Reflections & Learning in ETEC565A

This is the time of year when we are winding down the school year and wrapping up the work that has been ongoing for many months. We packed up the netbooks in our blended e-learning project, picked up the Kindles from our adolescent boys reading project, rounded up the document cameras and flip cameras for our assessment For learning inquiry project – all to be stored safely here at our central office, ready for re-deployment to the classrooms next year. So many reports to complete, so many budgets to wrap up. And yet, my new Superintendent (reassigned just last week to my secondary school department) now needs me to prepare all of the plans for next year. Can I say I am just too darned tired to think that far ahead? I hope he understands…after all, I have a Moodle site to build – One that I am SURE will be the end of me.

When I talk to my IT department about my struggles with html, they look at me in bewilderment – WHY would I ever have to deal with html in a WYSIWYG world? So they are NO help! I keep telling myself, that if you really want to learn how to drive, you need to know how engines work, and how to change a tire – the real basics of the car…so that is how I am trying to justify my frustration with code! I tell myself it will make me a better person right? Please tell me I am right!

Viewing the Vista platform as a course creator was very interesting..Since I am already used to the “look and feel” of a commercial product (D2L in my case) I felt much more at home on the Vista site than I do with Moodle. Like Sian, I find the Vista site very intuitive, while the Moodle site baffles me. It is so easy to switch between student and teacher in Vista, and yes, I could just keep switching the edit mode back and forth in Moodle, but it seems less friendly to me – I know that you get what you pay for, but the Moodle site has the feel of the early days of shareware – and I would have thought that being around for so many years, there would have been a more professional look to it. I know I am sticking my neck out here, in a sea of Moodle fans in my course, but that’s where I am right now. Maybe after I conquer this monster, I will feel differently….

In fact, I am getting more stressed as the days go by, especially as I see some of the products of my colleagues as they seem to whiz through their modules. I found the Wimba session very very helpful – the Moodle tutorials – not so much. So perhaps now that I have installed our licenced Dreamweaver on my computer, and I try to refresh my memory on how to use it, I will feel better. My panic time will come when I have to upload the zipped files into Moodle…a step that I needed a bit more information from the Wimba session, but since I could only view the archive, I will need to investigate this step much more from other sources.

Thanks to moonflowerdragon’s blog for helping me do the html code for hanging indents!

Saved my hide.

I have to admit that this assignment has been one of the more challenging tasks that I have had to complete, yet it was only 1000 words!  I have written much longer pieces for other courses, but it was the content of this one that had me sweating.  I found that I had to put myself in the mindset of actually facing my Learning Services team – my Director, the 2 Superintendents and managers of finance and ICT in order to develop the language we use when we present proposals – and I have done a few in my years as a central office adminstrator for secondary curriculum programming. Each time I have pitched an idea to the group, I faced the toughest scrutiny in the area of financing my ideas. I decided to create this proposal as though it was an authentic task – I told myself that I really am proposing this at our next meeting (maybe I should?) and so I used current practices in our board so that it could be as authentic as possible for me. 

The Learning Services team is not as tech-savvy as I would hope (with the exception of the ICT manager) and so getting into the tech-vocabulary usually results in glossy-eyed boredom on some of their faces.  So I stuck with the pedagogical focus – that’s where I can hold their attention.  I’m not criticizing them for having a different perspective than me – in fact, I am told that it is why I am part of the team – to help move them forward in their thinking about 21st century teaching and learning.  I really hope that I can pitch this for real some day!

The more I ponder what my Moodle production will contain, the more I am determined to see how I can make it applicable to the adult learner – specifically the teachers (and why not administrators too?) in our system.  We need to reformulate how we do PD for our teachers, as well all know that the “sit and git” model doesn’t work with adults any more than it works with our students.  Without a meaningful way of incorporating the learning into an authentic experience, and following up with sharing how it’s all working with others, we are spending a lot of money what I believe is little impact.

I am hoping I can create a structure for teachers to participate in a self-paced, independent learning environment but at the same time incorporate some accountability and requirement for sharing the learning with others…Am I asking too much?

I found an interesting resource, on Google of course, about Adult Learning Theory (who knew it would be different from our students?)  The author of the site proposes that there are 4 stages of Adult Learning:

1. Unconscious Incompetence (you don’t know that you don’t know something), to

2. Conscious Incompetence (you are now aware that you are incompetent at something), to

3. Conscious Competence (you develop a skill in that area but have to think about it),to the finalstage

4.Unconscious Competence (you are good at it and it now comes naturally).

Now I would be the last person to suggest incompetence in our teachers (here comes the union grievance if I did!).  They really are all well-trained, hard working, well-intentioned people that I am proud to work with…but we all have new things to learn and we all need to do some self-reflection as to where we are.  So often I see surveys from teachers who insist they do this or that strategy in their classrooms, but when I visit their rooms I can see that they don’t always grasp the concept – hence, they might not know what they don’t know…I hesitate to call that incompetence, but perhaps I could call it ” learning-in-progress”.

So my Moodle may be something I can use to provide a source of learning – for now, on a single topic for the purpose of this assignment, but then moving forward to a broader framework for adult learning..moving us all to the final stage of ‘unconscious competence” ( another nasty term!)

This rambling is a result of my thoughts on the upcoming proposal that I need to formulate…the ruminations continue.

When I think of all the online courses I have taken in my lifetime, it is hard to believe that I have not had to create a course myself that was fully online.  My experiences have been as a student on the learning end of WebCT Vista, or Desire2Learn, or Blackboard, but never an Open Source platform like Moodle.  But here I am now working within a new format – Moodle – for the first time.  It has been a few years now since I have been in a classroom, but how I wish I had been exposed to the ability to create an online course for my students!   So now I get to create my very own course, but I am going to consider who my “students” are – they are my colleagues – my fellow administrators who could certainly benefit from some online learning, or should it be  the teachers that I have been conducting PD sessions for over the past few years?  Budget cuts have forced us to rethink how we conduct professional development sessions – and so instead of face-to-face sessions, perhaps a Moodle format would work. Imagine, designing a course that would bring administrators up to speed in say, Web 2.0 tools, and other great learning technologies. It’s worth a try.

But first, I need to learn more about Moodle – from the Toolkit, the online tutorials I have found, and from my classmates in this course.  Looking forward to playing in my new sandbox!