Here’s the link to my digital story illustrating my journey in selecting an LMS to augment my F2F classroom.

As I have mentioned before, part of my professional growth plan is to go paperless within the next 5 years, and my first step in that journey involved simply content delivery, something which all LMS can do adequately.

My goal for this fall is to make assignment submission paperless, and I feel that my choice gives me a good option to begin this process.

I hope you enjoy my story.

http://prezi.com/3iienqycjnlc/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Many people who know and teach math might question how social media can be useful.  Most “traditionalist” math teachers see math as an individual exercise to be mastered by doing more practice (on one’s own, no less).  However, I have a success story with Math 9.  One of the outcomes in Saskatchewan Math 9 is

There are only so many examples of 3D objects that I could find (and create on my own) so I leveraged another teacher in my school division, at another school, to create more and novel practice.  We created a hashtag, #nesdmath9 to communicate with each others’ classes and our students would come up with 3D objects for the other class to determine the areas of.  Some of my higher end students even went so far as to combine this project with their shop class, and created their objects in a CAD program (Google SketchUp).  It was a great way to communicate with and leverage the resources out there.  Both myself and my colleague loved the experience and we are comparing our teaching loads year after year to try this again.  So far we have not taught the same class in the same year since, but we both believe this is valuable for our students.

Going into this I was unsure of the results, as I identify as a more traditionalist math teacher however seeing the results has made me realze that Twitter is a powerful tool in education.

Working on this assignment with a partner, rather than alone, afforded me some time and advantages that I am not normally used to when planning my instruction.  Having a partner to work with allowed me to step back and look at my ideas objectively for a time before suggesting and allowed me to receive feedback on my ideas from another professional.

In order to implement a successful online course, careful consideration must be taken in the introduction and first few activities to ensure that the design elements are effective and easy to follow for all students who will take the course.  As well, it must be easy for the course designer and instructor to follow and maintain the template throughout the design process.  Our course was built with three guiding pedagogical contexts:  1) creating a student-centred learning environment (SCLE), 2) creating technology that is sound in pedagogy, content and knowledge (TPCK), and 3) incorporating collaborative tools to foster a social learning environment.  All of our design elements, learning tool selections, and interactivities were chosen to support these contexts.

After considering the Trinh case study, we decided to create our course with both of us as co-instructors.  Not knowing how many students would enroll initially and not knowing how big this course might get led us to choose a more scalable model in the event of growing numbers.  By co-teaching, we can create more opportunities for interaction as we will both be available at different times for our office hours.

1. Are there other methods that are equally as economical, particularly in terms of instructor time, that are more suitable for assessment in a digital age? For instance, do you think automated essay grading is a viable alternative?

Considering that my teaching context is that of math and science I cannot speak to automated essay grading, but there are similar technologies that are applicable to my context.  For example, Moodle contains a built-in multiple choice grader.  I can easily create, or find multiple choice items that match my content and feed the answer into Moodle.  I can instantly look back at the student’s work and see where they were successful and where they were not.  However, if I have not created these questions myself or if I did not go into a detailed analysis of which wrong answers were picked, I would lack insight into exactly what misunderstandings my students had.  As well, multiple choice items give little to no opportunity for the teacher to give detailed feedback on student work.  However, in terns of time management this does become a tempting option.

2. Would it be helpful to think about assessment right at the start of course planning, rather than at the end? Is this feasible?

Absolutely, unequivocally, yes!  Assessment is ALWAYS the first thing I think of when planning for instruction.  I was introduced to the Understanding by Design (UbD) model early in my teaching career and there are parts of it that I cannot ever see myself going without.  Assessment is the final destination of learning.  If we create a metaphor of learning as a road trip to Toronto, the only thing that makes us successful is getting to Toronto.  Likewise, what makes us successful at learning is meeting expectations on the final assessment.  It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get there, or what detours must be made along the way, the learning is successful when the assessment criteria are met.  Without laying out those criteria early on, it is impossible to make the learning go in the desired direction, because that direction isn’t yet known!