresh Grade seems to offer a solution to 21st century grading and I am interested to explore this further.
Fresh Grade is endorsed by Education spokesperson and critic, Sir Ken Robinson, “https://www.freshgrade.com/” https://www.freshgrade.com/
References
Dabbagh and Kitsantas (2011). Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning Retreived April 15th, 2016 from http://anitacrawley.net/Articles/DabbaughPLE.pdf
Dixson (2012). Creating effective student engagement in online courses: What do students find engaging?
Grant, M., & Thornton, H. R. (2007). Best Practices in Undergraduate Adult Centered Online Learning: Mechanisms for Course Design and Delivery. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 3(4). Retrieved March 15, 2016, from http://jolt.merlot.org/documents/grant.pdf
Horn, M. B., & Staker, H. (2014). Blended: Using disruptive innovation to improve schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand.
Lister, M. (2014). Trends in the Design of E-Learning and Online Learning. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(4). Retrieved September 16th, 2016, from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol10no4/Lister_1214.pdf
**Images in my original post were retrieved from Moodle.org, Freshgrade.com and GAFE at https://www.google.com/edu/products/productivity-tools/ but my computer was having numerous issues with inserting images into the blog.