ETEC 565 e-portfolio

ETEC 565 – Learning Technologies Selection: Design and Application – Summer 2010

Course Summary

This course helps fulfill the practical component of my MET journey with focus on building materials and good practices that can be utilized within the classroom.

Specific components of this course include Web design tools, creation of a course management system (utilizing Moodle) that can be implemented in classroom practice, and exploration of various tools including but not restricted to: online communications, collaboration and community building tools; multimedia and social software tools.

Course Highlights

One of the highlights that I am looking forward to this during this course is the creation of my online Spanish courses. Next year I will be instructing three different levels of Spanish online (this year I piloted a hybrid Spanish 10 program) and I know that the advice, strategies and knowledge gained in this course will be pivotal in creating good Web design practices.

Communication is such an important tool in any online course, but especially in a Spanish class.  We have investigated many different forms of communication throughout ETEC 565, and I have tried to integrate as many of these areas as possible.

Within my moodle course I integrated three different types of communication.

Anuncios (announcements) – one way broadcast

Description: In this general announcements forum, the teacher presents news and announcements for the class.
Rationale: This forum is designed as an informational tool in which the instructor is the sole editor/contributor.  Students are forced to be subscribed so that they will be updated whenever there is a new announcement.

Sala de chat (chat room) – two-way synchronous communication

Description: In this chat room, students meet to interact with each other and their instructor to discuss content synchronously.
Rationale: Chat rooms allow a location for students to meet and have real-time discussions with each other and their peers.  Moodle also has the option of user specific chats (students select the name of the user from the participants list and can then have individual chats as well… it is important to reinforce digital citizenship expectations prior).

Introducciones (introductions) – two-way asynchronous discussion forum

Description: In the introduction forum, students are to introduce themselves (using the target language), stating three interests they have and respond to their classmates.  They are also to update their online profile using this information as well as their personal demographics.
Rationale: The introduction forum serves as an icebreaker and allows students to start to interact with one another using a topic they are familiar with.  This forum is designed to open the lines of communication among students and to start fostering the online learning community.

Linked to the moodle site are two additional communication formats…

Elluminate – synchronous communication tool

Description: students will be meeting weekly for synchronous communications using Elluminate to reinforce concepts covered throughout the week and clarify any questions or concerns.
Rationale: This synchronous online classroom provides a reference point for students to meet with the instructor and their peers in real time and connect, clarify and communicate with one another directly.

Wimba – asynchronous verbal discussion board

Description: Wimba voiceboards are one of the options within the Descubre supersite that students may use to communicate with one another.  These forums are similar to the threaded discussions in moodle, except that students can record their voice as a means of communication.
Rationale: Due to the communicative nature of the language, it is important for student to be able to speak with one another and hear what their classmates sound like.  This also provides an opportunity for formative feedback on behalf of the instructor to help students with their pronunciation

The following is a summary of my e-learning toolkit reflection as presented in my overall course synthesis.

E-learning toolkit

The e-learning toolkit was a great resource throughout the course.  The guidance and information provided was beneficial for both the completion of course assignments and to aid in further learning.  Below is a reflection on my e-learning toolkit experience.

LMS

Prior to this course, I had experience with designing both WebCT and Moodle courses.  It was interesting to compare the two systems as well as contrast abilities that were present with one system but absent with the other.  One of the features available through WebCT is the ability to automatically selectively release units.  Selective release can be achieved through moodle, but it must be done manually at this point.

The following website provides a side-by-side comparison of the two systems (special thanks to Maurice Last for bringing it to the class’ attention) http://www1.umn.edu/moodle/transition/mapping.html

Web design and HTML

Having a basic knowledge of webdesign rules and html, I found this tool to be a great refresher on sound practice.  Prior to this course my html experience was limited to basic font adjustment commands, but I found myself going beyond these entry level skills and integrating more advanced coding into daily communications.  I also utilized Dreamweaver for the first time to create webpages outside of moodle and then bring the code in.  I think this is a great entry tool to help increase html code comprehension.

