Assignement #2 – Introduction module – My grade 7 English course.

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For the purpose of ETEC565A I designed an Introductory module for a fully online grade 7 English class. I would like to begin my reflexion by talking a little about the context in order to explain certain decisions that I made regarding this course.

CONTEXT

This grade 7 English course will be offered throughout my school board which is a French Catholic school board located in northern Ontario. For most of the students in our schools, English is a second language, French being the maternal language for most. Most of the schools are small and have multiple grade classrooms. Therefore, the board could benefit from offering certain elementary curriculum courses online to students, allowing them to work with peers in the same grade level.

I decided to use Blackboard connect as the course LMS because it is most similar to the current platform that is used for elearning in Ontario K-12 schools (D2L).

COURSE DESIGN

I used a backward design approach (Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J, 1998, 2011) to plan and organize the course, starting with identifying learning outcomes (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2008) based on the Ontario grade 7 language curriculum (2006). I then envisioned what assessment strategies would help me (the teacher) better assess student learning in order to provide valuable descriptive feedback. Since it is an online course, technology had to be an important part of the assessment strategies (ISTE, 2008). Many factors had to be taken into account when choosing which tools to use for assessment. I wanted to integrate technology seamlessly into the learning process in an authentic way to increase student engagement (Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M., 2010), therefore, my choice of tools were the discussion forum and Blog available in Connect. Since it is a language course, students will be doing reading and writing and I wanted them to be able to do it in an authentic collaborative context. According to Bates’ SECTIONS model (2014), it is also important to consider the students, ease of use, organizational issues and security & privacy. With that in mind, I chose the Blog tool from Connect, rather than an external blog, for security purposes (Ontario ministry of education, 2006). Since grade 7 students in our board are not that familiar with technology collaborative tools, it will be easier for them (ease of use) to have all their tools in one place, Connect. Finally, our board has one person (a teacher) who is responsible for LMS administration and support for teachers and students. Therefore, students will have greater technical support with course tools. Other tools are also available to students in our board: Office 365, Google apps for education and Kurzweil. Students will have access to these tools and software as well as technical support.

 

COMMUNICATION

Students registered in this course are French speaking, English is their second language. Therefore, I think it is important to ensure that communications means are appropriate for the demographic. I chose to post two introductory videos (one is bilingual, one is in English), introducing myself (the teacher) and presenting an overview of the course in order to insure comprehension (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2005, 2007). Students can also use Kurzweil for reading and translation if need be.

The LMS email, Skype (available in the board), discussion forum and blog will be the tools used by students to collaborate and communicate with one another and with their teacher.

I will use asynchronous audio and video descriptive feedback to communicate with students as it can improve social and cognitive student engagement (Nadeau, 2012). Feedback for formative and summative tasks will provide students with precise information on their strengths, what they need to improve and their next steps.

 

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a Digital Age (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework). Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage

Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the Theory of Formative Assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability 21(1), 5-31. doi:10.1007/s11092-008-9068-5

Joint Advisory Committee, Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation, University of Alberta. (1993). Principles for fair student assessment practices for education in Canada. Edmonton.

Harlen, W. (2006). On the relationship between assessment for formative and summative purposes. In J. Gardner, ed., Assessment and learning. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers

Maloy, R. W. (2011). Transforming learning with new technologies. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.

Marchand, L., & Loisier, J. (2004). Pratiques d’apprentissage en ligne. Montréal (Canada): Chenelière Education.

Nadeau, J. (2012). Expérimentation de la rétroaction audiovisuelle asynchrone dans un cours à distance d’information dans la perspective de la théorie de la communauté d’apprentissage (Community of inquiry) (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://biblio.teluq.ca/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ISkXNYulN2xtgpPTmjiMAw%3D%3D&tabid=39743&language=fr-CA

Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2005). Many roots, many voices: Supporting English language learners in every classroom. Toronto.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2006). E-learning Ontario: Policy document. Retrieved from www.edu.gov.on.ca/elearning/pdf/Policy_document.pdf.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2007). English language learners / ESL and ELD programs and services: Policies and procedures for Ontario elementary and secondary schools, Kindergarten to Grade 12. Toronto.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2008). Growing success: Assessment, evaluation and reporting: Improving student learning. Toronto.

Prensky,  M. (2010). Teaching digital natives : Partnering for real learning. Thousand Oaks, USA: Corwin.

Piskurich, G. M. (2006). Rapid instructional design: Learning ID fast and right. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Sutton, R. (1991). Assessment: A framework for teachers. London: Routledge.

Volante, Louis. (2006). Reducing bias in classroom assessment and evaluation. Orbit, 36 (2), 34–36.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice-Hall.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2011). Understanding by design guide to creating high quality units. Alexandria, VA: Association for supervision and curriculum development.

