Précis of my flight path
“My educational flight plan for this course is to gain key skills in LMS platforms, communication, community and collaboration tools and multimedia that will enable me to create an online professional development community.”
“In order to manage the site and disseminate information and media, like video of lessons, my goal is to become familiar with HTML code and video editing, hosting and embedding.”
“I estimate, based on my previous experience in MET courses and readings, including NETS and SECTIONS framework, that planning a learning management system will require knowledge in assessing the purpose of the online platform, assessing the students, understanding the gap between where the learner is and where you want them to be, creating the resources needed to fill the gap between, and building, monitoring and refining the system.”
“Successful implementation of social networking software will require hands on experience and knowledge of the essential elements of successful online collaboration.”
Above are a few quotes from my flight path.
At the start of this journey, my goal was to learn the key skills necessary for creating and implementing an online course and community for Lesson Study. This knowledge ranged from HTML code basics and video hosting to proficient assessment of social software tools and their appropriateness in specific learning environments. Although I came into this course with knowledge in teaching F2F Lesson Study courses, I had never implemented an online version of this course or any other. The online course that I hope to complete in the coming years is best described as a professional development process of studying, analyzing, planning, revising, and sharing as a group of teachers studying a lesson together to improve student learning. This requires considerable communication and interaction with other teachers, facilitators, experts and students. Within an online community and course for Lesson Study, a variety of interactive tools need to be created and implemented to meet the needs of the collaborator and learner. Now, looking back to the start of this journey, I am realizing that my appraisal of the knowledge and resources needed to properly implement a course and community of Lesson Study has only begun to scratch the surface. Although this journey has been steep, and copious amounts of knowledge have been gained in these areas, this course has also made me realize that so much more needs to be discovered.
Reflection on your eLearning toolkit experience overall
Overall, my eLearning toolkit experience was instrumental in my journey through this course. Each section of the toolkit provided valuable practice with specific technology and social media needed to plan and create an educationally useful LMS site.
Learning Management System
Coming into this section, my prior knowledge about LMSs was limited to using WebCT Vista as a student and creating within Moodle as an instructor. While experimenting in this section, I found this prior knowledge helpful in understanding the structure, options, features, and affordances of LMS platforms. One of the misconceptions that I harbored going into this course was that these LMS features and affordances are largely the same. In truth, they do offer similar affordances, but I found their little differences made a huge impact on their usability. For instance, although more familiar with Moodle, I found WebCT Vista to be twice as intuitive, easy to navigate and faster to set-up, revise and review upon first attempt. This surprised me and led me to reevaluate my perceptions of LMS systems and delve deeper into understanding their differences. By the end of this process, I was reconsidering my choice of Moodle for my online course.
Web design and HTML authoring
At the start of the course, I had forgotten any HTML code I had once known. Worried that this was going to be a big problem, I went searching through the web and started self-learning. Unfortunately, this led me to skip over this section of the toolkit, something I am now regretting after reading over this section at the end of this course. One of the misconceptions I had coming into this course was that HTML was compatible across different platforms, browsers, and operating systems. Looking back, if I had learned about W3 standards (from this section) before submitting my digital story, John wouldn’t have had to email me for a compatible version to his browsers. Although functional, I can’t help wondering about lost opportunities and how I might have created my Moodle website differently had I worked through this section. One of the things that I plan to restructure, as a result of reading this section, is the site’s navigational structure.
Synchronous Communication Tools
While working through this section, I found some of its questions useful for evaluating the use communication tools online, such as “what hardware/software is required to use this tool, is the tool easy to use and explore, is the tool consistent with course goals, will the tool improve student knowledge or create community?”. In this section, I investigated add-ons to Moodle, like Dim Dim and Elluminate, that could offer live streaming, whiteboard, and audio, video and text chat capabilities. Previously, I might have jumped at the chance to include these options in my course, but through discussions and reflection, I have come to the conclusion that these features do not always improve a learning environment and need to be considered on a course by course basis. Some students, that enjoy the asynchronous and “anonymous” like environment, may find these options intrusive to the anytime, anywhere, and in “any state of being” affordance that online offers. From now on, one of the questions I will ask is, “what effect will this tool have on the community and comfort level of its participants?”
