For me, this course has been an excellent representation of a course that was designed using a constructivist approach. I thought it had a good balance between theory and practice, since it didn’t overly rely on readings to teach a concept. Instead, it used a variety of assignments and discussion activities to make us teach ourselves, which I thought that was quite clever. Looking back, I feel most of my time in this class was spent on building things using an assortment of digital tools. This is not just a cornerstone of constructivist (or constructionist) theory, but the main reason I signed up for this course.
After re-reading my flight path, I think I can honestly say that I reached the majority of my goals, but I also believe I came away with knowledge and skills that I hadn’t planned for; this is one of the reasons I love learning. Working my way through the course, I learned how to be proficient at designing a unit within a learning management system (LMS), to use a variety of technological collaborative and communicative tools to expand the social environment, and, perhaps most importantly, to use the process of creating something through digital means to instill true learning.
Working on designing a unit within the LMS, Moodle, was more challenging than I thought. The process really made me appreciate the time and effort that goes into designing a quality online course. Coming up with the content was, at times, the easiest part of the project. What was much more difficult was deciding which tools to use, when to use them, and how to support them. In this way, I found that online environments must be planned much more precisely, since it is not as easy and quick to get support. Therefore, your instructions and language must be clear and efficient, and this takes time and patience to develop.
The digital story was another project that I learned a great deal from. The journey from realizing the concept, to selecting the tools, and then to actually creating it, was quite entertaining, and educational. The project, on the surface, sounded quite easy, but in actuality had many parts that required the development and execution of particular skills. The project’s research forced me to examine a variety of tools and test them out. Throughout the project, I kept thinking back to Poole and Bates paper, A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology, and the advice they gave on selecting the appropriate technology to meet your and your students’ needs (2010). Because I wanted to link the project to my Moodle unit, and give my students an opportunity to create something similar themselves, it pushed me toward using a particular set of tools that I was unfamiliar with. In the end, learning to use these tools improved my technological knowledge, and made me more confident and willing to use them with my own students.
Perhaps one the most impactful parts of the course for me, was the revelation I gained from Perkins and Pfaffman’s article “Using a Learning Management System to Improve Classroom Communication (2006)” This article captured my attention right away, as its message coincided with one of the main goals I had for the course; using technology to enhance communication in my French immersion classes. In the article, the authors go on to inform how the online environment, and the tools at its disposal, can engage students in a different way than what is possible in a strictly face-to-face classroom. The ideas presented in the article inspired me to try this with my own class, but instead of using a LMS as my centralizing and collaborative tool, I used Google +. It was an interesting endeavor, directly applying a concept I used in a course to my work, and, for me, worth mentioning in some detail.
Before starting the project, it should be noted, that I did inform my students’ parents on the technology the children would be using, and asked for their consent. The project was created as part of a unit that would focus on learning important grammar components and incorporating them into a choose-your-own adventure story for a French language class. The first part of the lesson focused on teaching them about how to improve their sentence structure by using correctly punctuated complex and compound sentences; nothing new here. Once they demonstrated an understanding of the concept, I broke them into groups, got them all to sign up a Gmail account, and connect to their group members via their Google + accounts. I was surprised how much they enjoyed this activity. Right away, they were customizing their profile pages, adding each other into their Google Circles, and messaging each other back and forth.
The next step of the project got them equally excited, and continued to surprise me as well. I forwarded each group a brainstorming page using Google Docs that each group would use to outline their choose-your-own adventure story, and then showed them how to edit, write, and share documents within this highly collaborative word processing tool. They were hooked immediately, and in no time they were using the built-in comment board to communicate and develop their stories. Because I had them all share their documents with me, I could monitor their progress and communication, and offer assistance if they came into trouble. What really impressed me, however, was that not only were they writing their stories in French, but communicating with each other in the comment threads in French as well.
Once their outlines were finished, they needed to take their story and incorporate it into Google Forms, another version of Google Docs. This lets students create individual pages with options to link to other pages, upload images to personalize them, and post it in a way that reads like a story online. It was quite involved for Grade 6 students, but they were all buying in. What was more impressive was that most groups worked on their stories from home using the collaborative software to work on their documents simultaneously.
The last part of the assignment was for them to write a reflection on their experience; another idea that I borrowed from our ETEC 565a course. Personally, I liked completing our assignments’ reflections. Reflections, I began to realize, can be a powerful learning and assessment activity. They not only demand students to contemplate, in detail, the different aspects of an assignment, but provide the teacher a sample of the students writing and a glimpse of how the student grew throughout the process. Even for the teacher a student’s reflection can be a learning tool, as their reflections often focus on what they liked, and disliked about the assignment. For a teacher, this is valuable feedback that can be used to modify the learning activity to improve upon it for a future date.
The last part of the course I would like to touch upon is to comment on the value I gained from the course’s discussion forums. Again, I found these weekly activities to be well-structured, applicable, and framed within constructivism pedagogy. I liked how they began by presenting students with a real-world problem, and how it was our task to draw upon our own experiences and tie it to the new knowledge that we were gaining from our readings and other research to offer a solution. It was both interesting and highly educational to see how other professionals from various fields tackled a similar problem, and how our own proposed solutions for the problem changed and improved as we gained more and more feedback from our peers. These activities, and the discussion forums that were created to give students a chance to ask questions about our assignments, I found to be crucial attributes to creating an open, collaborative, and supportive environment; something that can be hard to achieve in online courses.
In the end, I found this course to be demanding on many levels. It’s assignments pushed me to work with a variety of tools that I can now use to help me improve the design of my own lessons. The discussion forums required us to be highly involved in the course material and offer solutions to real-world problems, that will, no doubt, help me in the future. But confronting these challenges and overcoming them is what learning is all about. The process has already inspired me to use new approaches in my own teaching methods, and I’m looking forward to putting my new skills and knowledge to work to produce even more engaging lesson plans and activities for my students.
References
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A framework for selecting and using technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective teaching with technology in higher education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Perkins, M., & Pfaffman, J. (2006). Using a course management system to improve classroom communication. Science Teacher, 73(7), 33-37. Retrieved fromhttp://20100829131520_6025161.webstarts.com/uploads/moodle_in_20_the_classroom_NSTA.pdf
Rafi. (2009). New life (picture). Retrieved from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhk313/3638085955/in/photolist-4hq1Yr-a3W1oP-7sb21s-b5fi4R-e74cDj-e1n4Km-7zSZ1Z-e74ccG-7xZhzQ-e1n3Xs-e6Xy9n-7rQU7S-7tEtDa-F3wfC-819Dic-6xu9cV-63CaJK-6Zi9Er-bEoXey-6o8WT3