Synchronous Communication Tools

Some of the synchronous tools I had used academically prior to this course were Vista chat, Skype, Google docs , moodle chat and Elluminate, as well as MSN and traditional online chatrooms for personal use.  The synchronous communication tool that was of most interest to me and for which I see excellent implementation opportunities in my classroom is the use of Wimba.  There were four different Wimba tools made available to us through this course: Wimba Voiceboard, Wimba Classroom, Wimba Voice Direct and Wimba Voice Email.  Wimba Voiceboards are similar to discussion forums in which threaded messages can be left, but instead of traditional text, authors can share their message using their voice.  Wimba classroom is similar to Elluminate.  The instructor can share their desktop, live webcams display the speaker, students may chat with one another through a text chat on the side or using a microphone with the ‘talk’ feature and all ‘lessons’ can be archived.  Wimba Voice Direct is similar to Skype.  Student can chat synchronously with one another using voice whenever their classmates are online.  Wimba Voice Email is an asynchronous communication tool that allows people to send audio emails to one another.

Social Software

I do not usually use social software tools, but I have used Facebook during political campaigns in the past.  I have explored Second Life but did not enjoy the experience, mostly due to some of the people’s attitudes and vulgarity.  I have used Flickr, Picasa and Creative Commons to access free media but I have not yet uploaded or contributed to either site.  I also have explored Delicious and Groove, but do not use them on a regular basis.

Weblogs and Wikis

The MET experience has forced me to start using Weblogs.  I have used WordPress extensively for my courses and have created courses specific weblogs for ETEC 565, ETEC 531 and a general program blog.  Next semester in ETEC 590 I will be creating a summative digital artefact that will be combining and synthesizing all of the work I have created throughout the program.

I am also planning on using Weblogs and wikis with my students to help them organize their work and creative summative reflections of their learning.  I have used wikis in my classroom as collaborative review tools and as a space to share assignments and provide feedback to each other.  Prior to implementing course management systems into my classroom, wikis were the primary online source my students used for collaboration.

Multimedia

This course has been an eye-opening experience for me in regards to multimedia exposure.  Through exploration of the toolkit and sites used for the digital storytelling assignment I now have a plethora of multimedia available.  The exploration of multimedia and practical application of these strategies was one of my main goals for this course.  Tools such as Picasa, Flickr and Creative Commons have been used for images.  I’ve used Audacity, Voicethreads and Vokis for audio recording (and looking forward to using Wimba next year). I discovered Jamendo this term for open source music access and Camtasia for mp4 productions.  I’ve created digital stories toondoo, GoAnimate, Xtranormal, Photopeach and Slide.  I look forward to exploring additional digital storytelling tools (such as Blabberize, Yodio, Moviestorm and Scrapblog) and including activities in my teaching that will promote the use of these tools to students.   Web 2.0 tools such as Prezi, Animoto, Slidecasts and basic wikis can be great tools for housing all of this multimedia.

Accessibility

Web Accessibility has not been something I have focused on in previous course development.  I try to use multi-modal approaches to e-learning due to the enhanced impact of student language acquisition.  These strategies should be more descriptive and thorough to allow access to all learners.  Taking into consideration adaptive technologies and strategies used to decrease the need for such technologies in web design is something I will now be more cognizant of as I design my courses.

mLearning

I had the experience of accessing both Vista and Moodle using my new blackberry this semester.  I had not used mlearning before and my initial experience was slightly frustrating.  The first time I accessed Vista, I needed to get on to a synchronous chat.  It took an extremely long time to access the site and by the time I was able to view the chat feature, I found out that the necessary apps were not available.  I had much more success viewing my course site in moodle.  I could access the audio recordings and discussion forums easily and the pages loaded quickly.  I was very excited with the level of convenience the moodle site afforded mlearning, and foresee this as being a very useful option for high school students.

