Author Archives: Victoria Olson

Victoria is a grade 3/4 teacher and technology coach at West Langley Elementary in Langley, British Columbia. She is a student in the Masters of Educational Technology program at the University of British Columbia. Victoria co-founded #bcedchat, EdCamp35, and the EdTech Mentorship Network to increase networking between BC educators and to enrich the focus on professional development within the province. She is an Apple Distinguished Educator (Class of 2015), a Google Certified Teacher (GTAATX), and a Google Education Trainer. Victoria is an active member of her Personal Learning Network and advocates for online sharing of best pedagogical practices. She believes in meaningful tech integration and innovation in schools, helping teachers reach their professional goals with pedagogical development and technology.

ETEC 565A – Victoria’s Final Synthesis

This Final Synthesis provides a reflective overview of my learning and experiences throughout the last 13 weeks in ETEC 565A. The initial Flight Path assignment required me to detail my professional background and experiences with educational technologies, as well as to set some overall goals for the course. The Final Synthesis assignment serves to provide reflective analysis of those goals and other learning connections that have occurred throughout this course. I will conclude with descriptions of my new personal goals as I graduate from MET program this spring.

Flight Path Précis

I have been a Grade 3/4 Teacher & Technology Coach for 2 years, modelling pedagogical practice and technology integration for my staff while supporting them in those areas. Over the past year, I have worked to expand my technological repertoire through my enrollment in MET, engaging with my PLN on Twitter, and attending conferences and institutes. The professional growth that I experienced led to an abundance of technology-enhanced classroom projects and web publications by my students. As such, when measuring myself against the ISTE Standards for Students (2008), one of the standards that I prize myself most on is inspiring student learning and creativity in the classroom.

At the outset of ETEC 565A, I aimed to improve my understandings in three areas throughout the course:

Strengthening my understanding of LMS systems and best practices with their application
Balancing and improving assessment practice, including qualitative and quantitative methods and cyclical feedback, and
Better utilizing the available supports and stakeholders in K-12 districts to prevent teachers from needing to be a “Jack of All Trades” to effectively integrate technology into their practice (Nel, Dreyer, & Carstens, 2010, p.240).

Over the past 13 weeks, these goals were explored through my interactions with the course content, assignments, and peer discussions in ETEC 565A. This Final Synthesis Assignment will detail a thorough reflection of my experiences and learning throughout this course.

Module 1 – Theoretical Frameworks for Selecting and Using learning Technologies

Module 1 was a bit of refresher for me, as I had plenty of prior experience in using and applying the ISTE Standards for Students and Teachers (2008). Readings like Nel, Dreyer, & Carstens (2010) and Bates (2014) led to early considerations for my course goal that included stakeholder empathy and understanding across educational technology decision-making. However, most of the scenarios included in these readings were based on scenarios in higher education settings where personnel and IT support were portrayed as always readily available to instructors. While this may be true in an ideal system, it does not align with the realities of K-12 districts. For example, my district of 1800+ teachers could not possibly collaborate with the single district digital literacy teacher in order to make positive changes in their technological pedagogies. Of course, efforts are made in other ways to mitigate these differences, such as focus groups, site-based digital literacy coaches for local support, and other professional learning opportunities.

Bates (2014) SECTIONS model was a revisitation for me as well. I had originally explored it as Bates & Poole’s (2003) original publication in two earlier MET courses, so it was refreshing to see changes made that reflected modern shifts in the technological landscape. Additionally, I began to see patterns emerge in this literatures that were present other MET courses, namely, that all technological decisions come with benefits and drawbacks; there are no silver bullets.

This module reaffirmed my need for professional play when choosing and applying educational technologies. Learning the affordances and constraints of technologies will impact perceived understandings of how technologies can be applied (Norman, 1999). Professionals who interact with technologies can and will make connections with future opportunities for application. Stakeholders across educational settings need to gain understandings of purview of the others in order to make the most informed decisions about widespread technological roll-outs.

Module 2 – Presentation Tools: Spaces, Places, and Platforms for Learning

Module 2 introduced us to Coates, James, & Baldwin (2005) who critically examined LMS platforms and the implications of their widespread application in institutional settings like universities and colleges. This reading would provide a sound basis for reaffirming my understandings of instructional design coming before technology selection as well as providing me with a more detailed outlook on the intricacies of selecting mandated technologies, particularly their widespread impact and consequences for different stakeholders across educational systems. Coates, James, & Baldwin’s (2005) writings would also provide me with a critical overview of LMS platforms, pointing me to the benefits and drawbacks that I ought to look for as I began to develop my ETEC 565A course assignments.

This module also introduced case-based discussions in small peer groups, a pedagogical strategy which I later connected to Garrison, Anderson, & Archer’s (1999) article, “Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment.” These cases often portrayed a problem that had some easily-identifiable solutions, but also some that were more convoluted in nature, causing cognitive dissonance in my understandings of technology selection. Particularly, with the little knowledge I had with development of online curriculum, I struggled to make estimates of the time frames in which an average person could fill out a course shell, or create a website resource when there were other technological obstacles in the way. In the end, many of these cases called for purposeful goal-setting and streamlining learner tasks with clear pedagogical decision-making that aligns with those goals.

The module ended with an exploration of Ciampa’s (2013) study of student motivation in elementary mobile environments. I had a lot of experience with this particular study in MET as I used it to write a paper in ETEC 511 that explored elementary mobile environments. It was also a primary study model for the development of my research proposal for ETEC 500. The discussion during this week of the course called for us to reflect on our own teaching and learning environments and how mobile technologies weaved into them. Despite having written these papers and research proposals that were set to explore other examples of mobile environments, I had never really shared about my own. This was a positive opportunity to share how my school site is changing the typical model of a schedule-based mobile technology cart that provides 1:1 access to classes only at specific times, and instead, how we provide project-based pods of devices that allow access at all times in all classrooms, despite not being 1:1 on a regular basis. This has promoted small group engagement in a number of activities that are synchronously occurring, many of which that are student-led rather than teacher-directed. A key component of this structure is that teachers are provided with abundant technical support and professional development opportunities much like the primary subject in Ciampa’s (2013) study.

Overall, this module pushed me to reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of LMS environments as well as my own environments and experiences as a teacher of blended learners. I consider myself technologically savvy and I prize myself on efficiency, so I often underestimated the time it might take to develop online learning environments and student tasks when considering the case-based discussions. I would also say that being absent from the classroom this year has also impeded my sense of need for time. Now, later in the course, I would offer more time in these cases to reflect and make changes for pedagogical and assessment quality and consistency throughout online course structures.

Module 3 – Interaction and Assessment Tools

This module introduced us to the idea of online interactions, community building, and assessment practices, particularly in computer-mediated learning spaces. Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (1999) outline a model of critical inquiry in text-based environments that feature cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence. I hadn’t considered simplification of my online learning experience to components such as these, but each of them are very important to facilitation of a quality learning experience. First, cognitive presence is created through interaction with readings and course materials and the communication of thinking associated with them. Second, social presence builds a community for the purpose of both scholarly and affective goals; sociality in a learning setting brings joy to the experience. Lastly, teaching presence is pivotal as instructors dictate the design of online courses, which in turn allows for the prior two components of Garrison, Anderson, & Archer’s (1999) model to flourish. This model was a major consideration while I developed Assignments #1 and #2, the introductory module and content module, respectively.

Meanwhile, our small groups were exploring the pros and cons of asynchronous and synchronous communications through our shared Google Docs. This activity got me considering the balance of these communications types within my own classroom and even how I interacted with my MET peers and groups I’ve worked with in the past. While I appreciate the space and time that asynchronous communications have provided me throughout the last 3 years of learning online, there is something to be said for the camaraderie and “realness” of a cohort of students experiencing learning in the same physical room. This activity also made me consider the balance of communication types and styles as I developed my ETEC 565A course assignments.

