I teach at a high school for adult and alternative learners.\u00a0 Our adult learners have returned to school some years after leaving without graduating, and have a variety of goals, from simply completing their graduation requirements to gaining prerequisites for post secondary programs.\u00a0 They\u00a0arrive with\u00a0a range of study skills and technology skills.\u00a0 Our alternative learners have come to us usually after having some difficulty continuing in a mainstream high school.\u00a0 They also have a wide range of skills and goals.\u00a0 We have a high proportion of special needs students, and many students who have significant responsibilities outside of school.<\/p>\n
This school is located across a number of small campuses, over a geographically large area.\u00a0 Many of the campuses have only two or three teaching staff, so each campus may not have a subject specialist in each teaching area.\u00a0 Students often don\u2019t have the opportunity for face-to-face contact with a subject specialist.<\/p>\n
Our course materials are largely text-based, and most assessment is by pen-and-paper assignments and tests.\u00a0 Registration in courses is continuous-intake, and courses are self-paced.\u00a0 Students get help from the teachers at their campus (who may not be knowledgeable about the course).\u00a0 Sometimes, we arrange a phone or email conference to provide extra help from a subject specialist at another campus.\u00a0 A student works in a classroom with other students \u2013 but rarely are they working on the same course, or at the same point in a course.\u00a0 Most interaction about the course material is with a teacher.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m working with a team of teachers who are updating our science courses to reflect recent changes in the curriculum.\u00a0 Our goals overlap with Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education<\/em> (1) in that we want to develop a variety of active learning assignments to support the varied needs of our students, in accordance with the principles of Universal Design for Learning and Differentiated Instruction (2).\u00a0 I also want to explore the use of social software, to provide students with an opportunity to interact with other learners and teachers at our other campuses.\u00a0 My goal for ETEC565a is to learn to select and apply tools that we can use to develop our science courses.<\/p>\n I am familiar with the Desire2Learn LMS, and expect it will be easy to learn about Moodle, and determine if it will be a good choice for our science department, and our students, using the SECTIONS framework for selecting technology (3).\u00a0 I have little experience with multimedia, and expect to spend more time learning how to use multimedia for enriching learning activities in order to appeal to a variety of learners.\u00a0 The area of greatest interest for me, and where I expect to spend most of my time, is in exploring the use of social software for assessment (4), and in order to build a learning community (5).\u00a0 I have some experience using discussion boards, but very little experience with blogs and wikis, and want to practice using them myself before I ask my students to use them.\u00a0<\/p>\n I expect that mastering these technologies will require extensive practice, and so this would be a long term goal.\u00a0 Developing a working knowledge would be an easily achieved goal, and would not require a large outlay of time or technical support.\u00a0 Another factor needed to develop some skill with these technologies is a group to share experiences with, and that is my purpose in this course.<\/p>\n References<\/p>\n (1) Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987).\u00a0 Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.\u00a0 American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), p. 3-7.<\/p>\n