Reflexion on Group Assignement #1

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Our group’s evaluation rubric can be consulted here.

Group work

Carrying out this first assignment allowed me to pose a critical judgment on my school board’s LMS, or which I am the administrator.  All team members collaborated well in order to complete this task.  At first, we had an asynchronous brainstorming session in our group’s discussion Forum section of Connect.  It was a challenging task for us because of the different time zones.  We were never able to have a synchronous work session.  I was impressed at how, even though we were working asynchronously, all team members contributed ideas for our evaluation rubric.  After doing some research to see what already existed, we opted for an evaluation rubric similar to the ones teachers co-construct with students to better guide them in assignments and evaluation.

Our Rubric

We opted to construct our rubric around the criteria from SECTIONS (Bates, 2014).  We felt like Bates addressed most of the imports points that needed to be considered to thoroughly evaluate which  LMS would best suit Athabaska University’s needs.  We then took selected components from SECTIONS that applied to our scenario.  We included a 4 points scale to allow the ad hoc committee evaluation the different LMS to pin point how effectively it met each criterion (4= exceeds expectations, 1= does not meet expectations).   When selecting evaluation criteria for our rubric, we considered the upcoming expansion of Athabasca University’s programs to the South Asian Market. The main concern was accessibility, which is addressed with the Student component of the SECTIONS model.

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a Digital Age/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework). Retrieved January 29, 2016 from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage

My planned flightpath for the course

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A little bit about me and my experience

I am from a very small, mostly francophone, city in north-eastern Ontario.  I was born and raised here.  After completing my Bachelor’s degree in history and bachelor’s degree in Education, I started working as a French and history teacher for the French Catholic school board.  Technology has always played a role in my classroom even if this was not the case for most teachers in my school.  I saw myself in the description of the “Lone Ranger” described in Nel, Dreyer and Carstens’ article, making choices of technology and media based solely on my experience and intuitions.  Five years later, I was hired by CFORP (an enterprise dedicated to developing French resources for teachers in Ontario and across Canada) as an online course designer and developer and later, a project manager.  I was very knowledgeable when it came down to teaching strategies and curriculum but LMS was a new tool to learn.  Over the next 5 years I worked on designing and developing (but not implementing) over 20 online courses for the Ontario ministry of education.  Although I had to comprehend the inner workings of an LMS (for design and development purposes), I never had to actually use the LMS since programmers would import the developed content in the LMS for us.  For the past 2 years I’ve been working as a teacher consultant and e-learning contact in my original school board. I play three different roles: I model how to effectively integrate technology in the classroom for K to 12 teachers, I manage our school board’s LMS (D2L/Brightspace) which is provided by the ministry of education and I’m part of the board committee dedicated to renewing our vision and creating a long-term plan that takes into account the changes in education brought by the digital era ( Prensky, 2010).

My Goals for This Course (or perhaps MET)

I will start this section by saying that I love my job because it is a blend of all the things that I like about education: collaboration, learning, teaching and technology.  When I applied to the MET program, it was because I wanted to gain more knowledge and competencies that would make me better at my job.  I can say that which each course that I take, I can see that I am improving at what I do, I am becoming a better and more knowledgeable leader in my field.

By the end of this course, I would like to present my board with some guidelines and criteria that can help them make more educated choices when it comes to spending large amounts of money of technology for our schools.  At present, technology and media are being approved solely by the IT department who don’t have any guidelines to base their decision on (they basically say yes or no to a purchase based on gut feeling or solely on the technical aspects, pedagogy is never part of the equation).

I also want to know more about different LMS and how they compare with one another.  I know D2L/Brightspace from top to bottom but am not familiar (except from a student standpoint) with other LMS like Moodle and Connect.  A question I often get from teachers is “Why should I use our school board’s LMS instead of [fill with the name of some other technology or LMS name]?” I try to answer the best I can but I am hoping this course can help me better articulate the pros and cons of using and LMS to enhance student learning in K to 12 classrooms.

Social media is a huge debate amongst K to 12 educators.  Some say to stay as far away from it as possible as others think that it is an absolute necessity.  I am somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.  In my opinion, social media is a very important tool that the teacher should comprehend and possibly use as one of many teaching strategies.  Social media can allow educators and students to do things that would be otherwise impossible like following an author on Twitter and ask him questions about his novel (and get a response!), collaborating with students from across the province to create an original song (iStudio project in Ontario) and so much more.  I realize that there must be some concerns when it comes to social media, the main concern being security and privacy (Bates, 2014). But what if we educate our students about digital citizenship?  Does this criterion become less of a concern?

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Chickering, A.W., & Ehrmann, S.C., (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 1-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/aticles/sevenprinciples.htm

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers

Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346

Prensky,  M. (2010). Teaching digital natives : Partnering for real learning. Thousand Oaks, USA: Corwin.