Author Archives: jout

Google Classroom Walkthrough

For my final Synthesis I decided to do a walkthrough of the Google Classroom LMS.

It was nice way to share some of the insights that I had accumulated after working in the program for quite a while this term.  Hopefully this walkthrough will help others in the future with setting up their classrooms.

I tried to limit the length and stick to what I thought were the essentials of setting up a Google classroom on your own. I feel like the walkthrough gives enough information, but still allows students to navigate and further customize their class.

When viewing, I recommend setting your playback resolution at HD 1080P in YouTube so it isn’t blurry at all.  It seemed to get a bit blurry at 720P for some reason.  I’m not sure if it was the settings in Camtasia or just that it rendered in a lower quality.

Jamie

Landscape Photography 101 and Google Classroom

My first reaction after creating this online course is to give high praise and accolades to all of the teachers in the MET program that have created their online courses.  The amount of hours that I put in to create a shortened 1 module course was already quite extensive, so my hat is off to those that curate such in depth courses.  I’m also having only one person critique my course and that is nerve-racking enough, but having multiple students over the years going over your course with a fine toothed comb would be a bit intimidating as well. 

My course was designed to help beginner photographers learn the basics of landscape photography, starting with learning about their cameras.  I provided weekly field assignments that they were to complete in order to get as much hands on experience as possible.  I know when I was learning photography I found that practicing any new learning technique was vital to making it stick.  Therefore my goal was to give short snippets of information and then have the students head outside to practice it (Chickering, 1996).

I also wanted to help build the classroom community environment and allow students to provide feedback to each other their work, so in their second field assignment on creating a photo story, I had them create a Google Slide presentation and had them turn on commenting on their presentation.   I think that this will help provide a more collaborative feel to the course.  It would also offer a safe place to discuss their work and get prompt feedback on areas to improve (Chickering, 1996).  I found that the options within Google Classroom were limiting in that regard so I’m happy with Google Slides as an option.

For the digital story, I used Final Cut Pro to create the video. It’s is a more powerful version of iMovie essentially with a lot more options. As I was fairly new to the program, I didn’t really use much in the way of fancy titles or transitions,  but I was happy with how visually appealing it was especially since my course is so heavily focused on improving photography.

Overall the process was great. It took me a while to think up a topic though and was happy I landed on “Telling a Story Through Your Photos.” If I was to do this again, I may try to add more titles or ways of making the video a bit more engaging. Overall though, I was pleased with the production and the programs that I used will be useful for me going forward as well.

As far as the LMS, Google Classroom has a lot of useful tools and is quite streamlined.  I can totally see why teachers use it on a regular basis for their classes.  My course on the other hand, would be more suited for Blackboard or Canvas because they both have more functionality when it comes to group discussions and posting individual work to separate forums. I found it difficult, without having to go outside of the Google Classroom LMS, to find ways for students to interact with others and share their photographs.  Since my course is all about photography and very image based, it would have been much more valuable to have tools embedded into the LMS rather than students having to go elsewhere. Based on Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS model, I think that Google Classrooms is a very solid LMS.  Where it lacks the most was in the interactions section.  There is the option of commenting on posts, but the posts can easily get lost in the Stream, so finding alternatives would most likely be necessary.  I would also argue that the organization options are quite limiting.  When you make a new post it automatically goes to the top of the Stream feed. So if you were to make an announcement and 10 other students made a submission to the feed, your announcement might be missed.  There are some work arounds, like making it a Topic on the left of the page, but that too could get cluttered if you had to do that for each thing you posted.

I wouldn’t hesitate to use Google Classroom in the future for an elementary or high school classroom, but if I had a chance to choose a different LMS for my course, I probably would.  Overall this was a great learning experience and I feel a lot more capable of creating a course in the future that could be put to use.

Thanks for viewing.

Jamie

 

References

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/

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

Jamie’s Reflection – Intro Module

This was the first time that I have designed a course using an LMS and I really enjoyed the process overall.  I am currently a teacher on call and don’t have a class to design a course for, so I decided to create a course for those interested in learning the fine art of landscape photography.   

