Monthly Archives: October 2016

Assignment 3 – Intro.

Leave a reply

Reflection

Assignment 3

ETEC 565A

Mr. Danny Tulk

 

Why I picked Guitar 10 and Google Classroom:

 

Not to sound like a broken record, but once again, I must declare my enjoyment to use this assignment in direct application to my practical teaching practice. When I contemplated how I would approach this assignment, I played with a few ideas before I decided to focus on the Alberta curriculum or General Music 10, specifically for the Guitar. This is one of the classes I teach at the High School where I teach. It has proven to be beneficial in my reflection into my own teaching method and has forced me to go through my class material and revamp and re-approach a few lessons.

Also, I was excited to be given the chance to use Google Classroom as my LMS. My school district has is the past two years moved from a Microsoft office suite and Excel platform to a Google Drive, Docs, Classroom, Gmail, etc… focus. With each student given a Google Student account and each teacher having access to a Google Classroom account, it is still relatively new to us and only our early adopters teachers have really embraced the LMS. In the past couple semesters I have often found myself, as the tech liaison, on the receiving end of questions regarding this particular LMS, and more often then not in catch-up mode. This assignment has proven to be very beneficial in forcing me to delve into the LMS and start really playing with it and learning how to navigate it and set it up in a usable manner. I am in no way an expert with Google Classroom at this point, but am leaps and bounds ahead in compared to where I was prior to the start of this assignment.

 

Where I have found the LMS has excelled and caused some headaches:

 

Start-up / Set-up:

 

This has to be the easiest setups I have encountered, once you have access to create a Google Classroom. It is a one to two click endeavor to setup a class and get the access to code to invite students. Once I was given my access email, I was able to create my class and change the background in matter of moments.

 

However, it was not without issue. The security on who can access the class has caused me some trouble, as I am unable to add people from outside the particular system. I believe this is a setting from the district administrator side, but not sure. Also, as it is a fictional class, I have been unable to see my class from the student perspective.

 

Customization / Adding pages / Organization:

 

Adding pages is as simple as a click. However, you are limited in options as to what type of page you will create. Also, few templates exists in the actual LMS and it seems to work better if you bring in other Google Apps (such a forms, sheets, youtube, etc…). Which, I must say is very easy and user friendly. That being said, the LMS should include a formatting palette, I would of liked the use of Bold, Bullet, etc… for headings and general aesthetic appeal.

 

The LMS does not lend its self to creative customization well. You are very much limited to the headings and page layout that comes standard on the Google Classroom. In an ideal world, I would have liked to been able to change heading names and add headings. Also, as you add posts, announcements, assessments, etc… the home page gets convoluted and disorganized. General posts for the class can easily be lost as the class body is created.

 

Organization seemed to cause me an issue as the side bar defaults to Alpha Numerical order and as I created class lesson they wouldn’t be in the order I wanted the student to follow. I over came this by numbering the lessons. However, even in the creation of content within the lessons it would order in sequence of creation with new posts appearing over older posts. This caused me confusion in the creation of the content and your only option seems to be to send a particular post to the top, which forces some interesting planning when creating the final order of each lesson. I would like to see the ability to click and drag posts to a particular order on a page.

 

 

Assessment:

 

This was where I was most happily surprised, I spent a few days thinking about how I would develop the assessment I needed in my class. I played with a few outside site such a Survey Monkey and the built in questions to Google Classroom prior to exploring using the assessment option and Google Forms template that us set up. This allows for quick set up and reporting when an assessment is completed. You can set up that the student gets automatic feed back on MC questions and limits who can take the test and how many times. You can also limit the times when a test can be taken.

 

However, I did find some limitations or, at least, problems that I have not found the answer to yet. I seem to be unable to set a time limit for the test, so that the student only has a certain amount of time once the assessment is started. Also, you are limited in creating feed back for MC questions, which is not really a surprise.

 

Nevertheless, creating questions and assessments in the Google Classroom LMS proved very easy.

 

For my assessment, I have developed formative and summative assessments. In each lesson there are small questions that will count towards the students participation mark as well as two formative quizzes (chords and scales) as well a summative assessment. I have also set up a video assessment that will be summatively assessed with a Google handout one on one session and formatively assessed with a uploaded Youtube video by the student.

 

Finally, there are two additional assignments where students will work in a group to develop a presentation on a assigned Genre and one final performance assignment where students upload a video of themselves playing a song of there choosing with the teachers guidance. These assessment mimic my actual in class assignments.

 

 

Conclusions (Thus Far):

 

Google Classroom is very user friendly and doesn’t require an extensive amount of tech literacy to initially set up for you class. However, it offers limited customization and set-up options that tech savvy individuals my find confining.   While it is a great basic system, it requires the other Google Apps and external apps to achieve more functionality.

