Tag: Reflections

Resources, Resources, Resources…

While it seems on the surface that Dafna has very limited resources at her disposal, there are ways around the problem that would allow her to maximize the utilization of her resources, allow students to gain fully from this activity, and to promote interactions with the community school.

Organization

Most alternate schools have a close working relationship with the community school, and some even operate as a satellite program from the community school. In either case, Dafna can actually converse with the media arts teachers at the community school, to see if her students can actually spend some time at the school using the community school’s equipment. Within the VBE, there are schools with very strong media arts/dram program – their equipment would definitely be better than those that Dafna has at her alternate school. The working partnership can also give Dafna’s students the opportunity to spend some time at the community school, something that, from my working experience, alternate school’s students sometimes enjoy.

If that option is not feasible for Dafna, the fact that her students are doing an interdisciplinary curriculum at her alternate school also allows for incredible flexibility. From my understanding, students in an alternate program still have to complete their core academic classes (English, Science, Social studies, and math) while also enrolling in elective courses. Dafna’s music 10 students, while working on this music video project, still need to work on their academic courses. As long as Dafna helps her students in signing up for sections to do the media project, competition for the limited equipment is actually a non-problem.

In a typical four-hour day, for example, Student A can start the day by spending an hour filming in the neighbourhood, followed by an hour of math, an hour of science, and an hour of another elective course (those three hours can be used with more flexibility, as there are fewer/no issues with equipment). Student B can use the camera in hour 2, and C can film in hour 3, etc. The key is to provide equal time for all students, and to ensure that everyone can have access to the equipment.

Editing time would be the most demanding for equipment use, but again, a working partnership with the community school can easily solve the problem. Looking for the media arts’ classroom, Dafna can look for a spare block where the equipment would be sitting idle. At that time, she can take all of her students to the community school, and have them work on the editing part of the assignment. As all VBE’s high schools operate on a 2-day, 8-block rotation structure, Dafna can expect her students to have access for such equipment every other day, 80 minutes each.

Dissemination of Finished Project

Most alternate schools have a website that features the projects, event highlights, etc., on it. After Dafna’s students have finished creating their music videos, these music videos can be hosted by the school’s website, as long as they abide to some of the regulations set out by the VBE (for example, a student’s name can only be identified with their first name, and the initial of their last name, i.e. Ed Leung = Ed L.). To save server’s disk space, these videos can also be uploaded onto YouTube or similar video sharing site concurrently. This actually would allow for increased exposure, and from my experience working with students attending an alternate schools who may suffer from difficulties with their self esteem, the publication on a public domain may be viewed as extremely valuable for the students.

Raj and Multimedia

Three Important Questions Raj could ask himself when deciding which multimedia to include:

• What kinds of multimedia resources are available at his hands to use? From the case study’s information, it appears that he has videotaped Chief Cunningham and his stories. Raj has also taken over 100 pictures. Raj needs to ask himself if the number of video clips he has videotaped, and the number of pictures he has taken, sufficient to fill his module (or specific lessons, depending on how he plans his module).

• What technical skills are required by Raj to handle these multimedia resources, and is Raj capable of utilizing these resources? Raj may have the best resources available, but if he has never learned or does not feel capable of using various programs to incorporate these resources into his lessons, the whole exercise can prove fruitless.

• What does Raj’s school provide in terms of technological needs and hardware? Raj can produce the best multimedia lessons in the comfort of his home, but if the school does not have the proper equipment for him to show the materials to the students, or to allow the students to work on the assignments/activities he has designed, the lessons would not be useful. Raj’s lessons, unfortunately, need to be designed based on the system’s technological capabilities.

Do you think Raj can deliver this in a month? Explain your answer.

I personally do not feel that using 10 hours a week for four/five weeks to create a website for a 5-lesson module is very time/cost-effective (or is he using 10 hours in total to create the entire module?). Based on the amount of resources he has gathered, and assuming that Raj does have a good grasp on the technological skills required to use these multimedia resources, I think time would be best served for him to create a unit of 5 lessons that utilize his resources. In his unit, he can create multimedia presentations, create inter-activities for his students, and provide resources that students can keep.

One significant aspect in Raj’s lesson planning that I see missing is the power of the collaborative force of the students. Just because these students are in grade 5 does not mean Raj needs to spoon-feed them with all the information and present them with all the pictures and videos. His resources can be used as introduction to the content to which he wants to deliver. Students can participate in activities that would allow them to gain some hands-on experience exploring and discovering more to the content Raj is teaching. Better yet, why not conduct a four-lesson unit, and recap the lessons by taking the students to the Kwikwetlem Reserve for a personal visit? By comparison, anything Raj can create on his website would be uni-directional.