As a professional landscape photographer myself, I get asked all the time how to make a career out of photography and how to take better photos.  I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to take this course at first, but I decided that the most useful would be to make it a beginners course and scaffold the learning so each module would build on the previous.  The goal is to teach one fundamental skill and then have students go out and practice that in a landscape setting and come back to share their work each week. 

I designed the course using Google Classroom not really knowing anything about it.  In hindsight, it probably was not the best LMS for the job because it did have a number of limitations. One of the biggest limitations was the lack of a built in central discussion board. I was hoping to use something that everyone could post their work to on a weekly basis, similar to a discussion thread in Blackboard and then have people comment on it.  The best that I could work out was a way for students to create their own post on the “Stream.”  This “Stream”, which is similar to a Facebook feed, would likely become quite cluttered as more and more posts were added to it.

For the Introduction/Ice Breaker I wanted everyone to share a photo of themselves and tell me a little bit about their background, but I also wanted each person to share their favourite landscape photo that they’ve ever taken. The reason for this was that first off, I wanted to see what they thought constituted a good landscape photo and second, for it to act as a starting point to future improvement. I specifically pointed out that I didn’t care if it was taken on an iPhone or wasn’t perfect, that I wanted to hear more about the story behind the photo and why it was so special. I love hearing the stories behind a photo, even if it isn’t the most technically perfect photo.  There is a real beauty in the emotions and feelings that a photo can retrieve for people.

For the assessment piece I was curious to try Google Forms to create a quiz since it was easily integrated with Google Classroom.  Although the quiz was a fairly basic way of assessing understanding, it was a valuable tool to test out to see its limitations.  It worked fine to create a simplistic quiz, but to really get an understanding of students’ progress and to give some type of feedback along the way, I decided to have them submit a photo each week to be assessed. This is in line with research that claims that frequent assignments and detailed (written) feedback are central to student learning (Gibbs & Simpson 2005).

I also had them create a digital portfolio of their work as a final project.  I thought that this would not only help them to see their progression over time, but that they would have something they could physically use to pitch to brands or clients in the future to get potential jobs. As Bates points out as well, the use of portfolios encourages self assessment and reflection as well as being useful for formal assessment purposes (Bates, 2014). I know that for me, tests don’t really help me retain the information. I prefer hands on assignments. This is backed by Gibbs and Simpson who found that a combination of coursework of varying types and examinations produced better average mark rates than did examinations alone. (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005)

Overall, I was very pleased with the results of my LMS. I’m not sure that I would use it at this point for a course, but I could definitely see me taking pieces of it and potentially creating something like it on a different LMS. 

Thanks for reading and viewing.

Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

LMS Rubric Reflection

One of the benefits of this assignment for me personally was the ability to really dive into what a learning management system is and how to go about choosing the right one for a particular task. When I first came into this course I had no idea what LMS even stood for. I was surprised to know that I had been using a variety of them for years, but hadn’t really considered why I had used them.  Having taken a much closer look at the work by researchers like Bates and Chickering and Ehrmann, I have a much better foundation that I can look to when choosing an LMS in the future for myself or my students. With so many options now available, having sound research or a guideline like SECTIONS is so beneficial when choosing an LMS.  Pairing that with a well structured rubric and you’re really setting yourself up for success.  Of course no LMS is perfect and you most likely will encounter issues, but doing the upfront work I feel will pay off. I’m hoping this will help guide my thinking in the future of this course as we work on our future assignments.

I found the group work aspect informative when we had the chance to meet, but I unfortunately missed one of the early meetings and felt a bit lost.  The group was very accommodating and had left a part of the assignment that I could complete once I was able to touch base with them all. They all worked quickly and effectively to finish the assignment and it was nice to have a conversation about the course as well as hear more about their backgrounds. Way to go team!

Jamie

Jamie’s Flight Path

The name of this assignment is quite relevant to me as I sit waiting for my return flight back from a vacation in Hawaii for the past two weeks.  Yesterday we were greeted in the morning to an alarm sounding and a text message that read:

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Continue reading →