As we moved further into this module, I revisited Anderson’s (2008) “Towards a theory of online learning”, where another model outlines learner-, knowledge-, community-, assessment-centred experiences when learning online. This article re-immersed me in the considerations of each stakeholder in the education system, and that we shouldn’t lose sight of academic goals in favour of student comforts:

““we must be careful to recognize that learner-centred contexts must also meet the needs of the teacher, the institution, and of the larger society that provides support for the student… For this reason, I have argued […] that this attribute may be more accurately labelled as learning-centred, as opposed to learner-centred.” (Anderson, 2008, p.47)

It is good to step outside of your comfort zone and understand a topic from another lens, much like I have been doing in this course. I may never teach online, but at least I have developed an understanding of online pedagogical designs and how they differ from a synchronous classroom experience.

This portion of the module was also a great step into the assessment of learning, as assessment is a primary driver of student motivation and engagement (Bates, 2014; Gibbs & Simpson 2005). Gibbs & Simpson (2005) assert that “students work out for themselves what counts — or at least what they think counts, and orient their effort accordingly” (p.6). I absolutely believe that this is true; you see students cut corners all the time, especially when there isn’t emphasis on a particular criteria or process in a classroom space. When I return to the classroom, I want to focus more on the development of learning skills – particularly soft skills like creativity, collaboration, and communication – so that my students will be able to adapt to different types of challenges through academic content.

Module 4 – Social Media

This module was right up my alley because I’ve used social media for professional networking and learning for almost 3 years. The power of social media – in my case, at least – cannot be overstated. It has provided me with ample professional opportunities including exposure to the MET graduate program, involvement as a session facilitator in conferences, and opportunities to become a part of groups like Google Certified Innovators and Apple Distinguished Educators. Twitter was the tool that brought me all of these opportunities so I related well with November’s (2012) blog post on the topic.

This module also explored the integration of multimedia with learning tools, including using SECTIONS (Bates, 2014; Bates & Poole, 2003) to evaluate multimedia technologies (Boyes, Dowie, & Rumzan, 2005). This article stood out to me because even though it focused on Flash Media specifically, it served as a fantastic model for other technological analyses and thus, decision-making. In the end, this article helped me to choose VideoScribe as the media for creating my digital story for Assignment #3.

Lastly, this module explored the issues of copyright and digital citizenship, topics which I have visited in other MET courses. This was a timely topic due to the need to use Creative Commons images for our digital stories. Through a little bit of research, I found a resource called The Noun Project (thenounproject.com) that is a Creative Commons-friendly site, allowing artists to upload icons and for users to download them to use with attribution or purchase to use royalty-free. In an added bonus, I shared this on Twitter to our #ETEC_565A hashtag, and another person in our course benefitted from that sharing. Seeing Edwin’s video discussion sharing his reflection from the digital stories was a fitting ending to the social media module.

Module 5 – What’s on the Horizon?

One of my other courses in the MET program, ETEC 522, focused primarily on the “what’s next” aspect of educational technologies, particularly from a venture perspective. Module 5 in ETEC 565A focused on the futuristic aspect of educational technologies from a pedagogical and logistical perspective. For example, Alexander (2014) discusses the nature of ubiquitous access and blended learning across future higher educational institutions. While an uncertain topic in and of itself, scholarly musings may be shaping the future of this field of study. I would love to see the “two cultures” of online and blended learning emerge in higher education as Alexander (2014) outlines them. However, I am uncertain that 10 years will be enough for us to see these changes across whole institutions. While the nature of post-secondary learning is indeed changing, there are still disconnects in programs that should be on the cutting edge of innovation, particularly, teacher education programs. Additionally, the readings in Module 5 fail to address K-12 settings, which may move faster than higher education in some cases, and perhaps provide further influence on future change.

Assignment #1: Online Delivery Platform Evaluation Rubric

This assignment was our first graded project during ETEC 565A. It was a small group, collaborative assignment that was to be completed in a short time frame. We had to assess a specific case and develop a technology platform rubric that would meet the needs of the case. This assignment had both positive and negative challenges. While our group collaborated together well, we struggled with the short time constraint (just over 1.5 weeks to complete the assignment) as well as time zone differences when attempting to set up synchronous meetings. We worked through Google Docs to split up the work and to leave correspondence and feedback for one another when particular sections were completed. The positive challenges included developing the actual content within the rubric, and matching it to the case study’s particular needs. In the end, most of the rubric we developed could be applied to any site’s general LMS selection process, but we could have organized it to fit our specific case more effectively. In the end, this assignment got me thinking about what components one might need to analyze before selecting an institution-wide technology such as an LMS.

Assignment #2: Introductory Module

The Assignment #2 criteria called for the creation of an Introductory Module to a course that would be taught online. Although the course was encouraged to be something that we had taught before, I am currently in a transition from teaching younger students (Grades 1-4) and moving up to Grade 5 or 6 and am looking to develop new curriculum for that age category. I chose to design a unit of study from the Grade 5 science curriculum: simple machines. This turned out to be an ambitious endeavour because I had to develop a unit and adapt it for online consumption for Assignment #2. However, in the process, I collected a number of useful resources, online interactivities, and assessment strategies for both my course and using the unit in my blended classroom.

This assignment was completed primarily through backward design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). I decided on the outcomes that I wanted my students to achieve through the development of specific assessments and then created a rough skeleton of the progression from little to no background knowledge on the subject to being competent both in discussion and with hands-on, topical tasks. This progression evolved into an overall course schedule which greatly aided in the development of the introductory module as well as the creation of the next ETEC 565A assignment, the content module. I wrote the introductory module to the course as I would like to see it from a student perspective, even though MET courses have been my only reference point for online-only learning.

Another key component of this assignment was learning about the technological environment that I was building the course within: Moodle. I hadn’t used Moodle at all prior to this and I tapped into a number of online tutorials as well as relying on ETEC 565A’s Q&A forum in Connect to solve problems that I ran into. I learned a lot about Moodle in this period of time, and worked to design a cohesive and flowing organization of my content, including progression buttons and a graphic user interface for the front page. Even though the latter was not required for this assignment, it was created in experimentation and I liked the overall look and feel that it provided for my course home page. Choosing a design and layout that provided consistency to the user was important to me at this stage.

Throughout the process of completing this assignment, I also relied on an ETEC 565A peer, Randy, as we provided cyclical feedback for one another. It was very helpful to have another set of eyes on my work and to see the progress and shape other courses could take. These types of relationships have been invaluable during my time in MET. They provide informal formative assessments that greatly aid in overall learning. In my case, this feedback informed both the content that I was developing as well as the user-friendliness of the technology itself (Bates, 2014).

Assignment #3: Content Module

Assignment #3 was a natural progression from the creation of the Introductory Module. While the latter was focused on a broad outline of course expectations, the former promoted our pedagogical executions of those plans. Also included in this assignment was the creation of a multimedia production through the integrated Digital Story assignment.

Since the development of our Introductory Modules, I was flip-flopping on which content module to develop within my course, Simple Machines for Science 5. There were many areas of the course that would have been fun to develop! I ended up choosing to develop Module 1, both as a linear progression from the Intro Module but also because my digital story theme fit into that particular module.

When choosing my digital story topic, I reviewed Levine’s “50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story” (2016) and some of the multimedia tools he lists there. For my storyline, I decided on demonstrating how simple machines are used in everyday life, and to outline the 6 basic categories of simple machines through this narrative. I ended up choosing VideoScribe because of the control that it provided with the canvas, slides, text, and images associated with the story. Additionally, it aligned with Boyes, Dowie, & Rumzan’s (2005) assertion that: “Novices in a subject area might have difficulty attending to relevant cues within animations, so text labels and supporting contextual information is critical in designing educational resources” (p.3). The final product of the digital story fit well with Module 1 in my course, as the first week of that module was an introduction to the 6 categories of simple machines.

