Flight Path
Tell us a bit about yourself, your experience, and your goals for this course (or, perhaps, the MET).
I decided to follow the path to become a teacher while in high school. I would tutor elementary students after school and liked it so much that from that point on, that was my goal. Before even entering the B. Ed. Program, I had the opportunity to live and work in Giyani, Limpopo Province, South Africa. I worked in a rural part of Giyani in a grade 5 classroom with no electricity or running water. My resources were limited as you can see. Any form of technology was out of the question. After a year, I moved back home, did my year in the B.Ed. program and decided I wasn’t finished working abroad so I moved to Abu Dhabi, UAE right after I graduated as a newly qualified teacher. From living and working in one of the poorest places to one of the richest places, I was ready for the challenge.
I worked for 2 years in Abu Dhabi in the public education system where the entire class was ELL boys. At the time, the government was slowly introducing a new curriculum where things would change on a daily basis. It was so chaotic and mismanaged that you just had to go with the flow. I wanted a change so I switched to a private school in the UAE where I was able to teach both girls and boys. Each class had a Promethean board and this was when I was really able to incorporate technology in the classroom and opened up my eyes to the unlimited uses of technology. I left after year and now call Vancouver home again where I work with grade 7 students and kindergarteners.
My goals for this course are:
- Design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments (ISTE, 2008)
- Learn about LMS and create a course either using Moodle or Connect. I am familiar with Connect but not with Moodle. I hope is to learn more on this and then choose accordingly.
- Learn in what ways how to integrate social media into the classroom as a teaching tool.
In relation to my first goal, Moore (1989) outlines the three different ways students can interact when learning and/or studying and each of these require a mix of technology and media. 1) Interaction with Learning Materials, 2) Interaction Between Students and Teacher, 3) Student – Student Interaction (as cited in Bates, 2014). All students have different learning styles and educators need to keep this in mind when designing units and lesson plans. When students are using different learning materials, they can include text, video clips or LMS without the direct involvement of a teacher. Bates (2014) mentions that this can be reflective or an observable practice such as an assessed response like a multiple choice test or discussion contributions. The teacher-student interaction can act in different ways. The teacher acts more like a facilitator while in this position as opposed to leading direct instruction. I don’t agree when Bates (2014) states that the teacher is needed for higher order thinking questions when you can ask the same type of questions with technology. Student-student interaction I find works best in an LMS asychronous environment where they can talk online such as our MET courses.
I would like to learn more about LMS and why I should choose a specific platform as opposed to another one. Like I mentioned in my second goal, I am familiar with Connect only because of the MET program and the requirement to use it for most courses. I know many schools and classroom use Moodle and I would like to understand this type of LMS more. Having options to choose will benefit myself and my students. To put it into perspective, nowadays most teachers will not say to students you must use PowerPoint, we like to give our students choices that best suits their needs and learning styles. I don’t want to be limited to just Connect but a range of LMS platforms.
For my third goal, I would like to incorporate social media into the classroom. How do I do this? Well, I hope to discover more ideas throughout this course. I’ve heard of teachers, professors and administrators using Twitter as another tool and I am glad that we are using it in this course. I had never tweeted before but I signed up because I was curious to see how it unfolds. I understand this is just one of many different forms of social media and I hope to broaden my knowledge on this topic.
Explain what you want to learn about Learning Management Systems (LMS), assessment, social software, and multimedia.
With regards to Learning Management Systems, I would like to learn how to setup and create a course, unit or lesson using Connect or Moodle. The only thing that I’ve created that I think comes close to this is a WebQuest for my students. With assessments, I would like to learn more on creating and administering electronic tests, quizzes, digital portfolios, personal response systems, online surveys and online evaluation rubrics. Creating assessments using technology is not my strong point so I am hoping to change this.
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers