What have you learned from this online class?
I have learned how to discover new free online educational tools. I learned how to find different types of tools online, understand their purpose and manipulate them to gain experience in their usage. I gained further experience searching each tool’s website and organizing information about them into writing. In this class, I also learned about other educational online tools that my other group members worked on. We shared more information from project one as it was more group work intensive. However, looking through the tutorial websites my other group mates created has also given me exposure to four other tools. Finally, the social aspect of this class must be mentioned as a learning experience. The group work, particularly the communication forms that took place, the first written project and the overall concept of working in online groups was certainly a learning curve. I have done online group work before and I find it difficult to coordinate times to meet synchronously and depend on others that you don’t have any potential to see face to face. What were your weak and strong points? My weak point this semester was that I had so many unexpected personal issues that I found it difficult to perform at the level that I am capable of. It was very frustrating to not be able to put the normal amount of time and effort that I generally put into any course. Although everything was completed with all necessary requirements, there were a few late posts, late responses and just thoughtless errors created that are not typical of my work. The other weak spot that I noticed is that after project one was completed and I did not necessarily have to work with the group to obtain my grade, then I basically stopped trying to communicate with or utilize them as a resource. My strong points would have to be based on my previous experience with Dr. Wang’s IT 645 class that I took last summer. It really carried me through being able to anticipate this course’s work load. There was a lot less time wasted in trial and error because I had already built a weebly site before, done a video recording, created the blog and worked in groups. Because of this, I feel I was able to concentrate on absorbing more information about educational communication tools. Another strong point was my overall interest in education. Because this is my career field, then these tools were exciting to learn about and how they could be used in the classroom. How did you like the interaction between you and your peers, you and instructor? Dr. Wang is always quick to reply and does reply to every email. I do not have to worry about when is she going to answer me or IF she is going to. I appreciate this about her. She is kind when she has to make corrections, and once in my case, repeatedly. My interaction with Dr. Wang has been positive. My group interaction was a bit more strained. For the first half of the semester it felt like it took a long time to develop rapport with one another and establish roles. I would have preferred that the group leader position not be assigned but that the group decide together who should lead. It felt like once it came down to a matter of days before the project was due then everyone began to respond to emails and be in better communication. Like I mentioned earlier, after the first project was done I basically just stopped trying to communicate with my group because it was adding a lot of stress on me. Reflect on the communication tools used in this class: email, discussion board, Bluebutton, and Blog. From you experience, explain the advantages and disadvantages of each tool. Email was the most used form of communication and I believe that anyone who is in an online course checks their email multiple times a day so this is an advantage. I guess one disadvantage is that whenever someone doesn’t reply to your email, you have to take time to try to keep reaching out and are dependent on the other person responding in an appropriate amount of time for this to be effective. The Discussion Board’s advantage is that you can quickly find who or what it is you need to read about in one place and not have to sift through old emails. I like the discussion boards because they can be “timed” and it forces students to make a timely response. One disadvantage is that you have to log on to canvas and pull up your class and the pull up the board. There is no quick way to access the discussion boards. Bluebutton was only used once in this course at the beginning, for a synchronous online meeting with Dr. Wang to go over important information. The advantage to me is that it allowed for her to explain the course to us be able to see pertinent information on the screen as she pulled up different material to look at. The drawback to Bluebutton is sometimes the audio cuts out and you have to log out and back in again. Blog has been good practice for me because this is a strong tool used in English classes. I just got my first teaching position for next year and I intend to use blogging in my classroom, this is the advantage of the blog for me. It helps to organize thoughts and reflect on what has been learned. Furthermore, by reading your class mates blogs then you may gain insight as you read from another person’s perspective. One disadvantage to the blog is that it is opinion and sometimes they are written as though the writer is just thinking on paper and that makes it difficult to follow. How helpful did you think the group work in this class was? Explain why? Based solely on the experience from this particular course then the group work was not enjoyable and pretty frustrating. I have taken another course with Dr. Wang and had a cohesive group that worked well together and was responsible to one another. By that I mean answering emails concerning group work quickly, but also being available to one another to use as a resource. I understand that each member has their own work and personal schedules, but I felt that maybe this course and the projects weren't as much of a priority for each member. I must admit that by the time we got a week away from project one being due, then I had a major personal issue that caused me delays. Because the group was lagging behind anyway then I lost motivation to work to the best of my ability and began to stop answering emails quickly or turn in work early. The group never felt like it developed a sense of cohesiveness or unified front to do good work, turned in early. I feel as though, at the beginning, I tried to model my behavior towards my group members in the same fashion as I had when I took Dr. Wang before and had to do group work. Unfortunately, this time we all just couldn’t get on the same page and that caused me to feel discouraged and I think my work suffered because of it.