The development of the entire content module seemed easier than it was to create the introductory module, probably because I opted to create such a detailed schedule of activities for the entirety of the course in that assignment. That intensive scheduling and outlining paid off later, though; I had a list of activities and potential resources for myself to draw from when I began completing the content module. However, my list of “interactivities” (games, challenges, or activities my students would be required to complete online) had to shift due to the fact that some of the original links had been removed. This is something to take heed of in the development of online courses: digital multimedia can be “notoriously unstable, here one day and gone the next” (Hobbs & Jensen, p.6).

While developing the assignment content, I focused on building a high-quality module that would engage Grade 5 students in course readings, viewings, and interactivities while promoting the initiation of peer-to-peer discussion, community-building, and collaboration. I emphasized importance on gradual sequencing, foundational scaffolding, and appropriate communications between the HTML pages that I developed. I also provided consistency of user experiences across the course pages through the inclusion of buttons and the GUI menu, and ensured that outside links would open in new pages so that the user wouldn’t lose their place in the course framework. I also focused on creating interactive components and activities that may promote self-assessment of content understandings (Bates, 2014).

The creation of a fully online course was admittedly artificial to my own use as I will not be teaching primarily online at any time in the near future. However, the skills that I developed may be applied in the future and the content that I created can be transferred to that of a classroom, blended or otherwise. Additionally, I now increasingly empathize with the need for time, maintenance, and support resources for online and blended course development.

Assignment #4: Final Synthesis

The act of completing this assignment and reflecting on the entirety of my experiences in ETEC 565A has been beneficial. Through a thorough analysis of my participation, work, and growth throughout this course, I have drawn further conclusions in my overall learning that I might not have made otherwise. Moon (2001) may categorize this as “dialogic reflection,” where the learner “‘step[s] back’ from the events and actions” resulting in new metacognitive connections with the course materials (p.13).

What’s Next for Me?

Taking this year off from teaching to complete my graduate studies has caused a gap in my usual understandings of current technologies and apps. Being away from the classroom means that I am absent from authentic opportunities for pedagogical applications of the technologies I learn about in MET. With that said, I have also improved my abilities to produce digital multimedia across several courses in the program. As I move forward in my educational technology endeavours, I have 3 goals:

Continue to engage in the professional networks that I am a part of, including Apple Distinguished Educators, Google Certified Innovators and Trainers, and my Twitter PLN
Explore new technologies and refresh on ones that are continually updated
Blog and publish shareable digital resources through my website, techteacheronamission.com

Prior to the MET program, I was highly involved in my Twitter PLN which led me to opportunities to apply to be a part of other networks such as Apple Distinguished Educators and Google Certified Innovators and Education Trainers. Over the past two years, I have worked on these applications and was accepted into each program, admitting me access to an abundance of resources in the form of colleagues and digital teaching and learning materials. Of course, networks such as these are highly valuable, but only when one takes the time to regularly tap into them. I have not been in a position to engage in those communities to the extent that I would like to, partly because of my high involvement in the MET program, but also because my personal life is busy (wedding planning & travels!) at the moment. When I complete this course, and subsequently, the program, I wish to involve myself more highly in these networks to learn from and collaborate with like-minded educators across the globe (Bates, 2014).

As I move forward in my teaching career, I have witnessed both new technologies emerging and existing, quality technologies constantly updating. The world of technology start-ups feels like a rat race where each company needs to have the newest and coolest features in order to stay on the cutting edge. I want to re-invest some time in screencasting apps like Explain Everything that are updating to include collaborative features. I also want to brush up on my use of Google Classroom, as it was updated heavily this past September. There are some new technological niches I’d like to explore as well, such as makerspaces and 3D printing. I will be exploring the role that each of these technologies might play in elementary learning environments.

Prior to my involvement in MET, I would regularly share and publish digital resources and app overviews to my website, techteacheronamission.com. When I was balancing MET and my regular work schedule, it became too difficult to keep up this aspect of my website. I significantly slowed down the amount I was blogging and sharing resources. The only time I shared my work was through Twitter or by publishing the professional development sessions that I would share at conferences. When I blog and publish my work, I aim to create more high-quality resources that can be used by a broader audience of educators. Particularly, digital peer commentary and collaborative contributions to resource improvement also helps me to grow professionally (Cheng & Ku, 2009). This is something I would like to invest more time into again as soon as I have the time and space to do so.

These goals focus on my continued professional growth through technological exploration and networking. Since I will no longer be involved in the MET program and courses like ETEC 565A which expose me to a broad network of peers and learning technologies content, these goals will keep me current and involved in the field of educational technology.

Concluding Thoughts

At the outset of ETEC 565A, I aimed to improve my understandings in three areas throughout the course:

Strengthening my understanding of LMS systems and best practices with their application
Balancing and improving assessment practice, including qualitative and quantitative methods and cyclical feedback, and
Better utilizing the available supports and stakeholders in K-12 districts to prevent teachers from needing to be a “Jack of All Trades” to effectively integrate technology into their practice (Nel, Dreyer, & Carstens, 2010, p.240).

I believe that I definitely achieved these goals as I feel that I now have a novice understanding of possibilities with Moodle (from a teaching perspective) and Connect (from a student perspective). ETEC 565A used more features from these LMS platforms than any other course that I’ve been a part of so far. I was very open to what ETEC 565A could add to my existing pedagogical and technological toolkit and I learned more about what I would use or not use depending on the context of my teaching (online, blended, or otherwise). While some of the technologies we were required to use do not align with what is available at my school site, there is transferability in some of their affordances that fit with my existing practice as I continue to engage in professional learning in the field of educational technology.

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). Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/

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

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A framework for selecting and using technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective teaching with technology in higher education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Boyes, J., Dowie, S., & Rumzan, I. (2005). Using the SECTIONS Framework to Evaluate Flash Media. Using the SECTIONS framework to evaluate flash media, 2(1). Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.186.6505&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Cheng, Y. C., & Ku, H. Y. (2009). An investigation of the effects of reciprocal peer tutoring. Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 40–49. Retrieved from http://ac.els-cdn.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/S074756320800112X/1-s2.0-S074756320800112X-main.pdf?_tid=13b20292-f2d5-11e5-8010-00000aacb362&acdnat=1458943447_a82642cc80f4e6ec6011233f435bdc9c

Chickering, A. W. & Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.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

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Retrieved from http://www.anitacrawley.net/Articles/GarrisonAndersonArcher2000.pdf

Hobbs, R. & Jensen, A. (2009). The past, present, and future of media literacy education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 1, 1-11. http://jmle.org/index.php/JMLE/issue/view/1

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for students. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards/standards-for-students

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers

Levine, A. (2016). 50+ Web Ways to Tell a Story. Retrieved from http://50ways.wikispaces.com/

Moon, J. (2001). Reflection in higher education learning. Working Paper 4. York, UK.: The Higher Education Academy.

