Reflections & Learning in ETEC565A

My Flight Path – a trip to the Moon?

My flight plan described the challenge I face in my work in the development of a vision and implementation plan for teaching and learning in the 21st Century. It has been established clearly through several articles I read in the MET program, (many of which I was able to revisit in 565A), that our students would benefit greatly from an instructional approach that included online learning. The approach I proposed would include blended learning, as our pilot projects in our schools highlighted the success of such a format. My flight plan included learning more about the specific technologies and tools that would be most effective and appropriate for this blended model considering the skills of our students and teachers, our server and bandwidth capabilities, and of course, our budget. I also needed to learn about the principles of ensuring that best practice in pedagogy is not overshadowed by the bells and whistles of the tools. The readings by Chickering & Ehrmann (1996), Bates & Poole (2003), Anderson (2008), Siemens (2003), Janson & Janson (2009), and ISTE NETS for Teachers were a few that were helpful in developing my understanding of these principles.

Re-reading my Flight path does lead me to agree with John’s feedback that I did have a lofty goal for a single course to meet – a more realistic goal would be to hope that the entire MET program would assist me in developing  this vision and plan for our schools. Learning about the tools that can best enhance the learning experience in an online environment, and understanding why each tool is most effective or not, is a key component that I need before  developing  our board plan.   My colleagues in this course (and John too!) have been a valuable source of information and support for my inventory of tools and technologies to use. I will be far better prepared for the discussions and planning sessions that will resume in September. One of my ongoing challenges though, is to move from the abstract visioning level to the practical how-do-I-make-this-happen level. So the readings and the assignments in this course contributed to a better understanding of how to operationalize the plan.

My 565 Overall Experience – Warning: Learning Curve Ahead!

Revisiting the learning theory and reading articles about online learning was the easy part…The technical requirements of the course – not so easy!

From the very beginning of Module One, I encountered statements from various theorists that confirmed what I also believed and provided future reference as I make my pitch to my senior team at my board. Even though articles such as Chickering and Erhmann (1996) are referring to undergrad-age students, their comments still ring true for students of any age – “for any given instructional strategy, some technologies are far better than others.” (p. 1) The seven principles provided by these authors will be a tool that I will have ready as we plan the professional development of our teachers as we move forward -so will the work of Bates and Poole (2003) and their SECTIONS model. Even though this was an article studied once before, it was a much more practical tool when in the context of ETEC 565. I have also been a member of ISTE for several years, and I have seen the NETS for teachers and administrators many times, but without the context of this course, the full meaning of their frameworks escaped me.

Revisiting constructivist theory was critical, as the use of online learning integrates this approach and experiencing it first-hand showed me that it works. Our group interactions in this course provided invaluable learning that was facilitated with a very light touch by John- showing me that it can be done! I found myself re-reading articles from previous courses to review constructivism to keep it fresh in my mind as I critically assessed the various learning management systems that are available, as my recent experience was with D2L in my board, and Vista in my MET courses. Panettieri (2007) provided a good comparison of the platforms available, and I saw some that were new to me, such as the Sakai Project, and WebTycho. The introduction of Moodle at this point was met with much skepticism by me, but more about that later!

One of the criticisms I hear from our elearning teachers is that assessment is a challenge, especially if they use primarily paper and pencil tests and exams in their face-to-face classrooms. Anderson (2008) and Gibbs & Simpson (2005) gave me several approaches for assessment that I will be able to share with our elearning and blended learning teachers. Our own assessment in this course was very authentic and I appreciated how in this course (and so far, all MET courses) I am able to show what I have learned in ways that do not require regurgitation – even though I learned how to memorize countless pages of materials in my undergrad courses – and can barely recall any of it!

My favourite modules of the course are those that dealt with social networking and multimedia – here is where the fun was as I have always been fascinated with Web 2.0 tools. Siemens (2003) and Janson & Janson (2009) showed me how to evaluate the effectiveness of the media tools. (although SECTIONS helped too!) I spent several hours exploring the MERLOT resources that were provided. I am so appreciative that I was introduced to so many new applications that I just don’t have time to find on my own.

