Précis of Flight Plan

Starting out with ETEC 565A I had hoped to learn a bit about Moodle and how to create or edit courses. My school is using BCLN Moodle courses more and more as our student numbers drop and the demand on the limited number of teachers increases. We can no longer offer a wide variety of courses for the students to take anymore. Some of the BCLN Moodle courses are beautifully laid out and easy to use while others are not. There are certain aspects of some courses I like and some that I do not. Starting out in the this course I had hoped to learn enough to be able to edit and make changes to the courses on our district server; to fix errors, typos and links that no longer work.

ETEC 565A Experience

The one main goal I had starting out this course was to learn a bit about Moodle, enough to do minor fixes to the BCLN Moodle courses on our district server. I learned that and then some! I had no idea that I would be able to actually create my own course. I am very excited about the prospect of going into copies of the BCLN Moodle courses that our district purchases this September and making changes and fixes that I think will make the courses easier to use. After this course I feel confident enough in what I have learned to turn on the editing and make the changes I want to make.

Right from the very first week of this course I was exposed to and expected to do things I had never done before. The introductory video pushed me outside of my comfort zone but once done, was rewarding for having accomplished it. The other completely new thing in the first week was the blog. I have never used a blog before nor spent much time even looking at other peoples’. I still am not comfortable on that mode of communication but I can see the possibilities it presents and that it could be a very useful tool with students.

There have been quite a few times during this course that I have questioned my teaching practices. Right from the start when we were asked to reflect on our use of digital-age work in the classroom I started to question myself. I have always thought of myself as fairly advanced when it came to using technology in my classes but I had never really asked my self why I use it. I have come to realize that even thought I use technology like my iPad instead of an overhead, and ask students to complete assignments on their computers and email to me instead of pen and paper, I am still using the old fashioned pen on paper question and answer, teacher lead style of teaching. I need to start assessing for learning along the way (Bates, 2014) and encourage students to reach out into their own areas of interest. This will be a bit more challenging in the Maths but quite doable in the sciences. The use of mobile technologies can help with this (Ciampa, 2013).

The Module on social media was difficult for me to wrap my head around in an educational sense. I know that it is an incredibly powerful tool but I am still concerned about the publicity of it for high school students. Bates (2014) raises my concerns when he says “…social media raises the inevitable issue of quality.” There is so much information on the web that is not reliable that students may be lead a stray. Bates also brings up the idea that teachers need to have pedagogy to guide students with their use of technology. That can be a major problem for most teachers when they don’t know much about the potential themselves. The BCTF has always been very clear that teachers should have limited to virtually no contact with their students on-line. It leaves the teacher open to all sorts of conduct questions. How, as a teacher, can I embrace social media and pull it into my classroom when my own union does not support it? Create a Teacher account and have nothing personal on it? That might work. I know that other teachers use different social medias in their classes so this might be a method to maintain the teacher-student dynamic.

Creative Common was another great thing I learned about during this course. There are so many images and tracks that available for use that I had no idea about. I will definitely be much more aware of borrowing images now than I was before.

The Next Steps

I still have 8 more MET courses to complete so that will be my focus for some time to come.

Starting in September I am going to try incorporating computer assisted assessments for formative learning in my classroom. I will still use the old fashioned paper and pencil for the summative assessment in the math related courses but for the little quizzes along the way to see how everyone is progressing, on-line quizzes should work well (Jenkins, 2004).

Further into the future….I plan to try and keep up with the every changing world of technology. Some changes happen so seamlessly that I can’t really even remember when they started (jump from portable disc players to iPods and the progression of phones from analog to digital to smartphones) and others have been quite abrupt (change from cash to debit cards.) The next 10 years will be very interesting from a technological standpoint. Things are changing and progressing so quickly that if someone were to blink they might fall behind.

References

Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/

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

Jenkins, M. (2004).  Unfulfilled promise: Formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, i, 67-80. Retrieved from http://insight.glos.ac.uk/tli/resources/lathe/documents/issue%201/articles/jenkins.pdf