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

Norman, D.A. (1999). Affordances, Conventions, and Design. Interactions, 6(3), 38-43. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=301168

The Noun Project. (2016). The Noun Project. Retrieved from http://nounproject.com

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Shaping Futuristic Thinking

Futuristic topics are highly challenging to consider, weigh, and assess. The authors of these types of writings typically work to expose how the patterns of predecessor tools and trends will inform the tools and trends of the future. Deeply woven into this issue are the social and cultural implications of these innovations to the places in which they are being developed, along with the growing disparities between western technologies and their applications when compared to rural and underdeveloped parts of the world such as Asia or Africa. Even though the readings from this week all pertained to the future of higher education settings (which I don’t plan to be a part of for some time after graduating this spring), they still spark a number of questions:

Which trends or predictions have the potential to stick?
Can maker education fit in outside of the science (I.e in the arts) in higher education?
Is ten years enough to close the massive gap that still exists in creating blended learning models in educational settings, higher ed or otherwise?
Do MOOCs represent the open-ended and personalized spirit of learning that Alexander (2014) alludes to in higher education institutions of the future?
Does professional development need to become more self-directed and personalized like Alexander’s (2014) discussion of our future students? Should instructors all have access to PD mentors as students would have academic mentors for personalization?
Can these writings in and of themselves work to shape the future – do they plant ideas – for people who are exposed to them, spurring them into action?

MOOCs have always been a strange and unexplored aspect of the online world for me. I was always immersed in social media collaboration and networking with other educators; I never struck out to pursue learning in these seemingly more formal settings. To be honest, I always assumed that the schools that offered them actually utilized them in admissions and crediting processes so I was disappointed to read that this is not the case (Bates, 2014). Upon reading further, it seems that the structure of the courses is indeed there, but they frequently lack the support and feedback that is indicative of a tuition-paid university course.

ETEC 565A in particular has had me focus increasingly on online learning and pedagogical designs and how they differ from in-person or blended approaches. When considering the speed at which education is taking up these initiatives (hint: it feels much more slow than these readings suggest), I especially notice the social and political aspects that are holding us back. Alexander (2014) mentions the “decline of tenure,” for example, MOOCs suggest an openness that provides access to high-class educational content with nominal fees, yet we see instructors continuing to fight for these securities and institutions continuing to fight for standardization and control in educational systems. This occurs not just with universities, but in government too. Yet, even in programs like MET that are somewhat standardized, we all seem to hold a different degree depending on our experiences in the program: no two students are going to experience it in the same way as the other.

I believe that a major reason that educational social pressure against personalization and digital solutions is because the teacher/instructor/school has always been the source of information. Since we are no longer, it has disrupted traditional teaching and learning and has trickled down into the social and political hierarchies that be. For me, it is Bates (2014) who hits the nail on the head when we consider these issues: “What is needed is information management: how to identify the knowledge you need, how to evaluate it, how to apply it” (Bates, 2014, 5.6.3). We need to reevaluate the knowledge students might need from us as instructors and how we provide access and organization of that knowledge so that they can apply it. The consistent answer that I’ve seen is that this should come in the form of support, feedback, and guidance, with increased onus on the learner rather than the instructor.

References

Alexander, B. (2014). Higher education in 2014: Glimpsing the future. Educause Review, 4(5). Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/higher-education-2024-glimpsing-future?utm_source=Informz&utm_medium=Email+marketing&utm_campaign=EDUCAUSE
Bates, T. (2014). MOOCs. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/chapter-7-moocs/ (Chapter 5)

Update: Content Module, Reflection, & My Digital Story – Getting Ready with Simple Machines

Here is my digital story:

Content module link + reflection to come in a couple of weeks!

UPDATE: Addition of Content Module & Reflection

Link to Simple Machines for Science 5 Content Module

Assignment Reflection

This assignment was a natural progression from the development of our Introductory Modules, helping us to build upon the knowledge we’ve already gained throughout ETEC 565A. Throughout this reflection, I’ll refer to each part of the assignment criteria and write an overview of the creation process and subsequent learning associated with it.

Purpose, Rationale, & Audience (Introduction – not part of assignment criteria)

This content module was developed with a Grade 5 student audience in mind, with me acting as the instructor for the course. The content in Module 1 of Simple Machines for Science 5 aims to contain a balance between text, images, and multimedia components (Bates, 2014; Siemens, 2003) that provide a weekly amount of science work that could be comparable to a typical in-classroom or blended classroom experience. I also tried to decrease reading assignments to large and difficult-to-read websites as Grade 5 students can present with widely varying reading levels; anything from a Grade 2 to a Grade 8 reading level can be present in a regular Grade 5 classroom, and online environments can be less forgiving in terms of literary support. These considerations led to the selection of appropriately consumable multimedia resources and assigned discussion topics for Grade 5 students across the 2 weeks embedded in Module 1.

I developed the “Parent Portal” during our Introductory Module assignment. However, it is worth mentioning here, as parent support is pivotal in supporting the learning of younger students, particularly in environments like online courses which can feel initially less structured. Within the course Moodle environment, the Parent Portal acts as a space for parents to turn to as they support their child with their online studies, from weekly discussions to more formal assessments.

Splash Page with Customized GUI

Interestingly, I felt that this was a component that I wanted to integrate when I develop my Introductory Module. When first experiencing an online course, these design components are extremely important and set an overall perceived expectation for the user (Bates, 2014; Norman, 1999). This was a challenge because I developed it as I first was learning how to use Moodle. I developed each of my icons in my GUI through the use of Canva.com which is a webtool I’m extremely familiar with. However, once I inserted the image designs into Moodle, I had issues with everything from spacing to image resizing which I had to solve by some backend HTML editing. There were many portions of the assignment where I found myself glad that I knew enough HTML to make these changes – this was one of them. I developed the GUI to navigate to all the different modules that would be included in my complete course shell as well as important pages, such as the one that points to assignment overviews, the Parent Portal, and weekly instructor announcements.

Complete Learning Module with Subject-Specific Pages

Because of the groundwork laid in my prior work on that assignment, I found the development of the content module much easier. I already had such a strong framework for how I wanted to play out the course content and I was more familiar with developing content within the Moodle environment as well. The overall course schedule of activities for Simple Machines in Science 5 was an immense help in beginning to set up the structures of my first content module. This was my springboard for the development of the content and activities that would follow. In fact, many of my resources and “interactivities” (interactive online games, challenges, or activities) were already chosen as I created this schedule. However, some of the online interactivities that I had originally planned had broken links – the content had disappeared! – and I had to change what I was originally going to do. This is something to take heed of in the development online courses or learning experiences: some of the resources you’re depending on may not be there for you in the future. As Hobbs & Jensen (2009) state, online multimedia such as this can be “notoriously unstable, here one day and gone the next” (p.6).

The content that I developed was intended to provide scaffolding for future assignments, complete with integrated media and graphics to grab the attention of young Grade 5 students (Bates, 2014). This module was a general introduction to the subject of simple machines, providing a broad overview of the different categories of simple machines as well as corresponding terminology that we would run into throughout the course. This approach intended to give students an understanding of the overall course content while also giving them a space to refer back to whenever they might misunderstand a term or course concept in the future.

Online courses can easily become text-heavy, especially when presenting content that will be scaffolded throughout the course such as vocabulary. The inclusion of embedded media and interactivities in my course was purposeful as to prevent the “overused and abused” nature of text in media (Siemens, 2003, para. 6), especially for the betterment of experience for young students. Videos supplemented text materials, sending a congruent message about course content. Interactive games, challenges, and activities allowed students to become more involved with the content, or test and/or apply their current knowledge. As I stated earlier, these components were browsed and selected as I created my course outline in the Introductory Module assignment, but I made small tweaks as necessary to improve the flow of the modular topic.

Digital Story

The development of my digital story came before I actually started to work seriously on my content module although I had no idea how it was going to fit it in yet. After some thought about what kind of digital story I would be creating, I made the decision of which module I was going to develop! My idea was to show how simple machines were so prevalent in our lives that I could use all 6 major categories of simple machines before I even left my house in the morning.