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This project went much smoother for me than the first one, I’m happy to say. Because this is the fourth website I have created on weebly, there was a lot less time spent in trial and error. Also, because we worked independently then it was easier for me to complete the project at my own pace.
Buncee is a really versatile presentation platform and it was hard to try to summarize all that it is capable of for this project. I felt like their website could be better organized so that it is easier to understand all of the different things that the buncee company is doing or capable of. It really took a lot more research than necessary to pull all the information together to get a comprehensive picture in my mind of the overall “deal”. Because of that, it was difficult to whittle it down to what was necessary because I kept coming across new information in random locations. There was a few things that were not really pertinent to add to the tutorial that I found appealing about the buncee tool. First of all, if you’re working on your presentation on the computer at school but need to finish it later, then you can easily pick it up on your phone or tablet through the app. I actually did add that feature to the “pros”. The Programs they have just got a mention on the first page, but they are really cool and could truly be used for any grade. Their presence on social media is extensive. There is hashtags to view buncees with similar topics, such as Earth Day, which is today! Another feature I didn’t mention on the site was their ease of topical trends…. What I mean is that, for instance, because today is Earth Day, for the past week, if you get on Buncee, then there are banners and templates, stickers and animations that are present first in the selections. When I first began this project a month ago, there was St. Patrick’s Day stuff readily available. I find this to really add to the “user friendly” aspect of the site. Overall, I am really pleased that I chose this tool because now that I know so much about it, I feel comfortable wanting to utilize it in the classroom. It is very similar to Prezi, but this company just has so much more going on and is really geared toward that K-12 sector. It is really amazing all the possibilities that Buncee presents to the classroom…. And it’s really fun! The image below that I used to as the link to my tutorial website is actually a BUNCEE I made! Enjoy! As a first-time online instructor, based on this and last weeds’ readings, explain the tasks that you would need to complete the design and development of an online course. What are the major components of your online course? What Web 2.0 tools or applications you would adopt for your online course? And why they are chosen?
This week’s readings were very interesting to me as I have am hoping to be an online educator in the future. When thinking about the tasks that are needed to complete the design of a course, besides referencing the readings, I would reference my own experience. The design needs to be clear and structured and shouldn’t change much unless necessary. The students should know at the beginning of the course what the major projects and tests are and when they will be. I find project-based verses test-based to work better for me, so as an instructor I would probably tend to that style. Assessments can come in many forms and Universal Design for learning techniques can help an instructor assess many different learning styles in the class. Dividing work into smaller learning pieces, like the smaller and more frequent tests mentioned in the reading by Anderson and Connell, helps students to retain information for longer periods of time. I would probably integrate short YouTube videos, such as Ted Talks, into the curriculum the most. However, I know how valuable role play can be and where it was useful I would also include this Web 2.0 tool. Blogging and threaded discussion are another tool that I would use because the cause students to be accountable to one another not just the professor. Based on your own experiences of using different web 2.0 tools in the past few weeks, describe the common features of Web 2.0 tools, how you can integrate them into your teaching area so as to create a friendly online learning environment, help online content delivery and assessment.
