Reflections & Learning in ETEC565A

Just thought I’d do what I keep saying I am going to do, and that is keep blogging after the course is over – I see that I have 3 blogs now in the UBC server, but it is time I take the water wings off and swim on my own in the blogosphere.

My site is definitely under construction, but I have learned so much in this course that I want a place to put everything and share with others outside of UBC protective walls. I have used Edublogs before, but once the ads started appearing across my posts I walked away from it for good. And honestly, my posts were pretty lame. Now I am using WordPress – wish me luck out there!
My new blog

There are times when you have to say, “Enough!”  I could spend countless hours on this assignment, but after all, it is a beautiful day outside, it is Canada Day, and the summer holiday just isn’t long enough.  So I need to recognize when it is time to say, “submit the assignment and leave it alone!” 

So now I am heading out into the sunshine and smell the roses!  Feel free to explore my Assessment Page for a peek at my quiz if you like.  The link is found at the bottom of my reflection.

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.

The past 10 months have been focused on a future plan for our board – the current trend has been to develop plans for the 21 Century teaching and learning and we are certainly doing our part.  All kinds of research, presentation after presentation prepared, meetings after meetings held..just when you think you have the attention of the powers-at-be, who gets cut from our Central Office staff?  The Integrating Technology into the Classroom consultant…How do you explain that?

So why am I spending so much time developing a plan when it is obvious we won’t have the support staff to implement all the great things we are envisioning?  Almost feels like someone wants it to fail….hmmmm

That’s how I feel about each new course in MET – a new adventure of learning about education and technology. I never quite know where it will take me, and sometimes I worry that I might not get through it, but in the end I am always grateful for the chance to learn so much.