When I was choosing a technology, I was drawn to VideoScribe because of its engaging graphics and visuals, feeling that they would be especially appealing to a young audience. Secondly, having used VideoScribe once before, I knew that I could include both graphics and text elements, with complete control over how and where they appeared on the canvas. This allowed me to adhere to Boyes, Dowie, & Rumzan’s (2005) assertion that: “Novices in a subject area might have difficulty attending to relevant cues within animations, so text labels and supporting contextual information is critical in designing educational resources” (p.3).

I hadn’t used VideoScribe for over 2.5 years and I had previously used the iOS app, not the OSX app; I used the latter for the development of my digital story. I found that there are still many images that were unavailable in their free image library and I had to find Creative Commons media that matched my theme and content. I decided to pair VideoScribe with Camtasia 2 so that I had a more robust video editing experience and more control over the final content, including the addition of Creative Commons audio tracks.

From a pedagogical perspective, VideoScribe is engaging for young students because of the visuals, graphics, and fonts that would be appealing to their age category. The gradual build-in canvas feature makes the story seem more like a progression of events than if all of the elements existed in the frame from the beginning of the media production. I was giving a lot of general information about simple machines in a short period of time. By using different slides in Videoscribe, the content appeared more gradually making the information easier to manage. This directly helps students to scaffold and organize knowledge as they prepare to apply their understandings to interactivities featured later in the learning module.

This story actually fits seamlessly into the blended Simple Machines 5 course that I will be teaching next year. I can probably use it for some time to come, as the knowledge content within it is highly unlikely to change. This is a great story to share both at the beginning and at the end of a simple machines unit. In the beginning, it could be used as a hook – getting students to look around and try to identify everyday objects that could be classified as simple machines, even though we haven’t studied them in depth individually yet. Then, at the end of the unit, once we have taken a closer look at each machine type, they can review the “machines in your environment” activity, looking at their old data, identifying new simple machines in their environments, and ultimately drawing new conclusions from the reflection and review (Moon, 2001).

Discussion Forums – Individual and Group

Before I read that small group discussions were going to be a piece of criteria for the content module assignment, I already had planned to include them because of Garrison, Anderson, & Archer’s (1999) writings on the topic. Other than stumbling through the Moodle set-up of the small group discussion forum itself, the rest of this section was very simple and flowed easily with the modular requirements and outcomes. I decided to use a case study adapted from Breau, Dykeman-Gaudet, Jones, & Johnston’s (n.d.) Simple Machines Unit Plan that I found online. Case study analysis helps students to see alternative perspectives that they may not have otherwise considered (Kolodner, 1992). The small group setting would promote more intimate and focused conversations as students worked through the problem at hand (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999).

Assessment (not included in criteria, but I want to address this)

I chose to develop content for the topic introduction module, which meant that it was primarily overview materials and scaffolded knowledge for the entirety of the course. As such, no major assessments were included in this module, although students would be getting started on their first assignment by the end of the third week of the course (the end of the content module I developed). Instead, as an instructor, I would use these weeks to closely monitor and moderate discussions, provoking students to engage in further thought and questioning on the topic of simple machines. According to the course schedule, the students would participate in a half-point quiz a few weeks following the module I developed, which was the quiz I created for our Introductory Module assignment in ETEC 565A.

On a different assessment thread – the assessment of my own work – my ETEC 565A colleague, Randy, and I exchanged feedback on our content module development. We did the same on our introductory module and it was a huge help to have another set of eyes and some formative feedback as development of the assignment continued. Even when considering little things like links or buttons that were not working, or grammatical errors, peer feedback goes a long way to supporting a polished assignment product and provides further peer-to-peer social presence in my ETEC 565A experience (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999).

Conclusion

Overall, this assignment was less frustrating to complete than the Introductory Module because I had already established my overall design components for the course and I was familiar with the Moodle environment. The content was the only thing that had to be developed and there was less finicky, technical work to be done. Because the content was outlined through the creation of my course schedule and unit plan that I created for Assignment 2, I had a rough outline of Assignment 3 ready-made for myself. I worked to appropriately sequence and develop online modular content that would be balanced in text, imagery, and multimedia, and would promote student interactivity and engagement with the topic. I worked to include pedagogically-sound and engaging activities for students to interact with on a weekly basis. Overall, this assignment was fun to develop and has provided some groundwork for my actual teaching of the content in the upcoming school year.

Reflection References

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

Breau, L., Dykeman-Gaudet, D., Jones, C., & Johnston, J. (n.d.). Science Unit Plan – Grade 5, Simple Machines. Retrieved from https://elementarysciencestu.wikispaces.com/file/view/Science+unit+plan.pdf

Hobbs, R. & Jensen, A. (2009). The past, present, and future of media literacy education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 1, 1-11. http://jmle.org/index.php/JMLE/issue/view/1

Kolodner, J. (1992). An Introduction to Case-Based Reasoning. Artificial Intelligence Review, 6(1), 3-34. Retrieved from http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/generals/papers/Kolodner_case_based_reasoning.pdf

Moon, J. (2001). Reflection in higher education learning. Working Paper 4. York, UK.: The Higher Education Academy.

Norman, D.A. 1999. Affordance, conventions, and design. Interactions, 6(3), 38-43. Retrieved from http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conv.html

Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm

Professional vs Personal vs Just Being Yourself

The “digital footprint” or, as others call it – “digital tattoo”, is something that I’ve been aware of for some time. It really started becoming apparent when I was enrolled in my Bachelor of Education program at UBC: there was a presentation at least once a semester with a tone of fear behind it. Each session contained warnings of students who were denied teaching certificates or educators fired from jobs for seemingly minor things they had posted online. One such example was a student from New York who was denied the awarding of her teaching certificate from her university for a photo on her MySpace. She was holding a red Solo cup with the word “Pirate” etched onto it (one of those write-on cups), and was wearing a pirate hat folded out of regular white paper. You couldn’t even see the contents of the cup! To this day I wonder if that story was made up to incite fear into our social media use. I guess I could Google it and probably find out, but I haven’t.

As I entered teaching, I was less cautious than my UBC colleagues but I did take precautions to lock down Facebook and other media. Some of my friends went as far as deleting and/or “hiding” the entirety of their photos from public view – even from their friend connections online. Later, when I joined Twitter, I held the attitude that the media had to host only professional content, and nothing personal. Over time, I realized that forging professional relationships has a personal element, and I began to share a little bit more about my life. It also helped that I found my fiancé through that very network; my personal life got to be pretty known to those people I was trying so hard to hide it from in the first place! Now, I share some of my Instagram photography openly, posting it to my Twitter account selectively, but I still keep my Facebook pretty locked up, even though I have many professional contacts there, too. Most of my photos are of travel, hikes, natural beauty, or family, but my fiancé and I are craft beer enthusiasts, so that gets snuck in every once in awhile.

When considering students, we constantly have conversations about digital citizenship and the impact of what they post online. I’ll reiterate here what Keri stated in her post – it isn’t a single unit of study, it needs to be an ongoing conversation. Personally, I use snippets from Common Sense Media’s Scope & Sequence (2016) as well as Media Smarts (2016) to inform my digital citizenship curriculum. As I shared in my post last week, I use a lot of social media and blogging in my classroom, and teach digital citizenship through actual use of the media. For example, lessons such as Paper Blogging provide great scaffolding for online conversations through commentary.

Even though my students are really young, I start working with them on image copyright and appropriate citations. Since asking them to format citations in APA is a bit much, I often ask them to provide a website list to me (they also learn keyboard shortcuts REALLY fast this way!). Additionally, I show them how to cite images and what kinds of images they can actually legally use. We use physical theft as an analogy to using copyrighted images or plagiarizing websites online. This is a very difficult concept for them, and we’re not perfect at it by any means. If I had to improve in one area, it would be this one – even though my students are only 8 and 9.