This week’s readings are about the best strategies and methods for successful implementation of online learning in the context of design. I have now taken eight online courses at USM and my experience has been varied. I have taken some synchronous, some asynchronous, some were on BlackBoard and some on Canvas, some use discussion boards, some don’t, some do group work, some don’t, some have quizzes, midterms and finals and others have been project based. Certainly what has caused me to be successful in the classes does have a lot to do with the organization of it. Many things the Weerasinghe, Ramberrg and Hewagamage (2009) article touch on seem like common sense, but after reading the article I realize that it takes a large amount of small common sense things to make the wheel of online learning spin. Things in this article such as organizing information from broad concepts to specific ones in outline form, presenting material in small chunks with regular self-assessments, using borders around images, keeping word count low and pertinent, availability of communication tools to access teacher and classmates, using smaller graphics, keeping audio weight limits in mind, the list goes on and on. This article was packed with very valuable information for us as we consider designing our tutorial site this week. To specifically answer the question proposed for this week’s blog, I feel a lot of these same concepts can be transferred. First of all, I would use what works. It is okay to try new things, but I wouldn’t test them on my class. I would wait until it has been proven to be a useful tool and all the bugs have been worked out of it. Secondly, I wouldn’t change up formats too frequently. I would pick one format and maybe modify it to work better, but not so much so that it is confusing or frustrating to students. And third of all, to help content delivery then age appropriate and subject appropriate formatting needs to be kept in mind. Also, it has been proven that smaller assessments throughout the learning process is very beneficial to long term memory retention. Also, a final thought on Universal Design for Learning: the online platform is a great place for this to take place. A teacher can plan ahead of time to have a variety of activities that appeal to all the different types of learners. From websites with quizzes and games to material that can be reviewed to offer further explanations and for regular review, Online Learning is an invaluable tool for UDL. Weerasinghe, T. A., Ramberg, R., & Hewagamage, K. P. (2009). Designing online learning environments for distance learning. Retrieved March 31, 2018 from: https://usm.instructure.com/courses/17122/modules/items/804190 The free online tool that I will be using for my project 2 is Buncee! It is a presentation platform very similar to prezi (differences to follow) and is truly made for all ages. From looking at the website for over an hour I am still not convinced that I can see all this tool has to offer. When I signed up, though, I did notice that although it is free, you can pay for subscriptions which allows for a lot more use. Buncee posts the month’s “favorite” creations on their website, if the presentation was set to “public”. I viewed countless “buncees” in countless forms! The presentations are presented on slides, similar to powerpoint and the user can choose backgrounds, fonts, animated images, insert images of their own, insert youtube videos, personal videos made on the computer, stickers and more. The presentation can be shared on social media with the click of a button. You can also choose to create a link to share or send it directly as an email. It even has a QR code option (not sure if this is part of the “free” version).
Some examples I viewed on the website for classroom use include: Venn Diagrams, Word of the Week, the Steps of a Process, Check Lists, Points of a Debate, Describe a chapter in a book, Famous people in History or Science or English, All about an Author or All about a period in time such as the Cold War. Other examples found on the website are: library branding, copy correct, quizzes, invitations and cards, journaling, pen pal exchanges, grammar development, research presentations, newsletters, flipped learning assignments, language learning (with audio), substitute planning, the possibilities are endless! I chose this platform because I thought it would be pertinent to what I am studying to teach which is Secondary English. I am now realizing that it can be useful to any classroom of any age group. The tool appears so user friendly with tons of options for application. There are several youtube video tutorials not only made by the Buncee company but also by other users of Buncee. I believe that there is enough usage for this tool to easily turn into a tutorial site without having to scrape for information. I am very excited to be exploring and bringing Buncee to the list of educational tools! While my group is still working on project one and completing the report, I will share what we have accomplished this week. Danielle started a Google Doc that we can, hopefully, all collaboratively work on. Our goal is to have everyone submit their report and then add an intro and conclusion at the end. I have written some of my report but was glad when Songtao suggested that we look at an example from a previous student. I feel that this has been able to give me some more pointed direction on where to take my report.
My group mates and I will be holding a synchronous meeting on skype this evening to organize ourselves and create some goals for working on activities and completing our report. Working collaboratively has proven to be more difficult that what I have previously experienced in a similar class. It is difficult with five different people’s schedules, other classes and priorities to get “on the same page”. I am hoping that this week goes well and that we are able to complete a great report and turn it in on time. I have enjoyed exploring Appletree and have developed a good list of pros and cons. Writing my report has gone quickly so far, I feel, because of the versatility of the tool itself. The main drawback that I see with Appletree is that it is really geared more towards elementary and early middle school. The Progress Report feature wouldn’t really be appropriate for someone who is in High School. Also, if it were designed for older students, then there would need to be some other features that would be applicable for them. For instance, the credit system is very important to High School and would be important to include how many a student has gotten and how many more are needed to graduate. Attendance is an important issue and Appletree could add a feature that notified parents of a particular absence and include whatever material was missed. I look forward to finishing up this project and starting on our new tools soon. As Dr. Wang points out in her article, one of the main issues with online learning is a “lack of engagement” and “sense of community” (Wang, 2011). In my personal experience I feel that the main drawback is the lack of accountability, especially with asynchronous classes, to peers and the instructor because there is no set time for face-to-face meetings. It seems easier to let work fall to the wayside if there is no extrinsic motivation. I fully agree that not every teacher is cut out for online instruction and neither is every student. She point out that this is due to personality and learning style differences. I have taken eleven online classes and do well at them. I like the sense of control that I have over being able to learn and do work when I can fit it in my schedule. I am an organized, type A, structured and self-motivated woman. These qualities make online learning compatible for me. I have also found, as it was mentioned in the article, that emailing has been the most used form of communication.