In conclusion, yes, Raj can probably create a website filled with multimedia resources in a month if he is planning to give 40 to 50 hours of his time doing so. However, time can be much better spent when he engages his students in a student-driven fashion of learning, and to provide them with a hands-on experience through a field trip.

Public space blogging

As an educator, the parents’ concerns or complaints raised about Noelene’s weblog assignment is not uncommon. However, I must also point out that parents actually know very little of what information their children are disclosing in the public forum through social networking websites and other online means. By comparison, the information that they may disclose on a weblog that they know will be marked by a teacher, and viewed by all fellow students, probably amount to little in the area of secrecy or privacy.

That said, this explanation likely will not satisfy the worrying parents. What I think Noelene can do to reassure the parents is to go over with the students (if she has not done so already), the availability for anyone to view the content that is published onto a public domain such as a weblog. She can also remind students that when they are composing their weekly reflection and discoveries for their “something kewl” assignment, that they need to take the necessary means to protect their own identity. For example, avoid identifying the students’ actual name (perhaps allowing the use of initials only), place to live, and school to attend…

The notion of “strangers” leaving comments on a student’s weblog, meanwhile, should not be a very difficult problem to solve. While I do not use LiveJournal to post my personal blogs (so there is no way for me to check), I know that, in Blogger (powered by Google), Yahoo Blog, WordPress, etc., the author of a weblog can alter the weblog’s setting so that only a selected group of people can post responses. If Noelene and/or the parents feel very concerned of a stranger posting comments of an inappropriate nature onto a student’s weblog, she can easily ask all the students to change their weblog’s setting so that only other students in the class can post a comment. That way, students can continue to interact with one another through the use of weblog, but people outside of the class would no longer be able to post comments to the students’ work.

Wiki Collaboration vs Threaded Discussion

As someone who has participated in threaded discussion, both from an educational and from a recreational setting, I feel that there are several areas where wiki collaboration cannot quite match it. However, from a publication point-of-view, the wiki collaboration is likely to yield a more “appealing” final product than a threaded discussion.

One of the biggest advantages threaded discussions have over wiki collaboration is that it shows in an easy-to-see format what each participant’s contribution is. For an educator who is assessing students’ participation, this format is a lot clearer than going into the history section to find out what has been done collaboratively and individually by all the students, though I admit that this may just be a personal bias.

Another advantage threaded discussions have over wiki collaboration lies in the fact that nothing is really “lost.” As students offer their opinions, sometimes the opinion or suggestion may be disputed, and discarded eventually through discussions. However, that does not mean that the opinion did not serve a purpose, nor that the student who raised the “inadequate” question/opinion did not contribute in a positive fashion. In wiki collaboration though, the final product seldom shows the “steps” and the “trials” that many people collaborated and contributed. In spite the fact that the final product should be considered that of a combined effort and collaboration, the “wrong” steps taken during that process would inevitably be lost.

Wiki collaboration, however, does produce a product that is more presentable than a threaded discussion. After many rounds of collaboration, the finished product is published, has external links, images, etc. In short, it can be a beautiful media production. The same cannot be easily done with many threaded discussion topics and responses.

Personally, I feel that depending on the goal of the collaborative process, wiki collaboration and threaded discussion can both be utilized to maximize the learning experiences of students.

What is troubling Boris’ students?

Reading the description of this week’s case, I think Boris needs to first investigate as to why students who do well on lab exercises cannot translate that level of competency onto unit tests. Depending on what the issue is, his solution can be drastically different.

In my years of teaching science at the high school level, one of the most common reasons why students who do well on labs don’t do well on test is because of the disconnectedness between lab work and tests. Over the years, I have tried to make the two more related – after all, both laboratory work and tests are tools used to enhance and measure student learning. If Boris notices that his tests are completely disconnected from his labs, he should review and perhaps modify that to make the labs and/or the tests more relevant and related.

Another area of difficulty students have is their anxiety towards test writing. I believe this is where the Moodle quiz function can help. After each lab activity, or at the end of each week, Boris can post a review quiz on Moodle and asks students to complete it. As long as the quizzes created are in the format of true-false, multiple-choice, or matching questions, Boris actually would not have the need to mark them – Moodle will do that. These practice quizzes can be used by students to review course materials; it will also help reduce the anxiety they feel towards tests.

The quiz function in Moodle allows Boris to enter feedback for each response, whether the response is the correct one, or the incorrect one. The initial input process can take a very significant amount of time (imagine creating a feedback for every choice in every question in every quiz), so I don’t think it’s feasible to expect Boris to have completed them all. But for starters, just creating a weekly review quiz and/or a post-lab quiz on Moodle would enhance and consolidate the learning experience of the students.

Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication

In choosing my communication tools for my LMS course site, I strive to use tools that are i) simple to use, and ii) offer significant pedagogical value to the course. From scholarly literature and my personal experience taking various online courses, I have settled into using “forum” and “chat” as my two tools. Sadly, financial constraints played a large role in my decision-making process.

As an educator who has worked in an inner city school for over a decade, it is important to point out that, although most students now have access to the internet at home, a significant number of students are from families who cannot afford high-speed internet services. As a result, although I can expect students to use a LMS as a supplementary component to their courses, it is also very important to build a LMS that would not have a very high demand for internet capacities from my students. This is a big consideration when I am choosing the various synchronous and asynchronous communication tools – I need to keep the communication tools simple to allow every student access to the LMS at a reasonable speed. This is the reason why I have chosen the synchronous chat function, as well as the asynchronous forum function in my Moodle site.

From the course material, it is clear that the exclusive use of either synchronous or asynchronous communication tools would create educational deficiencies for students. Using exclusively synchronous communication tools, for example, would prevent students from having the time to reflect carefully on their responses. From the Anderson’s article, I would argue that this would even prevent discourse from happening altogether. On the other hand, if a LMS relies exclusively on asynchronous communication tools, students very likely would feel disconnected to the learning community, and that is not an ideal situation either. In light of these potential pitfalls, I have chosen to combine the use of a synchronous and an asynchronous communication tool. I believe the two would complement each other, and would address the shortcomings of each individual communication tool.

It is also worth noting that, if a LMS is used as a complementary learning tool to a f2f class, the problem of an asynchronous communication tool such as forum is reduced quite significantly. When students have the opportunity to interact face-to-face during class time, the time they spend on a LMS asynchronously may actually enhance and deepen the discourse that educators are trying to instil.

Some Easy Parameters for Trinh

From reading the description of Trinh’s challenges, and having felt that disconnectedness in taking an online course, I think there are a couple of relative simple solutions for Trinh:

E-mail: Because Trinh is delivering her museumology course via Vista, and Vista offers a “mail” feature for instructors, all Trinh needs to do is to make a public announcements to students that course-related comments and questions would only be answered if they are made through the mail feature used in Vista. This announcement should have been made at the beginning of the course, or explained in the course outline, etc., but from my experience with online learning, students do understand the need for adjustments throughout the course and would compile to the change.

In light of the fact that Vista offers a good discussion forum feature and live chat rooms/forums, Trinh should also take a proactive approach in encouraging her students to engage in collaborative discussions on the discussion boards, and participate in live chat rooms and forums to exchange ideas with other fellow students. This, combined with the above-mentioned method, should help re-direct some of the traffic that Trinh need not handle directly.

Office Hours: While live chat rooms and live forums can both be used as a virtual office hour period for Trinh, the biggest challenge she faces is that many students are taking the course from different time zones, making it almost impossible to engage everybody at the same time. However, I think 100% engagement in every opportunity is not even necessary. Even for students who are living and working in the same place, it is often difficult for the instructor to expect all of them to be present at the same time. The best I think Trinh can do is to offer different times to be present in live chat rooms/live forums (e.g. Tuesday mornings, Thursday evenings) to accommodate students with different schedules. Another thing she can do is to produce a text transcript of the live forum sessions for students to download. This is a feature that I am seeing in ETEC 531. The transcript would allow students who are not able to attend the synchronous communication channels to at least “stay tuned” to what is happening. As for general enquires that sometimes take place during a regular f2f office hour, I believe most of these questions can be answered through e-mails.

My Four Prongs of Learning

Anderson’s article describes four different attributes in learning. According to him, “good” learning occurs when the learning is learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered. In my experience taking online courses both at the undergraduate and now at the graduate level, I notice that it is difficult for any particular course to be strong at all of the attributes. Some educators design courses in such a way that a certain attribute is noticeably stronger than another. While I would agree that a good online course should not be lacking in one of these attributes, I would also suggest that it is not necessarily a bad thing if one of these “prongs” of learning is significantly larger (or more emphasized) than the others, providing that this imbalance is intentional.

When I took a family counselling course online while doing my diploma in counselling guidance, the community of peer helpers was one of the key aspects in the learning that took place in the course. The instructor would post weekly topics onto the course’s discussion forum, and students would collaborate to discuss and come up with strategies to address each of these scenarios. Whether active learning could occur or not was determined significantly by the learner community. As the course progressed and people got to know each other better, the learning that took place became more in depth. Students who did not choose to participate in the discussion forum a lot often found themselves unable to understand course materials.

To probe into the prior knowledge of students entering the course, the instructor asked us to do a self-survey, as well as an introduction to ourselves. The introduction to self was very similar to some of my MET courses’ introduction, where students need to write a bio of himself/herself. By instructing the students to specific the prior knowledge and the expectations for the course, the instructor got a sense as to the people who he was working with.

In the above example, I could observe that the instructor appeared to have placed a much heavier emphasis on the Learner- and the community-centered approach. For a counselling course, I believe these two attributes can be viewed as marginally or noticeably “more important” than the other two attributes. Having said that, I do not disagree with Anderson’s notion of a four-attribute approach. As long as the other attributes are not ignored, and that the course design takes into the account the discrepancy that may occur, the four attributes need not to be emphasized in the same fashion.

Costs that Anju Need Not Pay

While there is no doubt that the creation of an informational DVD would allow Anju’s customers to have easy access to the resources Anju wants to present to them, the cost that Anju needs to incur upon her will be a continuous one, and is not necessarily sustainable. While the camcorder and the computer Anju bought can be used for her personal use, the DVDs she has to produce for her clients will cost her time and money. Assuming that Anju is conducting her diabetes workshop as a public service, and assuming that she will continue to host similar workshops (perhaps annually or semi-annually with updated information), it is not far-fetched to guess that she will need to produce a batch of brand new DVDs each time to give away. For a dietician working on her own computer, the time this would take would be enormous.

Many camcorders include softwares that would allow the camcorder to be connected to a PC/Mac through USB to easily upload videos into files that can be played on the computer. Once these files are uploaded, Anju can still burn the files into a DVD. My computer comes with Nero 7 Essentials, which is a fairly user-friendly software that would allow media files to be burned onto a DVD playable on DVD players and computers. The software also allows for the creation of a fairly simple, easy to navigate menu page. If Anju’s DVD requirements include the straight forwarding recording of her workshop and the creation of un-edited footages of her workshops, a DVD can be created within minutes of her return to home from such a workshop.

As I have said, however, the creation of such DVDs will cost Anju a lot of time, and to a lesser degree, a significant amount of money (a single DVD costs about a dollar, but if she has to mass produce these DVDs every time she presents a workshop, the cost would add up). I would suggest that, while she can still produce a small amount of such DVDs for some people (e.g. senior citizens who do not have a computer), the better approach would be to upload these videos onto a video sharing website such as YouTube.

While some may fear that people who are not fluent in written English may be afraid of using the computer, they often forget that a service such as YouTube is actually not language-specific. People of different ethnicity all use YouTube to post videos, and they can search for a specific type of videos in their own language as well. Once Anju creates an account, others just have to subscribe to Anju’s channel, and all of her videos can be watched whenever a person sits in front of a computer with internet access. Should the person chooses, he/she can even use a video-capturing program such as Video Piggy to download those YouTube videos. No more burning of DVDs by Anju.

If using YouTube is the method of transmission of choice for Anju, all she needs to do is to mention this information during her presentations. Or, if she chooses, she can prepare little business cards or brochures with instructions to subscribe to her YouTube channel. She could include screen shots to lead people into her channel. This, in my opinion, is a much cheaper way to do the same thing, not to mention that it leaves a smaller environmental footprint by taking the information to the digital world.

Resources and Support are Keys to Success

In reading Lenora’s scenario, I feel it would be advantageous for her to first research on the costs that she would need to incur to run a website, and the amount of support she will receive to maintain the website before she decides if establishing a website is the way to go. Further, she needs to learn about her targeted audience’s access and computer literacy in using her resources to determine if the format she is choosing is the most appropriate.

From the case study’s background information, it appears that Lenora is living in a place where high-speed internet is not readily available or that there are financial challenges that make the access to high-speed internet not feasible. This would substantially hinder the chance of developing and maintaining a very graphics and/or video-rich website as upload would most likely be a problem. I would argue that a significant portion of Lenora’s audience would also face similar technical challenges as well. If that is the case, then the creation of a website, much less one that features extensive display of graphics and large-sized files (for sounds and videos) may also be not suitable. A text-rich, free-hosting “holding place” such as a blog, therefore, may become more suitable.

In the design of the blog, Lenora can use multiple categories to classify the various topics on bullying against aboriginal people. To increase collaboration, she can grant access (user name and password) to other educators who wish to contribute to the compilation of resources as well. If, among the group of collaborating educators, there are people who have better access to internet services, services such as Google docs can be used as a storage place for sound tracks and videos. All Lenora has to do is to create a blog entry with the proper links to these documents on Google docs. Educators with access can download these files, while educators who do not can bypass them.

Wiki is another possible destination for Lenora’s work of collaboration. Similar to a blog, Lenora has to grant access to fellow educators to enter and modify the information of the subject specific wiki.

Neither a blog nor a wiki require extensive technical support and maintenance. I would argue that many blog websites provide a fairly adequate online/textual technical support. Other members of the collaborative team can easily receive assistance, and Lenora nor her employers would need to worry about paying for someone to provide that technical support.