References

Common Sense Media. (2016). Scope & Sequence: Common Sense K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/scope-and-sequence

Media Smarts. (2016). Digital & Media Literacy. Retrieved from http://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy

Twitter, PLN, Growth

In 2013, I dove headfirst into the world of Twitter. First, I used it primarily for professional learning, lurking on Twitter chats, collecting resources, and doing research. Very soon I began to participate, sharing what I was doing and openly accepting suggestions from others on how to improve or which tools to use over several subject areas. The learning curve was extensive and steep at first, but eventually became comfortable. In my case, Bates (2014) was absolutely dead on in his assessment that professional learning through social media promotes global collaboration, digital literacy, networking, and individually-driven learning.

In contrast, November (2012) misses a crucial part of what kept me coming back to professional use of social media: relationships. It was the people that I was following and who took the time to support me that were the most important part of my experience. I began filtering professional knowledge in my brain in a different way than before: it wasn’t what I knew, but what the people I followed knew. For example, I know to turn to Alice Keeler for information about Google Tools or to Gallit Zvi and Joy Kirr when I’m thinking about Genius Hour. There are countless other human resources in my PLN who have specialities that are ready and waiting to be tapped into. I even made this video in my first MET course for a project on Twitter – it outlines the stages of using Twitter for professional development

Following this pattern of my own steep professional growth, I wanted to lead my students through a similar experience of discovery and learning with social media. I set up a class Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Remind accounts under the name @EduMinions (our class theme). We set up Mystery Skypes with other classes around the globe, participated in global projects such as Global Read Aloud, and shared daily student work to hashtags like #mathphotoaday. My students also temporarily worked on a project on Twitter called #grammar911 where they could compose and edit each other’s grammar including capitalization, organization, punctuation, and spelling. Social media became a digital gallery walk or an announcement spot for fun news as we shared to the common hashtag #eduminions. There were many ways that we used social media as an exploratory tool that helped us to connect further with each other, families at home, and with other global classrooms.

Students began to learn the pros and cons of each tool, what they were used best for, and who should be using them (adult vs student). We worked through digital citizenship curriculum (which was also glossed over in November’s (2012) article but briefly nodded to in Bates’ (2014)). Students began to see that global connections were possible and began asking questions about other cultures, regions, or languages. Sometimes this led to self-directed or guided inquiry opportunities depending on class interest. An understanding of audience was also gained by students. They were very aware that people would see their posts and worked hard to perfect their work; perhaps even more so than if it had been just me reviewing it.

Courses do not necessarily need to be re-designed to fit around social media, but instructors certainly need to know the affordances of social media before attempting to harness them for use in a classroom space. Because there are so many types of social media, it’s a bit of a tall order to ask teachers to understand the affordances and constraints of them all. However, the primary audience needs to be considered – are you doing this for the students to see/experience? Or for a parent community? Or to connect with global classrooms? Each of these scenarios may call for a different tool with a different set of affordances. If you pick the wrong tool for the job, re-design may be necessary then. Time needs to be integrated in class to read, interact, and reply to these posts as well.

References

Bates, T. (2014). Pedagogical differences between media: Social media. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-5-5-social-media/ (Chapter 7, point 6)
November, A. (2012). How Twitter can be used as a powerful educational tool. November Learning [Weblog] Retrieved from http://novemberlearning.com/educational-resources-for-educators/teaching-and-learning-articles/how-twitter-can-be-used-as-a-powerful-educational-tool/

Assignment #2: Simple Machines for Science 5 (Intro)

Here is the link to my Moodle course for Simple Machines for Science 5.

You can navigate to the Introductory Module by clicking on the navigation menu or by scrolling down and clicking on the first page that says START HERE. The quiz can be found below that in Module #2.

Assignment #2 Reflection

This assignment took a lot of time for me as I have not taught the content beforehand, though I intend to teach it in the upcoming school year. I spent my first weeks of working on this assignment to research, build, and sequence the unit outline. My aim was to make it flexible for both an online course and a blended classroom so that I could use it later. Additionally, I had no prior Moodle experience so I spent an abundant amount of time learning about the Moodle environment and designing the layout to be more streamlined than some of the example courses that I explored. There were both rewarding and frustrating experiences in that process. My final submission shows the unit acting as a fully online course including an introductory and quiz for Grade 5 science students. My reflection below outlines several components of my experience in creating and designing it.

Unit & Overall Assessment Development

The first and most important aspect of this assignment was to develop a pedagogically-sound and age-appropriate unit of study. I began my research for my course content with some aspects of ETEC 565A literature in mind, particularly:

meeting the needs of online learners through best pedagogical practice (Anderson, 2008),
providing a motivating learning environment through the use of engaging technologies (Ciampa, 2013),
progressive assessments that scaffold through the course (Bates, 2014), and
detailed and clear communication about course requirements with a focus on cognitive, social, and teaching presence (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999).

With these components in mind, I started by developing some focus questions and learning outcomes for the course. I pulled several of these from the BC Science 5 Curriculum (2015), but I also added in a focus for simple machines in the students’ immediate environments and an overall understanding of simple machines and why they are pertinent in our lives. Later, these questions highly informed the development of the course schedule of activities. General course outlining, although difficult in moments, helped me to imagine the shape of the course, solidified the standards that I wished for students to achieve, and actually informed almost everything that I built thereafter. It made me glad that these aspects of the course development came into fruition first because I wasn’t very familiar with the content itself and needed a refresher on the physics of simple machines for late elementary students!

As the schedule and course began to develop further, I endeavoured to meet further considerations in the research such as small group discussion opportunities for students (Garrison et al., 1999) and varied assessment practices (Bates, 2014). This had a ripple effect across the content that I had already developed and I had to make sure I was making appropriate changes in each spot where one may find similar information. I worked hard to leave little room for inconsistencies across the course but it was difficult to do this; I needed to make sure information was detailed and clear, but some information needed to be repeated across a few sections within the course.

Through my unit research I discovered several interactive online resources, which made me really excited. I was aiming to have the course be both engaging and enriching to 10 year-olds, so I leaned more toward hands-on activities, games, and challenges over static text and images. As I developed the unit, it felt natural to create a progressive set of assessments where students could have interactive experiences and build their own simple machines. After reading Bates’ (2014) Assessment Appendix, I felt a need to slightly tweak the balance of interactivities, quizzes, and project-based learning present throughout the general course content. I opted not to include a paper or requirement for large written bodies of work (such as essays) because they are not necessarily fitting for the subject area or grade level; I felt that there are other means that can demonstrate young students’ knowledge of physics and simple machines better than the written word. Moreover, the students would be required to write posts and replies for weekly discussions. Therefore, major assignments in the course are inclusive of visual or audio-visual media with physical hands-on activities that may be more accessible and engaging to 10 year-old students.

Course Design

I took a number of steps to create a streamlined and attractive course design, developing a number of headers, subheaders, and graphic buttons through the use of Moodle and an online designing tool called Canva. Once I began to get a feel for how I could design the content layout in Moodle, I created a colour palette and selected fonts to make sure that these elements were consistent across the course.

However, it proved that Moodle can be a challenging environment to format graphics in. Despite having a WYSIWYG HTML editor (What You See Is What You Get), what you see wasn’t always what you got. As an example, sometimes <p> spaces would appear in the course even though I hadn’t entered them; it made my work look too spaced out and awkward. I altered and discarded some of the design components I had created because of these ongoing issues. Instead, I opted to use formatted tables to control spacing problems. Of course, this was time consuming, but now the layout and formatting is much more friendly to review.

Coates, James, & Baldwin (2005) discuss the importance of ease of use and course navigation from the perspective of different users of an LMS. After perusing several example courses, I really disliked that there were no navigation options at the bottoms of pages, especially on pages with large amounts of content; they felt clunky and difficult to use. As a remedy, I created button icons that matched my theme and hyperlinked them to advance or go back to pages in the order that they appear listed on the Moodle course home page.

