Assignment #4

Reflective Summary

1. Summarize your ePortfolio front page postings: compare your initial plan and your preliminary results with the ETEC 565 course.

My goal at the onset of this course was to explore the ease of use and affordances of instituting a blended learning LMS – likely Moodle or Eliademy – in my classroom. I imagined that using the LMS to post assignments, important messages and notices, and lesson and extension resources could work towards reducing the use of paper and help keep parents informed on what is going on in my classroom.

The three main assignments really helped me with this main goal. I learned quickly that Moodle wasn’t as easy to use as I’d like and the interface wasn’t really appealing for age group. Working through the course actually helped to steer me away from Moodle. Eliademy was a little more visually pleasing, but has the issue of foreign servers which are not currently allowed in my district. I would also like to explore Google Classrooms, but again there are privacy concerns, which are exaggerated by Google’s role in data mining.

To further complicate matters there has been a province wide rollout of MyEducationBC which provides some similar affordances as Moodle, however in my district the local union has negotiated that we will not be using it.

Overall, I think that especially in older grades, likely grades 6 and up, there is a lot of value in building and LMS for your classroom. I think that in my situation a simpler blog – perhaps WordPress – would be more effective. I plan to start a classroom blog for my next year’s group. I would lose some of the advantages of an LMS, such as an integrated mark book, among, however I would still be able to link in resources, provide messages, and allow parents an extra window into my classroom.

2. Summarize your experience working with the different LMS platforms and digital tools in this course. Which of your newly developed or improved technological skills contribute to your professional and academic activities? Which of you designer and ascetic preferences and instructional values have been transformed in the process?

As mentioned above, the majority of my time was spent working within Moodle. I was left frustrated and underwhelmed. So many seemingly simple tasks took an inordinate amount of time to complete, other tasks/ideas needed to be dropped or modified, and a lot of tasks ended up requiring complicated work-arounds. My HTML skills improved while problem solving.

I was inspired by a number of the activities that were shared through the discussions. I really liked creating comic stories. This is something that I will be doing with all my classes in the future. I found that Pixton was a great choice for a classroom. I liked that it works on iPads or laptops. It was very easy to create simple comics, however there was also a huge amount of customizability for those that want to really perfect their projects. This allows students to work at their appropriate level – which is one of the main strengths on technological based instruction.

My main goal in incorporating technology into my teaching is to provide opportunities for my students that wouldn’t be available in a traditional pen and paper setting. I look for ease of use, ability to personalize learning, and appeal of the tool. I don’t think that at this point I would bring in an LMS into my elementary classroom as it doesn’t meet my goals for technology with my students. However, I think that a classroom blog is something worth creating and running. I found WordPress easy to use and easy to customize. I think that my students – and especially parents – will appreciate a blog where I can post updates, images, and assignments. The blog won’t work towards personalization of learning, but I could design an extension page with bonus work for students to complete.

3. Consider the quality of your learning experience: how valuable for your learning and knowledge construction were the following course components as (1) the reading materials, (2) the discussions themes and questions, (3) the individual and group project work, (4) the range of LMSs for experimenting with and creating course projects. Have you been experiencing any unexpected, emergent effects as a result of your course activities, what was that? Whether having an open access WordPress version of the ETEC 565 in addition to the password protected discussions and assignments submission pages on Blackboard Connect contributed to your experience in this course or had no impact? What, you think, did not work well or has not been properly organized in this course?

I really enjoyed this course and found it quite useful for my teaching – even though I have decided against creating an LMS in the short term. It was something that I was interested in exploring and it is helpful to really know if it works for me.

The readings were valuable and relevant to the course topics. I appreciated the online nature and how easy they were to access. I enjoy reading a number of authors over a text book. In particular I found Game Based Learning, Learning Interactions, Social Media, and Copyright units especially relevant for me.

The discussions that involved sharing projects, personal experiences, and the Digital Stories were the most engaging. I really like to hear about the amazing work that other teachers do. Sometimes teaching can feel a bit like you’re on an island. The discussions can provide a window into diverse classrooms. On the other hand, the discussions can get a little repetitive when they are extremely similar course to course.

The group projects were my favourite aspects of the course. I felt that my groups worked really well together in a symbiotic way as we each shared our talents and experiences. I think that working in groups provides in a more authentic way the sense of community that is looked for in the discussion forums.

Personally, I did not like having to switch back and forth between Connect and WordPress. I would have preferred that all the content was held within Connect and our portfolios could be built within WordPress. I have taken courses that are on WordPress, courses on Connect, and now combined. I appreciate that the discussion was kept within Connect. I have had courses where the discussion is through blog posts and it was extremely hard to keep track of everything. Connect was much more straight forward. I don’t think that the open access of WordPress plays any role on our learning. Moving forward I would like to see all the course content held within Connect.