A place to call home for etec 565

Greetings everyone,

I’m a shop teacher at Delta Secondary School in Ladner. Well… at least I was. Shrinking enrollments, government funding allocations and a lack of seniority, I am now teaching Business Ed 10 and Math 8 to 10. I am also the Apprenticeship coordinator and Work Experience coordinator for the Automotive program at our school.

I am the father of two beautiful kids, Olivia and Mikylo – ages 12 and 10. They keep me busy, soccer, baseball, fastball, piano, skiing, swimming, math… you name it, we’re doing it.

I’m also a Red Seal machinist and CNC programmer/operator of 10 years. I started my apprenticeship at Tech Cominco in Trail, just after finishing high school in 1979. Yes, Jason Bay (Boston Red Sox) was one of my students and I coached him. In 1992, I completed my B. Ed. at UBC and started teaching immediately there after. I’ve taught every shop course under the sun.

Computer technologies are new to me and at times frustrating. As a hands on teacher, you see the work that needs to be accomplished, learning software packages is a different story.  Goals for this course are to start to learn new computer based technologies. I don’t think I’ll be teaching shop courses in the near future, so it’s time I start to “Moodlize” my Bus Ed courses which are taught in the computer lab. I choose Moodle because all indicators are that is the LMS of choice. Our district subscribes to Moodle and we have a few teachers using it quite fluently. Our Tech director is also a Moodler and finds the time to help when necessary.

My choice to incorporate Moodle in my Bus Ed class stems from the fact the many students learn at different rates. I would like to design modules so that quicker students can move through at a pace which is different from the others. Keeping kids corraled throughout the school year can be a task in itself. Offering Moodle would offer options provided I maintain the curricular time line.

I used a Wiki in our Bus Ed course for the first time this year with some success. I sometimes think that grade 10’s are still not mature enough to allow this form of sharing. I need to refine my Wiki exercise so that it becomes more bullet proof.

Many people talk about FaceBook as a way to design and share lessons. An idea I have is to get kids to post an image of a place (any place) they have visited and know well, then write a descriptive piece on that image. We’ll see… I’m always open to trying something new. So far… FaceBook is available to kids at our school.

My best estimate sits with what I have read so far in this course and talking to teachers at our school. Our labs have appropriate software and are powerful enough to run most applications. We have talented people who maintain lab efficiency. I guess for me… it will be time learning the software. I’m hoping July and August will be dedicated to the creation of a Moodle environment for my Bus Ed classes.

Chickering and Gamson say it best, “Emphasize Time On Task, ‘ Time plus energy equals learning. There is no substitute for time on task’.” Effective time management is something everyone deals with. The trick is to get it right! With children, sometimes time management goes straight out the window and instead becomes life management.

To coin another phrase from Bates & Poole, “the reliability and robustness of the technology is also critical.” The authors mention the last thing you want from students is the complaint that they cannot get the program to work, that their machine crashes or continues to “lock up.” Because I am new to the computing world, I would die inside (not really) if things started to go South. It is sometimes hard to switch gears mid-stream and gets kids started on something new when a technology fails, been there… done that! I am already experiencing difficulties with my 3.0 version of FireFox, apparently too new and not supported. However, I am committed, this summer, to get a partial Moodle course online. My focus for this course is to develop material that I can use in September of 2009 in my Business Ed 10 courses.

I look forward to this course and meeting new folks along the way and reconnecting with those I already know virtually.

Cheers all, Dave