The other two articles, although about the same topic, pose very different viewpoints. “Strategies for e-Learning” by More was written in India and “General Education Issues” by Childers and Burner is based in America. The More article provides a nice overview of the development and current state of online learning at a university in Nashik. The part I thought was the most interesting was the self-tests that the students can take to see where they are as far as knowledge attainment and how they’re measuring up to their peers. These were helpful in the Virtual Classroom Modules system that was being used. She reiterates the value of online learning and that is fast, valuable information at a low cost. The article by Childers and Burner was published in 2000 and was based on research conducted in 1998 when online learning was just emerging. I appreciate their list of goals for things that they, as educators, want to ensure that the students are experiencing in the virtual classroom. This article concludes that the students attained the same level of educational experience through online learning as they would have in the classroom. Interestingly, one of the main requests by students was more peer interaction. I believe that over the last nearly two decades since online learning has hit the stage, that a lot of the educational approach has shifted from instructor centered to instructors as facilitators of student centered learning. I enjoyed all of these articles from the perspective of a student who is in an online graduate program and also as someone who is seeking to be an online educator. Reading the literature on what works in the virtual classroom is a strong start to feeling confident that I can be successful in this new field. That being said, I hope that the issues of banning cell phones in schools and internet censorship will only have to gravely concern me for one year of student teaching. I used to be much more strict and traditional in my attitude towards these issues than I am now. Each school has developed their own policies about these issues, so whether I agree with them or not will not matter. It will be my job as an employee of the district to enforce whatever rules and guidelines have been laid forth. Personally, I do believe there must be boundaries with cell phones and the Internet in the school setting. Cell phones should only be used at school if it is facilitating learning or there is “down” time and no learning is occurring. I have asked my high school daughter which teachers implement a cell phone policy that she likes the best. She claims that she prefers for her phone to go into a hanging phone holder before class begins because then the temptation or concern with looking at the phone during lecture or work time is taken away. She can just focus on learning the material. Some teachers ask students to turn in phones at the beginning of class and some don’t. Obviously they aren’t supposed to be using them during instruction time but I am not sure that every student is going to have the maturity or self-control to not check their phone and become distracted. On that same note, Internet censorship should be enforced at school to some level because there will be students who are going to try to look up inappropriate material. I definitely agree in the strict monitoring of internet use for the protection of the children. In conclusion, I think a strong and unified set of rules, etiquette, and boundaries- is what will be the best approach. Don’t wait for something bad to happen to decide to make a rule. Rules should be proactive and consistent and always focusing on the student’s education first. Childers, J. L., & Berner, R. T. (2000). General education issues, distance education practices. Journal of General Education, 49(1), 53-65. More, S. (2009). Strategies for e-Learning in open & distance learning (odl). Retrieved from: http://itdl.org/Journal/Mar_09/article04.htm Wang, S., (2011). Promoting student's online engagement with communication tools. Journal of Educational Technology Development and Exchange, 4(1), 81-90. This week our group heard from two more members about their communication tool. The first was Molly sharing Twitter and Pearlina sharing Tango. I have only a little experience with both of these. I will need to explore more about them to understand how they are going to work efficiently in the classroom. One thing that is similar about both of them is that there has to be monitoring or restrictions placed on their use. That makes me anxious, but I know that given a mature class and a strong teacher that those issues could be resolved. Both of these tools seem to use feeds, video, pictures and posts. One pro is that a lot of young people use these apps so they are familiar and no new usage information has to be introduced.
