Reflections & Learning in ETEC565A

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!

I must admit, my goal to create a new post each week is already fallen away – for some reason the weeks are spinning past as this time of year absorbs so much time and energy in the schools!  I really understand the importance of regular journalling and so making this a habit of mine is a priority.

The use of Bates and Poole’s SECTIONS model has continued to be very useful in this course, as it was in 510- although I must say, the application of the SECTIONS is much more indepth in 565 and its value becomes more and more apparent.  We found it easy to transform the components into a rubric for assessing any learning platform, but I can now see that we could use it for any technology system or application.  What a difference it makes to have a framework that helps us focus on what really matters!

I just registered to attend a CASS conference – the College of Alberta School Superintendents to be held in Niagara Falls Ontario in July- so I am looking forward to spending time with educators from another province or two!  The topic is 21 Century Learning and I look forward to making connections to 565 as I attend the workshops and keynotes.  I look forward to sharing what I learn with my colleagues in section 66C.

After my last post I could see that I was sounding quite negative – should I call it despondent?  Then I was sent a video of a very recent interview that happened and it buoyed me considerably.

A grade 8 teacher, on a whim, did a Google search on Jeff Smith – the class’s favourite author of the Bones graphic novel series.  He found the name of Jeff’s publicist and emailed a request for an online interview between Jeff and the students.  He agreed and a date in May was set!

Next came the technology plans – the teacher had hoped to use Adobe Connect and the school’s one and only Smartboard – after many trial runs, they found that Adobe Connect crashed over and over again (not enough bandwidth in our board).  He was not discouraged and decided to try Skype – which required the actions of our tech department to change settings on the Smartboard laptop to allow the addition of Skype. 

The class did online research for good interview questions and prepared for the big event.  The questions were displayed on the Smartboard, as was the large Skype screen – that way, the students would not be nervous – they could just read the questions that Jeff Smith could not see. They set up their own webcam in front of a podium and placed it so that Jeff could see the whole class.  Students brought in their Bones stuffed animals – Bones books – a Bones fest was happening.

When the interview began, right on time, Jeff looked very laid-back, but as the questions proceeded, he could see that this class did their homework – he commented over and over again that these were VERY good questions – he asked if this was an Arts school and the teacher replied that this was just a typical Ontario grade 8 class.

All in all, this was a fantastic experience – Jeff gave the students all kinds of advice on how to write good graphic novels and how to do the art effectively.  The students are now working on their own versions.  Unfortunately we can’t release the video as we had a couple of students with publication restrictions on their photos – otherwise I would share it with the world!  I also have to thank our IT department who sent a technician to the school more than once to get everything set up and who stayed throughout the interview in case of glitches.

I challenge all of our teachers now to do some searching of their own classroom passions – is there someone out there that they could reach out to and do the same thing?  Let’s keep the pressure on to show how incredible these opportunities can be for student learning!

Maybe it’s the time of year – nearly the end of the school year – at least we know that once the May long weekend is over, we blink our eyes and the summer break is here, but I am finding myself wondering if I am making any progress at all in moving our schools forward into the 21st century.

I’ve been collecting reports from every subject department in our secondary schools – reports that tell me what progress they feel they have made towards meeting their goals of improving student achievement.  I was heartened to see back in September that many of the departments chose “increasing the use of technology in our classrooms” as a goal to engage students and meet the needs of those who learn best through the use of a variety of tools.  Maybe I forget how fast the semester flies by, maybe I forget how busy a class of nearly 30 students can be…and maybe I have really forgotten how frustrated the teachers can become with technology that doesn’t cooperate or is restricted to the point that they give up.  I just know that in reading their reports, we didn’t make much progress at all.  Results just aren’t there.

I just know that maybe I should be satisfied with baby steps – but in reading Chickering and Ehrmann’s Seven Principles for Implementing Technology – maybe I haven’t provided the teachers with a more focused direction in setting their goals – stating that they are just going to use the Smartboard more often can’t be enough.

Back to the drawing board!

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

In one week of introductions and discussions about our contexts applied to the NETS framework, I am noting a common thread from across the country and beyond as well – Do we really have a vision of what education should look like as we plunge head-first into technology use? I see educators who have varying technologies available – from minimum levels to sky-is-the-limit funding; from restricted access to basic applications to use-whatever-is-out-there. I see schools and districts where the expertise in technology is spotty – some teachers untrained and maybe uninterested in using the tools, to other teachers who use it in fully online courses or blended models. So student exposure to the tools and learning in a new format is hit-and-miss.

What do we do about this lack of vision? There are so many discussions in the blogging world, and in vision-setting symposia and conferences -I’ve attended my fair share, but we can’t seem to move it forward in a way that provides equal, safe opportunities to learning in a new way – and I argue, a better way. Can we move us away from the bricks and mortar model, where teachers control the students in a physical environment as the exclusive way that most of our students still learn?

I am struggling with this very monumental task myself as I try to formulate this vision of educating our students beyond the industrial age – where we are stuck! So far, my favourite framework is what I am using, but are there better visions out there? The NETS and SECTIONS models provide guidelines to remember when selecting technology and pedagogy, but we need a broader discussion about why we are doing this in the first place.

Maybe 565a will show me the way!