Summary of my flight path

I began my flight path by summarizing my experience with education technology: I worked as a student consultant at the Acadia Institute of Teaching Technology during my undergrad and as I gained experience as a teacher, I slowly tried to incorporate new technology into my classroom. This past year, I created a class website and dabbled in the flipped classroom. I had several goals for this course: I wanted to learn of new resources to make learning interactive and fun for students, I wanted to learn how to enrich my course website with multimedia without it becoming a distraction and I wanted to learn of a tool that would enable me to get real-time formative feedback from my students.

My other hope for this course was that I would gain some understanding on LMSs, so I could help my boyfriend with some market research for his start-up company. Specifically, I wanted to play with an LMS, to get a sense of what level of control an instructor had over the interface and features. I wanted to know what type of content is supported by an LMS, and how easy it is to author to content and incorporate older materials. I was curious to learn what types of limitations an LMS had, and what level of support was available to the user.

Looking Back

I’m pleased to say that I was able to answer most of the questions I asked at the beginning of the course. Many of my questions were answered by exploring two theoretical frameworks used to evaluate educational tools: Bate’s SECTIONS (2014), and Chickering & Gamson’s Seven Principles (1987). The SECTIONS framework is particularly useful to me as I continue to help my partner evaluate his company’s competition. The Students using his tool will have a varied background and unique learning needs. We will always need to assess the Ease of use of his tool as well as his competitors’ products (can it be web-based, or must it be desktop?). The biggest learning for me in Bate’s SECTIONS framework is the reminder that there are many types of Cost: development, delivery, maintenance, overhead and of course, time (2014). Given that his company is still in the development stage, there is a very high cost to him now, but will hopefully pay off in the future. Teaching function is the area where I will likely offer the most help, as I am best equipped to assess a tool from its pedagogical perspective. Interaction and Organizational issues will likely need to be determined from feedback from customers. Networking, Security and privacy are out of my realm of expertise, but I know they are essential to consider, particularly as he moves toward selling enterprise-level solutions.

I appreciated the opportunity to develop a rubric for an outside need in Assignment 1. It wasn’t until we began debating which aspects to include and how to rate requirements, that I truly understood what goes into selecting an appropriate LMS for a school, or even school district. Using SECTIONS and Seven Principles were essential to ensuring that we hadn’t overlooked an important piece of the puzzle. The assignment also made very clear that each “customer” has very unique needs, and a one-size-fits-all solution will never be adequate.

With my boyfriend’s business in mind, I was very eager to jump into learning about LMSs. I was amused to read that in 2005, competition, student expectations, the allure of student engagement and efficiency were the driving forces behind the popularity of LMSs in schools (Coates et. al., 2005) and today, analysts are anticipating the end of the LMS (Spiro, 2014). How quickly preferences shift! Spiro’s observation is that today, students want even more control of their learning, and that it is more effectively done through their personal choice of learning tools, not via a corporately controlled LMS. Students are no longer interested in being told how they are going to learn and will seek out information tailored to their exact needs (Spiro, 2014).

Getting my hands dirty with Moodle also answered many of the questions I asked in my flight path. I was able to determine that Moodle was free, fairly intuitive to use, can accept most forms of content, but having knowledge of HTML makes course design much easier. I found that the instructor had a lot of control over the look and feel of the course design, and I was able to track down many videos and resources to help me create my Moodle course. I would have liked to been able to play with BlackBoard Connect as well. Since Moodle was free, I could have explored it at any time, but since BlackBoard requires a license to use, perhaps I should have taken the opportunity in this course to try it out while I had access.

The design of my Moodle course was heavily influenced by Chickering & Gamson’s Seven Principles (1987), Anderson (2008) and Gibbs & Simpson (2005). The Seven Principles served as an important reminder about what makes a course great. These principles are crucial reminders to make communication and feedback a priority, and to design a course with collaboration and active learning in mind (Chickering & Gamson, 1987). To include these principles in my course design, I created several discussion boards where students could help each other, share their work and engage in conversation. I provided an introductory activity to build a sense of community within the class, and to make sure students felt welcomed and valued. I provided choice in their assignments and project to celebrate student’s diverse interests and ways of learning.

When designing the quiz at the end of my content module, I referred to Gibbs & Simpson’s position that feedback supports students’ learning (2005). After each quiz question, feedback on the correctness of the answer as well as reminders of key concepts are provided to the student. This gives students immediate feedback on their performance. The choice to not have a final exam in the course was based on Gibbs & Simpson’s finding that students do better in assignment-based courses than exam-based courses (2005).

Anderson (2008) states there are four considerations of learning which make an online course successful: it must be community-centered, knowledge-centered, learner-centered and assessment-centered. The Unit 4 project I created for this assignment features all four considerations. In the project (assessment-centered), students need to find examples of rectangular prisms, triangular prisms and cylinders in their homes and community (community-centered). Students are to take pictures of their findings and share them with their small discussion group (learner-centered). Finally, students measure and calculate the surface area and volume of one of their objects and submit their work (knowledge-centered). One of the things I really liked about my Unit 4 project was that it brought an authenticity to the course. Asking students to seek out real-life examples of what we were discussing in the course, showed students that math exists outside of their textbook. This situated activity encourages students to “see” math everywhere, and reminds them that learning math is worthwhile (BCIT, 2003).

One of the highlights of this course for me was learning how I could improve my teaching practice with technology. I’m really happy that I created a course website earlier this year, but I now know there is so much more I can do with it. After evaluating my site with SECTIONS in our course discussion forum, it was suggested that I should include embeddable quizzes after each lesson. This is a great idea as it provides students with real-time feedback that is essential to student learning (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). I could also include more mobile technology in my site for assessment, which will help keep my students motivated and curious (Ciampa, 2013). Ideas like having students ask questions via twitter, or directly on my site with the help of apps like Padlet may encourage students to learn on the go, or even provide a friendly forum of competition, recognition and collaboration (Ciampa, 2013). These tools could be used asynchronously, if students wanted to pose a question for class the following day. Or student could choose to work synchronously to help answer each other’s questions.

Learning about copyright and proper image citation was incredibly helpful to me. It’s been well documented that this is an area I have struggled with, and it was so satisfying when I finally got the hang of it with the help of my peers. I know that my teacher website is currently not properly cited, so that is something that I am looking forward to fixing.

Moving forward:

As I move toward the end of my MET experience, I know I have a lot of work ahead of me. I suspect that even as early as this September, I will be considered the educational technology leader on staff. Learning about SECTIONS will leave me better equipped to make informed decisions about tech projects in our school (Bates, 2014). I will likely need to advise our new principal about what tech is working in our school and what will need to be added. I expect that I will be one of the first teachers in my school to adopt Blended Learning in their classrooms, and it will be my responsibility to pitch it to the staff. Teachers will want my help to teach them about new digital tools and I anticipate that I will be leading many Professional Development sessions throughout the year. Before agreeing to any of these requests, I will definitely weigh the time cost against the scope of the project (Bates, 2014).

Unfortunately, I am still in a temporary position at my school, so I always need to be on the lookout for career opportunities. My school board has a popular online program and it is growing in size. All of the online courses are created in Moodle, and with my experience in this course, I will definitely be a qualified applicant for a teaching position.

In addition to the embeddable quizzes on my website, I want to learn more about using clickers (or other student response systems) for in class feedback. My ETEC 533 professor, Dr. Marina Miner-Bolotin, has written resources on this topic, and I will turn to those as a starting point. Also in my ETEC 533 course, one of our big projects was to create a virtual education technology tutorial. I have access to tutorials created by other groups on topics like Edmodo, BYOD, Flipped Classroom, Social Media in the Classroom, and Interactive White Boards. As part of my own professional development, I will begin to work through these tutorials.

I’m excited to include my Digital Story in my course website. I felt so honoured when a student from our class asked to use it with her students! This encourages me to continue to explore creating digital stories. I think a comic strip would work especially well for lessons that have a set procedure because students could read each frame as a step in the process. I would also like to try out StoryBoard That as a project with my students.

One of the best things about education technology is that there is no end in sight. New tools will pop up every year, and it’s our responsibility as educators to be informed by the literature and use it to support our adoption of the tools. I firmly believe that technology should not be used for the sake of using technology. However, technology such as video, LMSs, and social media can be used to enrich learning and motivate students (Ciampa, 2013). I look forward to learning even more.

References:

Anderson, T. (2008a). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Bates, T. (2014). Chapter 8: Choosing and using media in education: the SECTIONS model, Teaching in digital age. (p. 257 – 291). Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm

Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf

Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of Learning Management Systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary Education and Management, 11(1), 19-36. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11233-004-3567-9

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

Learning Resources Unit @ BCIT (2003). Constructivist e-learning methodologies: A Module development guide. Pan-Canadian Health Informatics Collaboratory. Retrieved from:         https://connect.ubc.ca/bbcswebdav/courses/SIS.UBC.ETEC.530.66C.2014S12.33210/download/unit5-construct-method.pdf

Spiro, K. (2014). 5 eLearning trends leading to the end of the learning management system. http://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-trends-leading-to-the-end-of-the-learning-management-system