Our group had a synchronous meeting on Tuesday via Skype that seemed to go a bit smoother than Zoom. I was unable to attend but appreciate Danielle keeping everyone up to date. I am looking forward to completing activities next week. To get our Project One going, Danielle and I created a one page word document that described our communication tool. We shared these documents through email with our group members. Furthermore, three of the five group members were able to meet synchronously on Zoom. Danielle, our leader, is emailing the members who were unable to attend a recap of the meeting.
I have chosen Appletree which is a platform that utilizes online, email, text or app usage for teachers to communicate with students and parents. For my first activity, I invited my group members to join my class as “students”. For the next activity, I will have members choose different forms of communicating that is available with Appletree. One drawback to this platform is that it is new and not widely used. For that reason, there are still bugs that need to be worked out. Also, the owners have not updated it for a year. Danielle chose Periscope and Molly chose Twitter. These two go hand in hand as Periscope is a function of Twitter, as I understand it. Danielle has more reservations than compliments to give to this tool. She has stated that it seems to be running into a bit of bad publicity and may even be phased out of Twitter soon. Its main function is to live stream videos that disappear after 24 hours. Molly and Songtao will be presenting documents next week on Twitter and Quizziz respectfully. We hope to have Pearlina make a tool selection early next week as well. I am excited to learn more about Twitter as I am not a user of this form of social media and am particularly interested to understand how it can be used in the classroom. I do have some experience with Quizziz and can see a lot of benefits for students with this. Does it have an app, or is it only online? Besides the quizzes and flash card services, what else can it do? I would like to close with a brief discussion on our experience using Zoom to have an asynchronous meeting last night. I have used this before in graduate school for a small class. I feel like if there were more than 5-7 people then it would be too difficult to manage as each person can be seen across the top. It was fairly easy to sign up and host a meeting. I copied a URL that was offered and emailed it to my group mates. I would have rather invited them through the email service they provide but I failed to get it to sync with Outlook. Another drawback was the lag. I did not experience this when using Zoom before, so we determined it may be due to the time of day and day of the week causing this due to high usage. Overall, I feel that it was a successful meeting and it was certainly nice to put faces with names. This is a great tool to use for small groups in the classroom setting to collaborate outside of school. Discuss the pros and cons of using instructional televisions, asynchronous video, and video conferencing in classrooms.
I didn’t see any information on instructional televisions, unless I missed it. I believe this is referring to such things as TV ONE that are created specifically to deliver the news in an age appropriate medium to adolescents. My kids used to have this at their public school in West Virginia, and they enjoyed it a lot. It helped them to feel like they were part of their world and society. They often came home asking questions about some news report they saw at school. The whole school watched it in the morning and often the students had some discussion on it. The con to this would be that the teacher can’t control what comes on and that can make it hard to prepare a discussion or work assignments. Asynchronous videos are a good option if you know you’re going to be out of the so that the students aren’t doing busy work and are still getting the value of lecture time. Another benefit to this is that it benefits students who learn better by hearing and seeing. So, the con, on the same token is that it could be a disadvantage to students who learn better by doing hands on projects. Video conferencing in the classroom is really a good idea to start as it was stated in the article titled “The Invisible Professor and the Future of Virtual Faculty”, there is a such a surge in online learning that soon no student will be untouched by it. It is a good idea to start exposing students to this type of learning before they get to a higher education institution. An exciting use of video conferencing is connecting people from all over that have a common topic to share. For instance, having a class of robotics builders video conferencing another class across the country, or even in another country, about what they are doing and what is or is not working. I’m not sure I can actually think of a con to having this as a supplemental aspect of any classroom, so I will be interested to see what my peers come up with for this! Based on your experiences in using IM, provide some ideas to your peers to that they can turn instant messaging into an instructional tool for teaching in their classrooms. One way to use instant messaging in a classroom would be to use it to communicate between groups working separately on a unified project. For instance, students could be split into groups in a high school language arts class to come up with one sentence to summarize various chapters of a book and then IM each other’s sentences to one another as they are created. The sentences could then be taken from the string of texts and combined to make a document that summarizes the book. Another way IM can be used is to connect classrooms within a school that could be collaborating on a common goal such as a debate or a talent show. |
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