Tell us a bit about yourself, your experience, and your goals for this course (or, perhaps, the MET).
2015-2016 is my eleventh year teaching. Nine of my eleven years have been as a full-time classroom teacher while two years were as a TOC (teacher on call) in Vancouver. The subjects and ages that I have taught have varied over the last nine years. Though I trained as an intermediate Elementary school teacher, I have worked in both middle school and high school grades as well as some teaching in K-2.
I have used technology consistently in my classroom for six years. The last six years were a mix of grade levels and subjects, but roughly (except this current school year as I am teaching Grade 2) I was teaching Social Studies to the two earliest years of middle school (ages 11-13).
In my Social Studies classroom (and additionally in my English classroom, as I also taught a single group of Grade 6 English), about 25% of what happened in the classroom was in a digital learning environment. The most common technology used in my classroom was blogs (especially for reflections), an LMS (as a repository for resources and a place for online chat/ collaboration/ venue for peer evaluation and feedback) and various web 2.0 tools/ websites such as Canva and Blendspace (which has recently migrated to the TES website (https://www.tes.com/lessons?redirect-bs=1).
My goals in ETEC 565a are to gain knowledge and skills in the LMS Blackboard Learn, refine my understanding of setting up a Moodle course and gather tools to effectively judge and choose appropriate technologies for different learning situations.
Explain what you want to learn about Learning Management Systems (LMS), assessment, social software, and multimedia.
I have experience with course design and teaching in Moodle, Google Classroom, and Edmodo. My experience with LMS is adequate, insofar as I have always had a mentor to go to when I was unsure what to do. Usually, this mentor has been the ICT coordinator at the school where I work. I suppose that this equates to the ‘Lone Ranger and Tonto’ analogy made in the Nel et al. article Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. (2010, 240) Except that I am probably more the character of Tonto despite being the classroom teacher.
I have had the opportunity to explore making assessments that are ‘in’ Moodle like quizzes. I have moved away from Moodle in the last three years for two reasons. One reason that I stopped using Moodle was that it was easier to use Google Classrooms to reach my course goals and the second was that the assessment tools of Moodle (at least the ones that I had the skills to use) were only assessing the lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Bates supports this when he states “Although this form of assessment [quizzes] has its value in assessing comprehension and for testing a limited range of mechanical procedures, computing also supports a wider range of assessment techniques, from learner-created blogs and wikis to e-portfolios.” (2014, 249).
Whether looking at Moodle or Google Classroom, I have had few issues when dealing with multimedia, most LMS systems are user-friendly for the course designer. Though as I mentioned earlier, I have always had the benefit of a nearby mentor to help me with any issues that arose. (Even when my first mentor left the school that we worked at, for a job in Germany, I was able to troubleshoot issues via Twitter.)
Moodle
If I were to go back to teaching in middle school, I would like to be more confident to build a Moodle course on my own. As it stands right now, if I stay teaching primary school I would not need to utilize Moodle as an LMS. Having said that, I sometimes consider becoming more proficient in LMS course design in case I want to leave face-to-face K-12 teaching and work solely in online learning. There could be several scenarios where this would be advantageous. Since I live abroad and work on contracts, I could potentially have the freedom to live in more places if teaching online. Secondly, I could teach online when/ if I move back to Canada solely or as I seek a face-to-face teaching job.
Connect/ Blackboard Learn
I have no experience in Blackboard except as a user, so I am interested in learning anything about course construction. However, I see Connect as a LMS mainly suited for post-secondary needs.
Lastly, having seen this course move to a WordPress blog as a venue for course materials and activities, I am interested in exploring setting up a course in a blog. I have been working in a couple of WordPress blogs for the last five years, so I would like to take on the challenge of creating a course shell in a blog.
Give your best estimate (guestimate?) about what resources you would need to master these technologies as a novice professional.
There are three resources that I think I will need to master the technologies in this course: time, examples and a troubleshooting system (whether that is self-directed such as a Google search or Youtube video or a more formal system, potentially even reaching out to my past mentors).
Time is finite in the course but my time management will be important. I hope to allow myself the time to explore and tinker in course design/ LMS course building.
Examples are equally helpful as well as detrimental. I hope to use examples for inspiration but not impinge on my creativity.
If I am to move away from the ‘Lone Ranger and Tonto’ analogy from Nel et al. (2010, 240), I hope to build confidence first while retaining a community of people and tools to use when I am unsure how to proceed.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age, Chapter 8. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved from http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346