Social Software
I have to admit that I was unaware of the vast array of web 2.0 tools and their possibilities in education before starting this course. As I learned about all the possibilities, I also learned about the concerns connected to these tools, such as privacy, abuse, ownership, and reliability. Although I have difficultly seeing the concerns for ownership and privacy since information shouldn’t be shared if monetarily valuable or personal. Abuse and reliability did catch my interest. Abuse can have terrible consequences for students and if a tool is unavailable or has hiccups, then it becomes useless. In discussion, we looked for ways to manage these problems like finding ways to deal with abusive comments or creating a plan B in case plan A’s tools malfunction. Although reasonable options, I hope to get more insight into the use of these tools when I get back to school and start trying them out with my students. If school policy allows student access to these tools, I would like to have my students make videos using Animoto, create a reflection blog and experiment with other affordances of web 2.0 tools.
Weblogs
Creating blogs and reading blogs has never been interesting to me in the past. Even now, I wonder, “does anyone care that I struggle to find the motivation to blog or read others blogs?” On the other hand, I see great potential in educational blogs that create courses using blog pages as course sites linking to web 2.0 learning objects. These sites can either be used as an educational website or as a test ground for different learning tools prior to creating an entire LMS site. In the future, I plan to implement a weblog course in Lesson Study as a training ground for the implementation of the final website.
Wikis
My previous experience in Wikis has been as informal collaboration with partners involving collecting of information, reorganization, negotiation (sometimes ending in a vote), and mutual and synchronous editing. This course was my first introduction into a formal wiki assignment. As mentioned in the toolkit, a big part of a wiki is negotiating content and managing disagreements. Interestingly in this course, I found very few disagreements occurred in the wiki assignment and my group’s informal rubric wiki. Each wiki constituted an amalgamation of ideas rather than a negotiation of content, organization, and meaning. Von Glasersfeld (1988) states that students learn through interaction and negotiation of meaning. This suggests to me that wiki assignments should present opportunities that encourage negotiation rather than the collection of different ideas. Instead of a wiki assignment that asks for the top 5 strategies and challenges for engaging students in social media, I would ask for the most important strategy and challenge. The requirement for corroboration leads to disagreement, discussion and ultimately deeper understanding of the strategies and challenges
Throughout this course, I have used GoogleDocs and UBC’s and Moodle’s wiki tools. Although these different wiki tools have various affordances and issues, my favorite is GoogleDoc’s chat option. It was amazing how much informal, yet important communication occurred in the chat tool on the wiki page. Although for the purpose of informal discussion, UBC’s wiki discussion page did not seem to be informal enough to make some students, as expressed in forum, feel comfortable challenging or changing other’s work. Based on my past experience, I believe a chat room may have provided them with the social and informal space needed to comfortably discuss reasoning, meaning and possible changes.
Multimedia and Authoring Tools
Going into the multimedia assignment and tool kit, I probably had the most misconceptions and blind spots in this course. Although I had created and edited video before, I knew nothing about uploading and hosting. I quickly got a cold splash of water in the face when I attempted to upload a 3.4 GB video to the Moodle course site. I found out UBC’s Moodle server was not going to host such a large file. This forced me to look for other hosting options such as YouTube, Megaload, etc. Although YouTube stated that you could upload >2GB videos, I was unsuccessful in completing a transfer. I did, however, upload a 0.615 GB or 2.4 minute video (taking almost 6 hours to transfer). This brought my attention to the requirements of hosting large video files, a consideration that has led me to understand the importance of server and administrative resources in creating my course.
An additional leaning moment occurred when I handed in my digital story. The embedded file was apparently only visible in Internet Explorer’s browser. Having always used the same browser and very few personal digital devices, I was unaware that they often interpret HTLM code differently requiring verification of function or W3 compatibility. This led me to go back to the source and discover an advanced embedding system, one that was compatible with mobile devices (and hence many different browsers and systems). This learning experience made me realize that having students check their code in different browsers, devices and settings is important to ensure functionality and unimpeded assessment. (Sorry John!)
Reflection on your overall ETEC565 experience
The biggest part of my overall experience in ETEC 565 experience was the Moodle course synthesis. I chose Moodle to create my Lesson Study course and community because it offered most of the affordances I felt were needed to create a collaborative environment. While creating my Moodle course, I attempted to implement the philosophies from the course readings of Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS model and Chickering’s principles into its development. These readings led me to ask helpful questions like:
- What are my student’s demographics? What affordances could Moodle offer to these learners? As adult learners, my students need a way to meet online, without the time restrictions of face to face meetings, and work collaboratively at their convenience in asynchronous collaborative spaces.
- Would my students have the ability, hardware, and software to use Moodle and other technology related to the course? My students are teachers that have access to school and district resources. Although they may not be familiar with social networking or media editing software, this can be overcome with specialized course modules.
