Author Archives: heatherwoodland

Lenora’s Need for Online Space

The first two ideas that I thought of while reading the case study were that Lenora may be able to create videos to share her professional development ideas with other Aboriginal educators and that Lenora may be more interested in developing a resource like a wiki which would allow other educators to contribute to over time.

I was not immediately dismissing her using a website. I would think a website is a better overall look than creating a series of videos or starting a wiki, but with the dial-up connection, (Do those still exist? Perhaps having lived in two major Asian cities in the past nine years, I had mistakenly believed that the rest of the world was now also connected by broadband.) her website would be visually sparse without the (efficient) ability to upload images and other content quickly. However, even in an image poor online environment, she could hyperlink to content hosted elsewhere. Her lack of experience creating a website does not lead me to shy away from offering it as a solution to her. Multiple websites are available that support new website creators in building what they seek. I looked at Richard Byrne’s blog Free Tech for Teachers to find out if he had compiled a list of such sites. In a 2012 blog post he had given eleven free tools for creating websites (“Free Technology for Teachers,” n.d.). Websites such as Wix, Weebly or Google Sites have a user-friendly interface and are easier than WordPress or Blogger for people creating a website for the first time.

Turning back to the two ideas that I had while reading the case study, a series of videos could be put on Youtube, and the link shared via email. But this seems insufficient for her needs. Not to mention the issue with uploading, though Lenora could take her video on an external hard drive and upload to Youtube from school. Since a wiki would take some time to learn and won’t have the visual appeal that many websites now offer, I am less fond of this suggestion after all.

I hope that Lenora would look into the available, easy website creators that are available for her to create her professional development website and collaborative community.

 

References

Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Free Tools for Creating Websites and Simple Webpages. (n.d.). Retrieved January 28, 2016, from http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/04/11-free-tools-for-creating-websites-and.html

 

If I was in Benoît’s position…

How might Benoît go about deciding whether to go with Moodle or Blackboard Learn? What questions might he ask himself? Come up with one specific question; be sure to explain why this is an important question.

 

Without (reasonable) access to the Help Desk, do I have the confidence and intuition to take on learning Blackboard Learn?

 

If I was in Benoît’s position, I think one of the first questions I would ask myself is to judge my ability to take on such a task. Often when I am introduced to a new type of technology, I like to google it and watch related videos on Youtube to see what others have to say about it. There are numerous tutorials available. I don’t know if this would be the case with Blackboard Learn but this is a starting point that I often use.

 

How much development time (in weeks) would you estimate Benoît would need to develop Business Writing, the online version? Be sure to explain how you came up with this number.

 

If Benoît teaches a 13 week course, I assume that compiling each week of the course would take 2-4 hours. The range takes into account the length of time it takes him when he first begins developing versus once he has put together a few weeks, I assume that with time he would become more comfortable and perhaps quicker. The range could also comes into play if some weeks of the course, such as the first week, require less building or have less (or more) content.

Total time to development (average) 39 hours, but considering the range development time could be as little as 26 hours and as much as 52 hours.

Cowboys and Airplanes: Heather’s Flight Path

Tell us a bit about yourself, your experience, and your goals for this course (or, perhaps, the MET).  

2015-2016 is my eleventh year teaching. Nine of my eleven years have been as a full-time classroom teacher while two years were as a TOC (teacher on call) in Vancouver. The subjects and ages that I have taught have varied over the last nine years. Though I trained as an intermediate Elementary school teacher, I have worked in both middle school and high school grades as well as some teaching in K-2.

I have used technology consistently in my classroom for six years. The last six years were a mix of grade levels and subjects, but roughly (except this current school year as I am teaching Grade 2) I was teaching Social Studies to the two earliest years of middle school (ages 11-13).

In my Social Studies classroom (and additionally in my English classroom, as I also taught a single group of Grade 6 English), about 25% of what happened in the classroom was in a digital learning environment. The most common technology used in my classroom was blogs (especially for reflections), an LMS (as a repository for resources and a place for online chat/ collaboration/ venue for peer evaluation and feedback) and various web 2.0 tools/ websites such as Canva and Blendspace (which has recently migrated to the TES website (https://www.tes.com/lessons?redirect-bs=1).

My goals in ETEC 565a are to gain knowledge and skills in the LMS Blackboard Learn, refine my understanding of setting up a Moodle course and gather tools to effectively judge and choose appropriate technologies for different learning situations.

Explain what you want to learn about Learning Management Systems (LMS), assessment, social software, and multimedia.

I have experience with course design and teaching in Moodle, Google Classroom, and Edmodo. My experience with LMS is adequate, insofar as I have always had a mentor to go to when I was unsure what to do. Usually, this mentor has been the ICT coordinator at the school where I work. I suppose that this equates to the ‘Lone Ranger and Tonto’ analogy made in the Nel et al. article Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. (2010, 240) Except that I am probably more the character of Tonto despite being the classroom teacher.

I have had the opportunity to explore making assessments that are ‘in’ Moodle like quizzes. I have moved away from Moodle in the last three years for two reasons. One reason that I stopped using Moodle was that it was easier to use Google Classrooms to reach my course goals and the second was that the assessment tools of Moodle (at least the ones that I had the skills to use) were only assessing the lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Bates supports this when he states “Although this form of assessment [quizzes] has its value in assessing comprehension and for testing a limited range of mechanical procedures, computing also supports a wider range of assessment techniques, from learner-created blogs and wikis to e-portfolios.” (2014, 249).

Whether looking at Moodle or Google Classroom, I have had few issues when dealing with multimedia, most LMS systems are user-friendly for the course designer. Though as I mentioned earlier, I have always had the benefit of a nearby mentor to help me with any issues that arose. (Even when my first mentor left the school that we worked at, for a job in Germany, I was able to troubleshoot issues via Twitter.)

Moodle

If I were to go back to teaching in middle school, I would like to be more confident to build a Moodle course on my own. As it stands right now, if I stay teaching primary school I would not need to utilize Moodle as an LMS. Having said that, I sometimes consider becoming more proficient in LMS course design in case I want to leave face-to-face K-12 teaching and work solely in online learning. There could be several scenarios where this would be advantageous.  Since I live abroad and work on contracts, I could potentially have the freedom to live in more places if teaching online. Secondly, I could teach online when/ if I move back to Canada solely or as I seek a face-to-face teaching job.

Connect/ Blackboard Learn

I have no experience in Blackboard except as a user, so I am interested in learning anything about course construction. However, I see Connect as a LMS mainly suited for post-secondary needs.

Lastly, having seen this course move to a WordPress blog as a venue for course materials and activities, I am interested in exploring setting up a course in a blog. I have been working in a couple of WordPress blogs for the last five years, so I would like to take on the challenge of creating a course shell in a blog.

Give your best estimate (guestimate?) about what resources you would need to master these technologies as a novice professional.

There are three resources that I think I will need to master the technologies in this course: time, examples and a troubleshooting system (whether that is self-directed such as a Google search or Youtube video or a more formal system, potentially even reaching out to my past mentors).

Time is finite in the course but my time management will be important. I hope to allow myself the time to explore and tinker in course design/ LMS course building.

Examples are equally helpful as well as detrimental. I hope to use examples for inspiration but not impinge on my creativity.

If I am to move away from the ‘Lone Ranger and Tonto’ analogy from Nel et al. (2010, 240), I hope to build confidence first while retaining a community of people and tools to use when I am unsure how to proceed.

 

References

Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age, Chapter 8. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved from http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346