Reflection on Digital Storytelling

I found this experience to be very educational and introduced me to a myriad of new digital storytelling tools to use in my classroom. There were many options to choose from, some of which I’d used before in my classes (Voicethread, Xtranormal, Toondoo, Animoto, Prezi). I actually included a digital story as an intro to my Moodle site using Toondoo prior to even thinking about this assignment and it wasn’t until I started doing this reflection that I realized I have two digital stories on the go! For my latest digital story, I used “Slide” as a tool to tell my digital story. The story I chose to tell is a Spanish cuento that I will use with my grade twelve students. An additional adaptation I could incorporate in this story is the inclusion of oral text to support the written components. I think I would include this as an option for student productions.

Rationale

The reason I chose Slide was due to the ease of use, basic adaptation of premade text and inclusion of audio into the production. Slide is a very easy tool to use and pre-made PowerPoints can be quickly adapted to it. Simply create your PPT, save slides as jpeg (it will ask if you want to convert the entire presentation or just the current slide) and then upload your ‘images’. I think this tool is great for both audio and visual learners and provides a fresh look at storytelling for students.

Using digital storytelling

I will be using digital storytelling tools, like slide, in my classroom as an alternative to student text based assignments. Students have used basic PPT to tell stories in class (daily routine, vacations, and holidays) but these tools goes beyond PowerPoint. Specifically, I will be using this tool with my Spanish 30 students while they create short stories and fairy tales in Spanish.

Motivation and Creativity

In the past, I have seen a huge increase in student motivation levels in class when incorporating digital storytelling into lessons. The first time I used voicethread with my grade nines, the entire class was enraptured and didn’t stop talking about it all week (“You mean the computer actually calls your cell phone!?” Yup). Even taking basic assignments that had been pen and paper in the past and encouraging students to incorporate images and music has had great results. I had one grade twelve student have both her mom and her best friend follow her around the entire day taking pictures of her so that she could fully document her daily routine assignment. What started off as a low creativity/motivation assignment in its text-only form, developed into a fully creative activity and one that her mom came in to talk about at interviews regarding how excited her daughter was to be in the course!

Key Issues

One of the key issues that emerged for me throughout this activity was choosing a variety of tools to appeal to multiple types of learners. By considering multiple intelligences and incorporating this into our practices I think we will be able to captivate students and make their learning more meaningful.

Thoughts on blogging…

Weblogs provides students with an outside space to synthesize and conceptualize discussions and learning covered in class.  They allow for deeper thought and discussion and continuation of learning beyond the classroom.  Weblogs do not have the time constraints typical of a regular f2f classroom, and students are afforded time for reflection within the world of blogging.

Public vs Private

Weblogs can take place in either public or private spaces.  The implications this has for K-12 teachers vary from that of teachers of adult learners.  With K-12 learners, online safety is a very important factor and one that is regulated very closely within school divisions.  In our school district, students are not allowed to sign-up for Web 2.0 tools using their own name or any indicators of who they are when they are working in public spaces.  This can be a dangerous because any misjudgment or poor reference within a student’s blog could potentially give away important student information and in a day-and-age where youth are accustomed to constantly publishing personal updates, this is a concern.  Within private spaces that are restricted to include only students who are part of the class (or who have been granted permission to combine classes) there is not as much cause for concern.  Online predators cannot enter this space and although there is still a possibility for cyber-bullying, it is in a contained environment and such issues can be more easily rectified by the teacher (and hopefully preemptive digital citizenship discussions are had prior to students getting online to deter such actions).

Ownership and Responsibility

Weblogs promote collaborative practices and foster an online learning community.  Students can post comments on each other’s blogs and provide feedback as to their like and dislikes (in a constructive manner) regarding their peers’ posts.  As others will be viewing their work, students are more likely to take ownership of their writing and will return back to their work and make adjustments based on peer feedback.