- Would the cost of implementing this technology make it unreasonable…considerations like time, resources, and administrative costs? This question, although very important to getting a technology project off the ground, was never at the forefront of my consideration prior to this course. This course dispelled the assumption that “time and money aren’t an issue”. Looking back, I believe that this consideration flew under my radar because I have never before used technology outside of the school’s available resources. In the case of implementing my Moodle course for the future, I will require the use of the district’s Moodle server, administrative services, and necessary hardware and software. I have also enlisted the services of my collegues to share in the development time.
- Does the technology create the framework for the type of learning and instruction needed? Does the technology promote interactivity and feedback, essential elements in active learning? In this case, Moodle does an excellent job of creating a collaborative environment where collaborators can meet in forums, wikis, workshops, chat and journals.
- Is their organizational structure one that can support the implementation of the technology and include knowledgeable creators and implementers, administrative services and support, necessary hardware, etc.? Through the process of creating this Moodle, I have developed a powerhouse of skills in effectively implementing a Moodle course making this technology a practical choice. In addition, our school district has a server devoted to Moodle courses and the administrative services to make this technology feasible.
- Does the technology provide a welcome relief from the traditional method of teaching? Yes, it allows collaborators to meet and review video at their convenience. It also allows them to interact without social distractions like age, status, physical appearance, etc. clouding their communication.
- Can the educational environment be quickly created and implemented using the technology? Moodle is sometimes awkward, especially compared to WebCT Vista, but the setup is intuitive and editing is user friendly making the creation and implementation relatively speedy. One thing that I have learned in this course, is nothing is quick and setting up technology takes time. In order to be successful, you need to give yourself more time than you think and spend the most time on planning the outcome to avoid wasting time redoing and revising.
One of the aspects of this course that provided some of the greatest learning was the summing up posts. Although I practice a similar technique in my F2F Lesson Study courses, it was interesting to be on the receiving end of the summarizing practice. I found this experience to be very reaffirming of the benefits to summarizing the key points and understandings that came up during a discussion and some of the connections that may not have been mentioned. I also enjoyed the observations about our growth, involvement in the process, and issues as they may have related to us as learners. Although, this was not necessarily an interactive aspect of the course like the friendly eyes and facilitating comments made during the discussions, it provided closure and reflection on our experiences.
Overall, I found the digital story the most rewarding assignment in this course. In retrospect, I would have added more personal images but time played a huge factor in the end product, as in most implementations of technology. I feel that using multimedia and creating a digital story is useful in explaining Lesson Study and demonstrating to my students the potential of digital stories. In future classes, I will be creating a review assignment that has students create their own school set of 30 second digital reviews for the Physics 11/12 learning outcomes. When choosing to implement any technology into my classes, at the forefront of all of my future decisions will be the question, “will my students find this valuable and educational?” Although, we can never be sure until we try, Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS categories give teachers hard questions to ask about student demographics and learning styles and the types of learning the teacher hopes to achieve before implementing technology. In this case, I already know that students will be receptive to this assignment, as they have found short video clips on review topics educationally valuable in the past.
Describe next steps for you, in terms of your practice in educational technology, which could include what technologies you hope to explore moving forward, or how you plan on engaging as a lifelong learner in terms of educational technology?
As I move forward in my practice in educational technology, I intend to continue developing an online platform to facilitate Lesson Study. Although Moodle offers an effective platform, many of the affordances provided by Moodle and other LMS platforms, such as a grade book and security, are unnecessary for this course as it is an open and voluntary community of learners. This has led me to believe that I may be able to offer the course largely through web 2.0 tools while hosting the Lesson Study videos on the school server. My intentions are to continue to explore options and their individual benefits and costs while continuing to create and implement an online course structure. Some of the technologies that will be important in implementing this plan are video creation, editing and hosting, asynchronous social tools, weblogs, wikis and authoring tools.
As a lifelong learner, my journey will continue past this course and the MET program as I explore new technologies and their affordances, both in the classroom and online. Throughout my on-going exploration into Lesson Study, I plan to encourage my fellow collaborators to plan, implement and study the use of different technologies in the classroom. Using this authentic form of real-life analysis of learning, together my collaborators and I will discover new ways to improve learning through technology.
References:
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Chickering, A.W. and Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever, American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2). Retrieved July 30, 2011 from http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples.htm.
Von Glasersfeld, E. (1989). Cognition, construction of knowledge, and teaching. Synthese, 80, 121-140. Retrieved July 30, 1011 from http://www.vonglasersfeld.com/118.