 

I am still playing with the LMS and will hopefully find solutions or work arounds to come of these issues as I continue to work on this assignment.

Boris, maybe F2F trad. is better.

Leave a reply

Let’s talk about Boris and his Class. It seems like he doesn’t have a lot of time and that his class time is already used. This is certainly a pitfall that teachers run into, we would love to have 28-hour days and just a few more weeks of classes at the end of the semester to finish the way we want. We want to have the time to do the cool stuff and not be dictated by the looming exams. I fight with this everyday.

 

What I would recommend for Boris is the set up of a student-peer led review group.

 

Finding already made youtube videos and on-line exam banks (Exambank.ab.ca is great) that already exist and give it to the students. If Boris is willing, as I’ve learned the past few weeks, he can take a year and work on google form (or other test taking sites) and build a review test for each unit that students can use for review. I do fear that this might only be utilized by students that already comprehend. Where as the peer tutoring F2F may be more beneficial.

Reflection

Leave a reply

This was certainly a different assignment and one that came with a unique set of challenges and obstacles that ultimately led to some insight and discovery. If I am to be honest, I am finding ETEC 565A to be one of the better classes in the MET program at offered real life application of educational technology. This specific assignment offered a unique blend of academic and practical knowledge and I am confident the lessons I learned will apply well in my practice; however, as the group and I worked through Assignment 2 a few challenges emerged. A few of the most prevalent challenges I came across, with the group, were; how to properly approach the assignment and develop the rubric, how to communicate with the group, and finally subdivide the work and create a cohesive product.

 

At the onset, the challenges of developing a rubric for assessment of an LMS seemed almost too easy, especially given the SECTIONS (Bates, 2014) readings that we had explored in previous weeks. However, as we delved into the development, it became apparent that it would not simply be a blanket application and that the group would have to work to ensure that the developed rubric would be comprehensive / specific enough to ensure effectiveness but not so elaborate as to create redundancies and become convoluted. Also, the SECTIONS model did not account for the First Nations perspective that would be required for the YESnet program. Though email correspondence, Google Docs, and Google hangouts we initially decided that a straight forward approach would be to simplistic a not offer the detail needed to be effective. As a group we decided to expanded on the basic categories in SECTIONS and decided to use more sub-categories as well as areas that would represent the First Nations perspective (Bowers, 2000). Problem averted! Well, maybe not. Once we used the sub-categories we were left with a much longer rubric that at times became redundant. Once again, using the Google platform we merged some categories and eliminated some that had redundant parts. It was strange the see the evolution from worrying that our rubric would be too brief to dealing with actual problem of it being overly loquacious. However, after working on sections as individuals and then discussing and editing as a whole we were able to develop a comprehensive and effective rubric.

As with any E-learning class environment, we had group members from across the country and each with varying time commitments, as well as school, family, and work obligations. Therefore, finding a method and time to meet was a challenge. Our initial contact was made form the Black Board learning portal and email, from there we decided that we would use the Google platform as our primary communication tool. We held a preliminary Google hangout in which we discussed how we would approach the assignment and breakdown workload. We then used a communal Google doc to share work and develop our rubric with SECTIONS in sections. Daily email updates kept every body in the loop and we had a final Google handout / edit session a week following the to read and edit the rubric and ensure proper and consistent voice and vocabulary were used. This was also beneficial is editing as we had 5 different readers to evaluate the assignment.

Finally, although this seems to be addressed above, how do you subdivide this kind of work and ensure quality is consistent. It has to be said, when you work in E-learning group work, a certain amount of trust needs to be given. When you release the reigns of a particular part of the workload to another person, you have to be confident that they will do an acceptable job. Thankfully, in my 8 MET courses I have never come across the adverse. In our initial group discussion, each of the 5 members took ownership of two sections of the Rubric, in my instance these were Cost and Organizational Issues, then we came together and edited and proofread as a whole to create a final document. This was highly effective and divided the assignment into manageable portions that were attainable with the other demands of the class as well as personal and professional lives.

In the end, this was a very well organized assignment. The group members each brought different ideas and strengths to the rubric and we worked cohesively to develop our final product. We issues arose in how to proceed; the group communicated effectively and came to communal agreements on how to best approach the problem. This was a rather fast passed assignment and did not leave much time for considerable interaction, but I can confidently say that the group worked well and developed a rubric that I feel is effective and would accurately assess an LMS for the YESnet program.

 

Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In             Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-            between-media/

Bowers, C. A., Vasquez, M., & Roaf, M. (2000). Native people and the challenge of             computers: Reservation schools, individualism, and consumerism. American             Indian Quarterly, 24(2), 182-199.