As an elementary school teacher, my experience in instructional design are limited to largely working with online courses as a student. Along with the courses I have taken with the MET program, I have also taken AQ courses through York University. In my ETEC 510 course, I had brief exposure to the Moodle LMS as my group used the platform to create a course on 21st Century Professionalism. In addition, in my previous position as junior literacy teacher, I was part of network of teachers who shared information and resources through the e-community Ontario platform.
In terms of my current position, as a grade 3/4 teacher I have begun to use Google Classroom with my students. So far I have used it as a way for students to submit Social Studies and Writing assignments. I have also had the students do their reading response journals on Kidblog. We have also worked together as a class to make a website for a social studies project. In addition, I also serve as the technology point person at my school. I am by no means an expert in this area but, through trial and error, I manage the technology at my school as best as I can.
As such, my goals for this course are to become more familiar with technological tools for instruction. Up till this point, I have been able to give advice to colleagues about different programs and apps that I have used (Prezi, Kidblog, padlet). I would like to expand my exposure to digital tools that I can utilize in my own classroom and share with my colleagues. With the adoption of Google Classroom into my school board, I would like to be able to get some ideas as to how to use some of its tools more effectively.
Although my current teaching assignment doesn’t lend itself to setting up an online course, I would nonetheless like to get a working knowledge of how to do it. I have only briefly used Moodle to upload content as part of a project in another class, so I would like to be able to become more confident in using different LMS. With all the different LMS available, I would also like to be able to know the advantages of using the different systems. Judging from what we will be doing in this course, I look forward to achieving these goals.