I want to start off by explaining that, although the course module instructions suggested we design one or two weeks of our course, I ended up doing the first three weeks of Module 1. Keeping in mind that my course is for grade 6 students, I wanted to keep the information for each lesson to a manageable level. In addition, this course has to fit within the time frame that is allocated at school, so three periods of fifty minutes per week. Therefore, due to the grade level and time restrictions, I felt as though building the first three weeks of the course would better meet the criteria of the assignment and would hopefully allow me to put in the equivalent work to those that were designing for high school or post-secondary.
Lesson structure
This was the first time I designed an online/blended course and it was the first time I used Moodle, so I definitely had some challenges. One of the biggest issues I struggled with as I was setting up the content for the weekly sections was how to make it comprehensive enough that it included a wide range of activities, while still remaining user-friendly and intuitive enough for an eleven- or twelve-year-old to use. I went back and forth about using separate lesson sections for each of the three lessons in the week, but I felt that would overwhelm the students visually. Therefore, I grouped them into one lesson block, with a splash page/homepage for each, which includes navigational images/titles linking to the different elements for that week. Since you cannot embed the activities in Moodle within the lessons (which is very frustrating!), this was a way for me to have everything in one place for the students to access it. Every week, they can be confident that when they click on “Lessons for Week #”, all the components, including surveys, quizzes, questionnaires and web quests, can be accessed from there, rather than jumping to a number of different places from the Moodle homepage.
Pedagogical and design choices facilitating student accessibility
In planning this course, I wanted to make sure that it was realistic and applicable for my students, not something I was just doing for the sake of the assignment. The students in my school have low reading levels and quite a few learning difficulties. The levels in the class range from first to sixth grade, so there is a huge spread within the group. Most of the classes in the school are like this. With this in mind, it was imperative to me that the course be accessible to a wide range of learners. One of Chickering and Ehrmann’s (1987) seven principles is that “good practice respects diverse talents and ways of learning”. In his SECTIONS model, Bates (2014) echoes this idea, stating that “it is important to offer a range of options for student learning within the same course. […] This content should be available in a variety of media such as text, diagrams, and video” (p. 268). With this in mind, I did not want the content of the lessons to simply be text. I also embedded YouTube videos, infographics and images. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a wide range of activities, including chats, class and group discussions through written or recorded responses, Padlet discussion boards, web quests, a questionnaire and a variety of multiple choice and short answer questions. The majority of students will be able to complete these materials independently. Others can still be successful with the assistance of text-to-speech software, myself, classmates or teaching assistants.
I based the content of this course on a grade 6 social studies textbook: Canadian Communities, Past and Present (Cairo & Soncin, 2015). While I like this textbook because it covers a wide variety of topics connected to a central issue… I also dislike this textbook because it covers so many topics! In general, the students that would take this course have very little prior knowledge about historical events, people and places. Anderson explains that, in an online learning context, “a teacher [must make] efforts to gain an understanding of students’ prerequisite knowledge, including any misconceptions that the learner starts with in their construction of new knowledge” (p. 47). Therefore, I decided to use the lesson pages as a way to fill in those gaps and provide students with the information they would need before reading the textbook and moving on to completing the activities. For example, whereas the textbook itself only provides one paragraph of information about the American Revolution, the students can build up their understanding of the event by reading the text and graphics, observing the images and watching the videos provided in the Moodle lesson. This way, they are better prepared to deconstruct the information in the textbook.
Web quests
When I was designing my introduction module, I had originally said that I was going to provide two options for each web quest in order to give students more choice and agency. However, as I started creating them, I realized that would not be possible. I did not want to simply attach a word document for students to fill in, so I created the web quests using the Quiz tool on Moodle. The process of finding an appropriate, student-friendly website and coming up with the questions was quite time consuming. My hope is that the structure of the web quests will ignite the student’s curiosity and will lead them to apply these strategies to other topics. Their “cognitive curiosity [will also be] aroused when learners discover that their knowledge is incomplete or inconsistent, and they [will] have the desire to explore and attain new information and competence” (Ciampa, 2013, p. 84). The web quests will demonstrate that the information presented in the textbook is only a snapshot of the whole story and they can use the computers or iPads to seek out more details.
In the feedback Natasha provided, she suggested that I could embed videos and images within the questions of the quiz that I created. I ended up using this idea and did so a few times in each of the web quests. I also linked the images and videos to their original source. This way, students can explore not only the referenced site for the web quest itself, but also the websites used for the multimedia questions. Although they were the most time-consuming part of the module that I designed, I like the way each web quest turned out. They provide students with a chance to discover a topic that is only briefly touched upon in the textbook.
Digital Story
The digital story gave me the opportunity to create my own video to expand the students’ knowledge about a topic of my choice. Week 3 of the course focuses heavily on the causes and the short and long-term consequences of Irish immigration to Canada. It is quite a sad issue to teach students because of the number of deaths in Ireland, on the coffin ships and upon arrival in Canada. Therefore, I wanted to highlight to students how people still remember these events and decided to focus on the memorials in Dublin and Toronto dedicated to the Irish Potato Famine. The information from the video will help students prepare their posts for the Padlet discussion about the causes and consequences of Irish immigration, as well as their end-of-module project.
From a pedagogical standpoint, a digital story about memorials can open up valuable ethical discussions about a variety of issues within social studies courses. Why do we memorialize certain events and not others? Who makes those decisions? Who pays for them? Why are memorials so important to generations far removed from the actual events? Should memorials representing controversial people be taken down? Memorials are built all over the world for a number of reasons. These important questions can be worked into almost any social studies course and can be connected to events happening in the world today, such as the removal of Confederate statues and monuments in recent years in the United States.
With regards to technology selection, I wanted to use a program that could seamlessly display and highlight real pictures of the memorials, while also allowing me to narrate and insert text. While I have used VideoScribe and PowToon in the past, I don’t like the way photographs look in those programs, so I decided to use Adobe Spark. It was also important for me to model a program that students could use to create their own digital stories. Exploring scenarios for the future of education, Alexander (2014) explains that “digital stories appear throughout public and private spaces, from public transportation to bedrooms, from airport departure lounges to bathrooms” (p. 96). Students are already producers of multimedia in their daily lives and this trend will follow them into high school. In my course, creating a digital story would be part of the end-of-module project, so the video I made is an exemplar that students could refer to.
At this point in time, I am finding it difficult to stop adding or making changes and modifications to my course. This is something that I could use in my classroom tomorrow, so I just want to keep working on making it great. Overall, I am really proud of what I created and I am looking forward to the feedback I receive.
References
Alexander, B. (2014). Higher education in 2024: Glimpsing the future. EDUCAUSE Review, 49(5), 91.
Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Cairo, M & Soncin, L. (2015). Nelson Social Studies 6 Canadian Communities, Past & Present Student Book.
Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S., C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm
Ciampa, K. (2014). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82-96.