Learning Experience, Skills Development and Knowledge Construction

Goal Progress:

In my initial plan I wrote about how I had been laid off again this year and did not know what I would be teaching in September. Since then I have been recalled into a position. I will be back to the same school, and still in student services. However, I will no longer be in special education, I’ll be working in the learning center case managing students with learning disabilities (as apposed to intellectual disabilities). It is defiantly not the same job, however it is not a completely different one, like I thought it would be, so I am very happy about that. When I wrote my first post I did not think I would be back in student services, so I figured I would be able to have a class blog come September. Since I will not actually have a class this will be rather difficult. However, I have decided that I will create a blog anyway. It might only be for future practice, yet I hope to use it to post study skills and tips, study guides and other information that will be useful to the students on my case load. I’ll also make sure to have a section or possibly I dedicated blog for the basketball program I coach in. My second goal was to work on having more student work result in creations that they can share/publish online. Again this will be a bit challenging since I will not have a class of my own in the traditional sense. However, since all students at my school have blogs I can still help by encouraging they post their quality work from their other classes.

Experiences with the LMS platforms and digital tools:

More directly related to this class, I really wanted to push myself to try new things and not fall back to using tools that I was already familiar with. I am pretty proud that I have managed to do just that. When doing the storytelling discussion post I could have easily updated and posted a pre-existing Prezi. Instead I was able to use the opportunity to test out a new digital tool that I had been meaning to try for some time now and made an online resume using re-vu. Similarly, with the LMS group project I took a different path then I normally would have and worked in a group on a non-profit society, as appose to staying in an educational setting which I am far more comfortable with. I also took the lead on researching the LMS that I knew the less about, Eliademy and Edge-Edx. Finally, for my final assignment 2/3 I chose to work with Moodle and not with Word Press a platform that I am already a little bit familiar with.

Most importantly, I feel that I will be able to use many of the new skills I have gained while completing this course in my teaching practice. While I will not be teaching planning 10 this year, I will be sharing my Moodle with my colleagues that are teaching the course, and keeping it in my back pocket for potential future use. I also feel very well equipped to create a new Moodle or a Word Press course in the future. I also know a lot more about LMS in general and feel pretty comfortable with the idea of teaching an online class, and very comfortable with the idea of using an LMS to support blended learning. Going through the process of creating my course for the project allowed me to narrow in on my values when it comes to online teaching. I found that I really wanted everything to be streamlined and ascetically pleasing. I also really wanted everything to be user friendly for the students. I could have guessed a few of these things about my teaching style, but others I learnt only through the process.

Learning and Knowledge Construction:

The reading materials –
The readings all seem to build on each other and many of them had practical advice that related directly to the LSM projects. In fact, I was able to make a few changes to my project after specific readings.

The discussions themes and questions –
I really liked how the questions were listed right with the discussion and the link to the reading. Everything was all in one place and that made the process easy to complete. The questions also really helped to focus my reading and the discussion. It was interesting and eye opening to be a part of several of discussions. There was quite a wide range in views which is educational and enjoyable.

The individual and group project work –
I learnt a great deal from the project work, particularly from project 2/3. As I have previously expressed I appreciate how it was hands on and practical.

Course Construction:

Personally I would have preferred to only have one site with all of the course content. As the course progress it got easier to sort out where everything was and eventually having to navigate the two sites had little to know effect on my learning. However, at the start of the course it took a fair bit of extra time to figure everything out and get into the swing of things.