Moodle
Before I started my reflection, I decided to see where I started from and what my learning goals were so I looked back at my Flight Path. My goal was to use Moodle as my LMS to offer an alternative way to deliver the Graduation Transitions 12 (GT 12) curriculum to students in the Mission Public School District than they are currently offering the course. Additionally, I hoped that I would develop a better understand how I can make the course more interactive as well as offering more room for student collaboration using Moodle.

In terms of meeting my goals, I would say that I have a great head start on developing the GT12 course in Moodle; I completed three of the five units in the course but due to time constraints, I didn’t finish the last two units. I estimate that I will need an additional 5 hours of development time to achieve my goal, based on my experience in setting up the other three units. I did come away with acquiring a better understanding on how to make the course more interactive using discussion forums and groups in Moodle but I failed to tie my Moodle site into Social Software sites such as Facebook and YouTube. I underestimated the time required to complete the course requirement tasks for ETEC 565A and more time would be needed to fully use Moodle in collaboration with a social network (Facebook, YouTube) to raise the level of interaction to an appropriate level so that the quality is conducive to positive learning environment for the students.

A learning goal that I did accomplish that I didn’t predict from the onset was using
JavaScript to create dropdown menus. I wanted at add just more than a links on my GUI Splash Page and figured dropdown menus was something new I could try and set out to learn how to do it. A minor setback was learning that each new dropdown menu has to be named separately in HTML or none of the JavaScript will work (i.e. down1, down2, etc). This created some hassle for me but after troubleshooting with the help of Google, I managed to accomplish my unforeseen goal and am glad I tried out the process.

E-toolkit Learning Experience
I have used Moodle in the past but just the basic features and never incorporated my technical skills (HTML, Dreamweaver, etc) into the Moodle as it was never required. This course force me to maximize the LMS learning experience and sometimes in education a push is required in the learning outcomes for motiviation. As Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education emphasize in their sixth point an communication of high expectations were regularly stated and received by students in ETEC 565a. I learned many features that I have not used in the past that will add to my Moodle experience not only for myself but for the studens as well; incorporating Splash pages, using outside software (ie. Hot Potatoe Quizzes) and/or fully recognizing the capabilities built-in Moodle came from the expectations set out from the onset of the journey. In the past, my Moodle experience was just to build rudimentary pages within Moodle and not really test its capabilities and/or its versatility with other programs.

Assignments/Discussions within ETEC 565a
The design of the assignments in ETEC 565a were an excellent example of scaffolding and constructivist learning approach that effectively incorporated Project Based Learning to allow for an understanding of the courses expectations and learning outcomes. Scaffolding is often used in order to support problem-based learning (PBL). Learners in the classroom become researchers and often work in small groups to analyze problems, determine solutions, and evaluate problems when utilizing PBL (Hoffman and Ritchie, 1997). The assignments tied nicely into what we were expected to learn in a sequence that enabled the high expectations to be both managable and tangible to the learner. Upon reading the course assignments at the beginning of the semester, it might have seemed overwhelming at first but as I worked through the individual assignments, the final outcomes became much more apparent and reachable through this approach.

Another benefit was the active and supportive discussion forum; by far this was the most vibrant and active forum I have been involved in in my MET experience (this is my 8th MET course). The students in this cousre seemed more eager to share their experiences and knowledge with each other more which allowed for a condusive online learning environment. I’m not entirely sure what led to such an active and engaging environment but having a professor and teaching assistant constantly sharing their expertise and summarizing discusssion topics couldn’t hurt this experience at all. Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) indentify that good practice not only encourages contacts between students and faculty but also develops reciprocity and cooperation among students; I believe this was achieved in our discussions.

Looking Ahead
I had initially planned on completing my LMS course by the end of this course but unfortunately due to time constraints, wasn’t able to finish. Before the end of August, my goal is to finish my GT12 Moodle site to include all of the 5 units within the course.

Additionally, I would like to see how I could incorporate both Blogs and YouTube into the GT12 course. A blog would be excellent for the students final portfolio requirement and many of the learning outcomes for the course could be captured and viewed on YouTube. Using Bates & Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS framework to examine the options available and make the best possible choice, student access, content management, costs, interactivity and technical support, really are evident these two programs.

Another area that I’d like to experiment futher was the Digital Story assignment and its 50+ web tools you can use to create your own web-based story http://50ways.wikispaces.com/StoryTools . Due to time, I could only look at a few of the options listed and I’d like to further examine these tools to see which of these I could incorporate into my classroom. On first glance I can see that the Comic Tools would fit into my Grade 8 Information Technology course curriculum and the Flickr Tools would fit into my Desktop Publishing curriculum.

References:
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education. p. 75-108. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hoffman, B. & Ritchie, D. (1997). Using multimedia to overcome the problems with
problem-based learning. Instructional Science, 25, 97-115

Chickering, A.W. & Gamson, Z.F. (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), 3-7. Accessed online 11 May 2011 
http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm