I appreciate the metaphor of a plane trip for this course. We often talk about our learning journeys and this course certainly represents one aspect of that long adventure. As a life-long traveller I am always looking to visit and explore new places: sometimes the excitement of a city, at other times the relaxed pace of beach. As a lifelong learner, I also appreciate steep, fast-paced learning curves, but also situations when I have time to absorb and really reflect on and accommodate what I’m learning. I hope this course follows the latter pathway.
I’m looking forward to learning more about the learning management systems that are available. My school uses Moodle, but I know I only use a very small percentage of the features available. I want to see what else is out there and look at costs and benefits of each from a pedagogical perspective. I hope to improve my evaluation skills by looking critically at each technology and experimenting with the variety available. I also want to discover how I might incorporate the use of LM systems more into my classroom practice.
I work at a 1:1 Bring Your Own Device school. Students must have a laptop with certain hardware and software requirements. Our school uses a Google platform so much of the tools they need can be found using Google Apps. The school buys licenses for other software and students download these onto their computers. I use technology in my classroom regularly. Data loggers, lab simulations, online databases, and Youtube videos make up the majority of my technology usage. As mentioned I do use Moodle, but only as a resource library. It is where I keep resources so students can access them if they miss a class.
I am interested in the design of environments supported by technology. I have only recently begun to experiment with digital media beyond what I mentioned above. I have just finished the first year teaching an integrated science course that is a complete online delivery of resources, supplemented by collaborative classroom activities. Labs (also known as textbook chapters) are shared through Google docs, which allows students to interact with the material, add their own ideas and experiences, comment, and link out to other resources. It is a spiraled curriculum meaning that students are constantly asked to link back to ideas already studied and skills are built upon throughout the course. The three of us teaching the course did a small action research project to see if this spiraled curriculum allowed students to improve on skills of measurement and use of significant figures over the year. The results came back positive as more students reached a level of proficiency each time we assessed them. Interestingly, the students are pushing back a bit against the complete online delivery. They don’t like to spend so much time reading on their screen and wish they were given more paper. We have started printing some of the documents and giving them a choice. Its interesting that in such a digital age, where students feel lost without their technology, that they resist the online delivery system. This suggests that there is a digital threshold and perhaps blended environments need to ensure that the threshold between the amount of online delivery and face-to face interactions is not crossed.
This course should be useful in terms of delivering a course electronically and I look forward to learning more about the systems available to do that.