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Galina’s Assignment 5: Final Synthesis

Précis of Flight Path

I have revisited my Flight path while working on this final course reflection. I feel I have achieved most of my goals, which included:

  1. Enhance my skills in evaluating, selecting and using various learning technologies, such as LMSs, online communication and collaboration tools, multimedia and social media.
  2. Explore pedagogical affordances of various social software and web 2.0 tools.
  3. Enhance my understanding of formative and summative assessment, particularly when delivered online.
  4. Create a sophisticated prototype LMS course site.
  5. Reflect on how I can enhance my practice by using my experience and learning from the course.
  6. Add ETEC565A artifacts to my existing MET ePortfolio that I created during ETEC590 Graduating Project course.

I am still thinking what to add to my ePortfolio (goal #6) as the access to my course in Canvas will be lost after ETEC565A finishes. I will probably add my digital story with the reflection on my experience creating it as well as the LMS rubric we created with my peers.

Overall Experience

I had a great experience working on various assignments, collaborating with peers and experimenting with different tools in this course.

What I loved most about this course is the great course structure/design; practical approach; applicable assignments; easy and timely communication with instructor; detailed, constructive video feedback on assignments, the opportunity to experiment with various tools and some elements of surprise (ex. “This week we will conduct our discussions in Mattermost…”); and amazing help I received from reading questions and answers in the general discussion forum.

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Assignment 4 Reflection – Alexis Handford (& Joyce Kim)

Assignment 4 Reflection

To best recognize our extensive work together throughout this project, we wrote a collaborative reflection. When we calculated our working hours together, we realized that we have spent up to four synchronous meeting hours per week to discuss, design, and edit all of the different aspects of Assignments 3 and 4. We will include an individual reflection portion at the end of each of our posts in addition to our collaborative reflection.

Our Course and working in Moodle

When we first met to discuss creating our course module, we knew we wanted to explore an LMS tool and content that would both utilize and challenge our complementary skill sets (Alexis’ experience as an instructional designer and Joyce’s teaching experience). Bates notes to adhere to best practices for online learning design teachers must “[work] closely with instructional designers and media professionals whenever possible” and that “teachers working with instructional designers will need to decide which media they intend to use on pedagogical as well as operational grounds” (Bates, 2015). Implementation of the SECTIONS model means collaboration between multiple stakeholders. We also wanted to work with an LMS with which neither of us had worked extensively. This left us with the two choices of Moodle or Google Classroom as we had interacted as students or administrators for the other LMS options. Our next step was to refer to each of our LMS Evaluation rubrics that we had created in Assignment 2 to assess Moodle and Google Classroom. Though neither LMS platform met all our expectations, we felt that Moodle best fulfilled our criteria for functionality. When referencing the LMS Evaluation Rubric (Cruz et al., 2018), Moodle met or exceeded expectations in the following areas:

  • Fully supports user-intuitive actions, such as WYSIWYG drag-and-drop functionality, instant upload and auto-save, history tracking.
  • Provides a comprehensive range of assessment and evaluation tools: standardized and non-standardized testing methods, assignments, and activities.
  • Allows for a complete range of both synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication.
  • Fully supports instructor-student, student-student, and third-party interaction..
  • Allows for user-unique curation of course content including the integration of external learning tools.

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Assignment 4 Reflection

Initially, I didn’t believe developing the content for my module would be very difficult as I chose a topic that I already have some content for and it is a unit I feel is engaging for my students. However, when developing an online course, there are other considerations that need to be acknowledged and as a result, I found it more challenging than expected. In Ciampa (2014), it states that “motivation is a necessary precondition for student involvement in any type of learning activity” (p. 82) and I imagine this to be even more true for elementary students participating in an online classroom. Below are some of the challenges and solutions that I experienced.

Ongoing assessment is very important with elementary school students who require guidance and practice (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005, p. 9) so it was necessary for me to use tools that would allow me to provide online support. Since Google classroom is integrated with the GSuite of products, I created a Google document for each one of my activities. This would allow me to put feedback directly into the students’ documents hopefully alleviating anxiety they may have about their work. Continue reading →

Mimi’s Assignment 3 reflection

While I am familiar with the google applications for education, this is the first time that I have designed a specific unit of inquiry using a blended approach of in-class activities and assessments and a google classroom as an LMS. I decided to base my google classroom upon the BC grade 7 science curriculum which examines the history of life on Earth, evolution and genetics. Teaching in my IB PYP school, the expectation is that inquiry based learning is teacher guided, but student driven and collaborative as much as possible. My main concern was how I would be able to be true to the guided inquiry approach and utilize the google classrooom as an LMS.

 

I felt that by using Bates and Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS framework for making informed technological choices seemed straightforward when using the google classroom as an LMS. That is until I reviewed the Interaction section which addressed student to student interactions and to a certain extent student to teacher interactions as well. How was I going to be able to create activities that met the interaction requirements in a google classroom situation? The google slides assignment was created to give students a glimpse into my perspective as an instructor as well as the perspectives of their classmates. This activity was limited in nature, but the inclusion of peer to peer feedback was added in order to create a brief student to student interaction with an individual reflective component. Looking back, I see the need to investigate more conducive forms of interactive activities to create true peer to peer interaction within the introductory section.

 

Teaching grade 6 students in an inquiry environment it is vital for me to assess prior knowledge of the content before launching the unit of inquiry. The selection of the Padlet for the purpose allowed me to see their knowledge but more importantly any pre-existing ideas that might not be correct. Additionally, this allowed for other students to examine the knowledge base of their peers and to examine areas of interest that we might investigate moving forward. The focus assessment activity, the evolution quiz, was based upon Bate’s criteria for meaningful assessment, yet fell short in its ability to improve of extend student’s learning as the focus was designed to only test objective knowledge of facts and the short term questions were subjective. My future assessment activities will be formative and ongoing in order to follow Gibson’s understanding that “students tend to gain higher marks from coursework assignments than they do from examinations.” (Gibson, 2014) Additionally, the activities and assessments need to be, as Gibson stated, “group projects that can engage students in much discussion and confront individuals with learning alternative views and different standards of work.” (Gibson, 2014)

 

This assignment really brought to the forefront my understanding of the importance of designing meaningful assessment that could then be used to work backwards to create activities and assignments with will work towards building learning. Given the limited nature of using google classrooms as an LMS for this unit of inquiry, I can see that I will be challenged, to say the least, in my ability to meet the criteria of the frameworks outlined in the articles by Bates (2014) and Gibsons & Simpson (2005)