It should be noted that watching tutorials on YouTube didn’t always help to fix the numerous problematic formatting situations I encountered. The version of Moodle available to us through UBC was very inconsistent with the versions featured in the videos, both new and old. I often watched a tutorial then clicked my way around to figure out the components on my own, but I think that the overall look and feel of my course ended up being all right in the end.

Quiz Development

Developing the quiz was challenging for multiple reasons. First, I hadn’t yet developed the specific content for the modules that the quiz was assessing so I needed to know what would be included. Second, because I’m not very refreshed with the specifics of the content, I had to do a little studying myself! Since my course assessment outline included two quizzes, I settled on creating the first quiz, the Simple Machines Quick Quiz which falls around the midpoint of the course. This quiz is intended to be a formative assessment for both students and myself. It is worth only 5% of students’ final grade for this reason.

As I developed questions for the quiz, I had to dive back into the content schedule overview that I had developed far earlier in the assignment process. I carefully looked over which foundational vocabulary, concepts, and simple machines would be included in what we’d cover so far by the point the assessment was to be delivered to students. I aimed to strike a balance in students defining terms and used some of the multiple choice questions and all of the “essay” questions to get students to critically apply that information. One of the major foci in the course is to get students identifying how simple machines can ease real-life work in their own environments, so some of the questions naturally flowed with that focus.

In order to learn about the quiz feature of Moodle, I spent some time viewing tutorials on YouTube, and of course, relied on some of the questions and answers in our ETEC 565A discussion forums in order to help me understand the affordances and constraints of Moodle quizzes. I experienced some cognitive dissonance with the development of grade boundary feedback: providing sweeping feedback doesn’t necessarily address specific problems in student understanding and learning (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005). To remedy this, I opted to use these scores predominantly as a piece of formative assessment, helping me to identify which students I would need to further support via synchronous correspondence. For students who achieved lower scores, the feedback reads that I would be video conferencing directly with those groups to help them better understand the foundational content we’d have covered so far, including vocabulary definitions and the components of some simple machines such as levers, wheels & axles, and pulleys. This intervention would hopefully catch as many students as possible who were struggling with course content.

Future Course Development

The quiz also got me thinking about the development of my course content module (Assignment #3), and the methods by which I may be disseminating materials. 10 year-old students would probably not be very engaged with consuming large bodies of text as content, so I opted to include points throughout the introductory module about tutorial videos available each week. While these might be time consuming to create, they could be utilized in future iterations of the course.

Although I outlined both communication and assessment strategies for the entirety of the course in my introductory module, I will touch on them here in my reflection.

Communication is made available through discussion forums, including a Q&A forum for course and technical issues, a parent portal for adult-to-adult-only communications, as well as through a specified Gmail account for teacher-student private conversations. Additionally, I have listed that I will provide synchronous communication options as students close in on assignments and for parent-teacher conferences midway through the course. I gleaned much of this balance from both my communication experiences throughout MET our group Google Doc activity where we discussed the implications of synchronous and asynchronous communications on student learning.

Student assessments for the rest of the course will be progressive in nature and vary from collaborative online experiences, to quizzes, to hands-on and individual physical creation of complex combinations of simple machines submitted through videos. I am still unsure as to which content section I plan to be developing further for Assignment #3, but I fully anticipate creating a rubric of assessment for an assignment so there is transparency on how students would be evaluated. Again, much of the balance of assessments was influenced by the Bates (2014) Assessment Appendix.

Something that really helped me was teaming up with Randy to provide feedback and support for one another in the final stages of module development. I hope that we can do that again in the next assignment – it helps a lot to have another set of eyes on your work.

Assumptions: Access & Parental Support

I had to make a number of assumptions in my course, including logistics and technology access for students, as well as the fact that parents would be involved in assisting with their course projects from home. Two particular assignments assume access to mobile devices that can take video as well as video software. If I actually taught in a fully online school environment, I would be sure to take time to set these as course registration parameters and/or look for ways to provide support or alternatives for students who lacked access to these resources.

This is part of the reason that I created a parent portal: it was an attempt to ease these issues but also a space to provide adult to adult communications when necessary to support at-home student understanding. The goal was to create social and instructional presence for students beyond the confines of the online course (Garrison et al., 1999). For example, the introductory module could be seen as a large and overwhelming amount of information for a 10 year-old. Therefore, I made it a requirement to review the introductory module with parents.

Conclusion

This assignment was a large exercise in professional growth and empathy for online course designers. The introductory module taught me about the inherent inflexibility of online learning environments, and the small margin by which instructors need to work to meet and support individual student needs (Anderson, 2008). Backwards design was an important and fundamental strategy in my work on this assignment; I am familiar with it as I use it frequently to create lessons for my own students. Additionally, I learned about Moodle’s affordances, constraints, and how to add different design elements to provide increased ease of use for students. Moreover, I worked through the nuances of issues of utilizing quiz and feedback components, and how these may or may not meet the needs of students directly but may provide formative feedback for both teaching and learning (Bates, 2014). Overall, this was a great learning experience for me, and I am pleased with the final product of my introductory module.

References

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

British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2015). Building Student Success: BC’s New Curriculum. Science 5 Core Competencies and Big Ideas. Retrieved from https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/science/5 on February 2 2016.

Boris: Harness Digital Assessment Tools

Boris’ case is a challenging one as time always seems to be a predominant factor that works against building in content according to student needs. Additionally, the case calling for both instant and formative feedback is a tall order, and one that a teacher doesn’t come by without either a steep technological learning curve or by dedicating abundant amounts of time outside of class to support either students or the creation of media.

Boris should probably begin by creating a series of video tutorials to reinforce the periodic table content that he is aiming to support. Since information about the periodic table would be comprised of mostly static knowledge in a Chemistry 11 context, he could very likely use these comfortably from year to year over multiple iterations of courses without changing them.

After creating the video tutorials, Boris could use a tool like Google Forms or Moodle’s built-in quiz application to have student quiz themselves, or use these to study for exams. Each of these tools could easily tell them what they did right and wrong; the tricky part here is giving formative feedback. I am not as familiar with Moodle’s quiz tool, but I know that Google Forms allows you to route a form according to the respondent’s entry. So, for example, if a student picked an answer of “False” incorrectly, they could be re-routed to a page that gave them feedback on the fact that that answer was incorrect and why. After that page, they could re-answer the question and continue along with the quiz. Likewise, if they answered “True” correctly, a page could appear that reinforced their response and told them why the statement was indeed true, and they would, again, carry on with the quiz.

This strategy would provide immediate feedback for response correctness as well as make an attempt at giving formative feedback. A drawback to these methods is that the feedback isn’t necessarily personalized as to why the student might respond correctly or incorrectly. Additionally, Boris would need to be insightful as to why students may or may not make particular mistakes; this insight would help to provide the best possible feedback to students as they quiz themselves. Lastly, it would take Boris some time to build, particularly if he was not familiar with the affordances of routing pages on quiz tools. However, if successful, he could also reuse these quizzes with immediate and formative feedback throughout future iterations of the course as well.

Digital Tools for Elementary Assessment

Both required readings this week emphasize that assessment is a primary driver of student motivation and engagement (Bates, 2014; Gibbs & Simpson 2005). However, they also point out the importance of a learning community and motivating student learning through other means such as interactive simulations or games, peer review and discussion, and consistent formative assessment and feedback.