Outside Influences

As a K-12 educator, I shy away from including the world in students’ daily lives.  If there is work they have completed in class and they want to publish to the world after they have completed it that is their prerogative, but not a requirement of mine.  I have seen student project published on YouTube and know that there are videos on facebook of final projects from my Spanish classes.  Students enjoy promoting themselves to the world, but from a liability standpoint, that is not something I would require of my students

Blogging Summary

I have used this strategy with wikis in my high school Spanish classes (restricting the access so that only students in the class can view, edit or comment on the site… requiring a sign-in prior) and my students did great with this (plus there weren’t any phone calls in regards to parent safety concerns).

Students would be able to have just as much interaction within the class using private spaces so that only classmates could view their entries.  Students should not be required to publish their work to the world, that is their own prerogative.  The online classroom has the potential to expand beyond normal classroom constraints, but there are student and parents that would not feel comfortable with this.  Student safety should be forefront in all educators minds and there are no need to take unnecessary risks.

Wiki Reflection

I found the wiki activity to be less engaging than the regular usage of LMSs in an online course context. I think that most of this was due to the fact that it was a new technology for students and that due to the short time frame (one week from start to finish) many students did not interact with it as much as they do with the regular learning management system of which they were familiar. For collaboration and group work, the wiki space was a great way to communicate and summarize findings, but it is also something that requires students to be constantly involved with. Students who posted earlier to the discussion and then came back a day later found that many decisions had already been made by their peers. One other downside of the wiki format is that one does not know when students contributed. With discussion forums, it is clear which students first start discussion and which students come in late, not so with the forum.

Below are the top five challenges and strategies as per the ETEC 565 wiki page

Challenges
Challenge #1: Balance student safety and privacy online, with opportunities to interact with social media.
Challenge #2:Choose the ‘best’ social medium for use in the school setting, considering purpose, and longevity versus novelty
Challenge #3: Assessment – criteria and providing feedback back in a timely manner.
Challenge #4: Educational or cognitive purpose for the use of social media.
Challenge #5:Support for infrastructure, vision and funding for social media and technology use/implementation in the classroom.

Strategies
Strategy #1: Properly orient the students to the social media they will be using, including guidelines and etiquette (for example: use a social network as a tool to teach skills and safety at the same time- modelling and exemplars)
Strategy #2: Start the educational design process with the assignment strategies. With this approach, the correlation between objectives, activities and choice of technologies become clearer.
Strategy #3: Ensure the training and support are in place and accessible for staff. Involve, empower and inform parents- they can be our greatest support
Strategy #4:Variety and Fun! Do not overload students with too many media options. Keep it simple and limit choices until students are familiar with enough social media types to make informed choices. Consistency across the grades.
Strategy #5:Use assessment for learning strategies using clear criteria taught and modeled, self and peer feedback, and teacher presence and assessment as learning with self-reflection and feedback?

Assessment tools: Creation of online quizzes in moodle

Having worked with quizzes inside moodle in the past, this section was not as daunting for me as for some.  The way my course is set up, the majority of assessment occurs outside of the moodle site within our Descubre Supersite.  Assessment pertaining to module coursework in conducted in this manner.  All review, final assessments and module progress reports are developed and administered within the moodle site.

The progress quizzes for each module were simple to design due to the consistent nature of each unit.  The review questions took longer to develop but after initial questions have been made, it becomes simply a matter of importing pertaining questions into the review.  One of the great features of moodle quizzes is the ability to create a large exam bank of questions and categorize them according to topic for future use.

Below is a summarized version of some of the challenges and opportunities associated with assessment tools within moodle.

Challenges:

• Increased in-put / formatting time
• Inability to assess higher level thinking skills using auto-assessment
• For summative assessments, you can secure browser security, but there still needs to be an invigilator present to ensure additional materials are not brought into the exam.

Opportunities:

• Students receive immediate feedback on quizzes
• Students are able to complete quiz multiple times (teacher has the option to collect highest grade, thus pushing students to achieve excellence, or to take first grade and allow students to go back and re-take the test for review)
• Assessments can be time released (students that are away from school can still take the test at this time as it is online)
• Tests can be taken using a secure browser (students can not bring in information from other sources)