As we designed our own learning environment, I found myself wanting to step back and analyze the structure and flow of 565 and am impressed with the layout, the activities, the opportunities for discourse, and the resources that were made available. It is apparent that learning theory has been put into practice and I want to ensure that we design our own blended courses in this way. I also learned something else that was new: not all constructivist learning requires group work. We completed one assignment in a group, the rest as individuals – but continued learning took place from the discussion forums of the whole group – this, I want to remember.

Overall, this is a course that I am sad to see come to an end.

The Elearning Toolkit

I found the toolkit to be helpful in the use of Moodle and web design. The links brought me to several sources that I repeatedly referred to as I created my sites. I was also happy to revisit the wiki that was part of my ETEC 510 course. When I opened the Blended Learning Grades 7-10, I found my old site – although hardly recognizable from the edits that had been done – at least I still saw that I was given credit for the original version! This really demonstrated the intended use of wikis for me. As for other tools, I found that I accessed more information from my colleagues and from the link to the 50 Ways to Tell a Story that was provided.

Moodle and Me: Friends at Last

Moodle and I have made friends finally, but it was a rocky start. I fooled myself into thinking that I could handle minor html coding issues after taking the self-assessment quiz at the start of the course – but thanks to my many new friends in the blogging world and my colleagues in this course, I managed to complete the most basic of html codes when needed – although at times, I simply gave up and satisfied myself with the placement of an image – “it must want to be in that spot so I’ll leave it there” was my thinking at times. Creating web pages using WYSIWYG is easy enough, and I found that it did indeed create better pages for the Moodle than using the editor within the shell. I tried Dreamweaver at first, but at the recommendation of someone in the course, I tried Weebly and after paying a modest fee in order to create multiple web pages, I was impressed. Weebly was very simple to use, the templates provided were very appealing and uploading the files to my computer was very easy. I do see that Moodle is somewhat intuitive (I sure didn’t think so at first) and I now have a better grasp of the tools within. My concern is that if I do indeed need to use Moodle in the future, I will have forgotten so much of the technical aspects, but I have know that there are countless tutorials and blogs to help me if that happens.

The pedagogical design of the modules was a challenge too, in that using an online platform removes a lot of the flexibility afforded to teachers in a face-to-face classroom. It is important to anticipate where students might struggle and need additional help, what order materials need to be presented, when it is time for group work and individual work – all having to be set up ahead of time instead of just-in-time in the traditional classroom. I realize that an instructor could step in and make changes as needed, but it may be more difficult to ascertain which students are struggling when they are not right in front of you. Body language is invaluable and so we are left to hope that online students will speak up when struggling! Creating good assessments is a challenge as well, and I found that creating a final quiz for this assignment was counter to my own positive experiences with assessment in online courses. I wanted instead to assign a project-based assessment, and I would likely do so in the future – but it was important to experience the task of building a quiz – I can see its usefulness for formative assessment, as Chickering and Ehrmann (1996) point out, “students need frequent opportunities to perform and receive feedback on their performance. (p. 5)

My Next Steps: keep the momentum going

My immediate plans involve preparing my presentation to be used at a September meeting when the 21st Century teaching and learning steering committee resumes. I am now equipped with much more information and knowledge to debate the expansion of blended learning and the resources that are needed for successful implementation. I will be able to more critically view the D2L platform that is provided for our use. Until now, I was more of an observer at the teacher meetings for our pilot projects – our technology teacher conducted most of the PD sessions, but I did not view the instructional components with a critical eye. I will now be more active in leading some of the PD in the sessions as I share many of the articles provided in 565. I will spend more time exploring the social networking and multimedia tools with the teachers to make their sites even more pedagogically sound.

I will be spending a lot of time on our collaboration space (MyBigCampus) to ensure that I can support teachers in using this tool, as well as adding my own resources for use. I want to continue blogging – it seems I keep creating blogs in the MET program, and enjoy keeping them up to date during the courses, but the habit hasn’t been sticking with me to continue outside the UBC server. I will change that this time!

As for my own learning, I will be continuing with the last four MET courses and will continue my professional reading on 21st Century teaching and learning. I am exploring the various options in tablets for my own personal use – sounds like I need to join the Apple world!

References

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