One of my primary foci with assessment is creating a community of learning between my student peers. Student feedback and reinforcement is a major aspect of my classroom community. For example, when students are writing weekly blog posts for their blogs (which act as digital portfolios), they give feedback on each other’s posts and make edits in advance of submitting them to me for feedback. In providing weekly peer and instructor feedback through digital means, I have seen writing abilities shift dramatically in my Grade 3 and 4 students.

Another way that I try to incorporate self-assessment practices is through metacognitive reflection after recording student read-alouds. With young students, it is especially important that they can hear themselves read in order to make improvements. I use Explain Everything on the iPad to have students record their reading and listen to the playback. I equate this to “game film for learning” – as a former athlete, watching myself play was a powerful method by which I could improve. Students use their own recordings to improve attention to punctuation, expression, fluency, and to review texts for comprehension purposes.

However, just as the speed of ongoing, formative assessments like these can be powerful and easy to create, and therefore, the volume of assessments can pile up. A teacher cannot possibly review recordings of daily readings for every student, every day. Likewise, my students are constantly writing over and above – sometimes two or more posts a week – and it’s not plausible to give feedback on every single piece of writing. I have found the need to pick and choose the things I need to assess and allow students to develop and improve the rest of their work on their own. Despite being young, most of them absolutely take advantage of this time and the peer reinforcement helps to keep them on track, too.

As we develop our introductory modules, I realized how fluid my own assessment practices are and how different the requirements for online courses really are. Access to a blended model allows you to change the components of assessment that you’re aiming to include in your teaching depending on what students know. In contrast, online courses need to lay that all out for students in the beginning of the course and seem less flexible in catering to a group or a student’s specific needs.

References

Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Appendix 1. A8. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/5-8-assessment-of-learning/

Online Adult Learning in MET

As my only formal online learning experience, being enrolled in UBC MET has changed my perspective of what a learner-centred environment can look like. As Anderson (2008) states:

“we must be careful to recognize that learner-centred contexts must also meet the needs of the teacher, the institution, and of the larger society that provides support for the student… For this reason, I have argued […] that this attribute may be more accurately labelled as learning-centred, as opposed to learner-centred.” (p.47)

This particular reading was assigned in my first course in the program, and it is somewhat serendipitous to re-read it now in one of my last courses. In the beginning of the program especially, I felt very resistant to assignments or protocols that didn’t align with these concepts of best online educational practice that Anderson (2008) outlines, and more specifically, ones that didn’t take into account my personal teaching and learning contexts. While he does touch on the importance of contextual connection for formation of communities, it is also important to consider perspectives outside of your own as a student, such as what I am experiencing here in ETEC 565A. For example, I have never taught formal courses online and I have no intention of doing so in the immediate future, but considering how my approaches need to change in order to complete these assignments is both stretching my thinking and helping me develop empathy for online course creators. Learner-centredness isn’t just about pandering to the wants and needs of a learner, but also about supporting them in the moments of discomfort that occur in the learning process. But yes, some autonomy within those contexts is nice, too, whether for tools and content involved in the creative process.

For the most part, the MET courses I’ve taken have attempted to build peer-peer connections through the promotion of knowledge-building communities (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). Particularly, this would involve the building of understanding through asynchronous peer discussions. Peer motivation was frequently high in pushing understandings and asking questions to promote further learning. Sometimes this would include bringing in outside sources to support thinking within discussions. It was infrequent, however, for instructors to get involved in discussions. After asking a few instructors about this early in MET, they posited that instructor involvement often acted to shape opinion and create an inorganic learning experience for students. Later in the journey, I’ve found that this opinion will differ from instructor to instructor, but overall, they participate less than I would have imagined at the outset. (Natasha seems to be an exception to that rule and is very present and involved.)

Assessments in MET courses were often built around autonomous choice with specified learning goals such as development case-based reasoning skills (Rizzo, 1998), conclusive and confident discussion of nuanced topics, or effective media creation. These opportunities for learning sometimes provided feedback for future learning, but, unfortunately, I often found that either feedback was minimal or not informative enough for improvement in later assignments. Additionally, I’m not sure to the degree that these assessments would inform future teaching on behalf of the instructor. For the most part, I’m guessing it wasn’t that responsive of a process, as it seemed that course content remained the same regardless of overall performance by the cohorts I was involved in. In short, I found that I had to be my own advocate throughout my online graduate learning experience; if you don’t ever ask for the support, you’ll never know the answer, even if it’s a simple “I can’t help you there.”

As for how I might use the tools to promote interactions within my own courses, I’m certainly thinking about the blending of asynchronous and synchronous communications over several components of the course. I want to provide channels that students can choose from to meet them where they are comfortable, while still stretching understandings of online navigation and tool use. For example, I really enjoyed the opportunity to speak with Natasha to clarify questions re: Assignment 2. These types of short and simple chats – which can be archived for those who can’t make it – are great ways to provide synchronous and connected communications, and definitely enhance the ‘community feel’ of the course itself.

References

Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1994). Computer Support for Knowledge-Building Communities. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 265-283. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1466822

Rizzo, A-M. (1998). Inventing narratives in ethical reasoning in an administrative ethics course. Journal of Public Affairs Education, 4(1), 1-10. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40215365

Possible Solutions for Trinh

My first reaction to Trinh’s communication issue is that appropriate community-building and teacher guidelines for students need to be put into place within the Blackboard community. She should create a dedicated space for public questions much like our 565A community on Connect; every other MET course I’ve been in has offered the same kind of space for student queries. Through encouragement of questions to be publicly asked in a specified forum, Trinh would certainly cut down on the amount of online spaces she should be looking in to remedy student queries. Secondly, with a course as large as this one, it might be a good idea to establish that peers may also feel empowered to respond to other peers’ questions if they know the answer. For questions that require more privacy, Trinh should specify that students ask them while sending to a specific email (either her campus email or Blackboard email) to alleviate those questions from going to two different places. If there seems to be a matter that is common across private email requests, she could make an announcement to alleviate the issue instead of replying to each individually with long-winded responses. When students post in the incorrect location, she could kindly remind them of the appropriate protocol for questions (to the discussion board or to a specific email) in order to reinforce management on this issue.

Trinh could also work to create some social presence within the course in order to strengthen the learning community. Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (1999) define social presence as “the ability of participants in the Community of Inquiry to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to the other participants as ‘real people.’” (p.89) By promotion of networking and story sharing within the student group, peers could also be alleviating one another’s questions and supporting one another in coursework, sometimes even in online venues other than the Blackboard discussion boards (social media, Google Hangouts, etc.).

Additionally, Trinh is hoping for learner-centred outcomes so I would suggest some flexibility in her approach to the differing student timezones. If lectures are being livestreamed, I see no reason why those livestreams cannot be archived and asynchronously discussed later. For example, if you record using Google Hangouts on Air, it will automatically archive to a YouTube channel. Those videos can be linked in a discussion forum and that can be an area that students can tap into while the event is occurring as well as after it is complete. This also creates a learning artifact that can be used in future iterations of the course. If Trinh is looking to make these discussion groups more meaningful to students, she could use Garrison, Anderson, & Archer’s (1999) strategy of breaking into smaller groups to provide more focused discourse on any topical issues. If she wanted to provide feedback in these scenarios, she could have those groups create a general report on their primary discussion points so that she didn’t have to read and give feedback to every single post.

Lastly, it’s not mentioned in the case specifically, but I would be under the assumption that qualitative student feedback for such a course would be a nightmare. In a student-centred environment, I would make the assumption that Trinh is not assigning quizzes or tests (I have not experienced any such assessment throughout my MET experience), but that she would rather provide students with enriching learning experiences through creative assignments. These assignments could be primarily group-oriented, and she could even include peer- or self-assessment components in order to aid her own assessment and feedback. Of course, not knowing the specifics of what would be included in an introductory museology course, I am unable to imagineer what such assessment and instructor-to-student communications might look like.

References