Week 7: Collaboration

I find this tough.  I don't want to go so far as to say that I am against having my students collaborate on projects.  I will say that for the online courses that I teach, it is difficult for me to come up with many realistic collaboration opportunities in general.  Additionally, there are several challenges.  Age and maturity level (junior high course), wild variations in student dedication/ethic, varying school fidelity of course implementation, and varying school schedules are some of the main hurdles.  I hate the idea of assigning a collaborative distance project, and seeing a dedicated student get stuck carrying the weight of others in order to preserve his or her own success.  Even more, I hate the idea of turning off a dedicated student because he or she got stuck in a remote collaboration with people who were poor teammates. 

That being said, I can see plenty of opportunity for collaboration in certain kinds of classes and projects.  Age, maturity, and work ethic are factors that hopefully improve in our upper level courses where we can more easily foster large collaborative projects.

Let's move on to resources.

I don't want to waste a ton of time on our 500 lb. gorilla in the room.  But I will simply give Google their due.  As most of the education world has gradually become comfortable and proficient using various Google things, saving in drive, and sharing with others, a teacher's quest for collaboration could start and end there.  Dropbox could be considered one of the co-runner-ups in my opinion.

I liked the padlet site/app mentioned in this course.  Especially if a team were developing a project and sharing resources and ideas asynchronously, something like this would absolutely be the ticket.  I got an account and am awaiting the right chance to utilize this tool.  Thanks Nicole for sharing that with us!

There are several other collaborative online spaces that people can also use.  I'm a fan of sites that don't require an account or login.  It simplifies things for students, who can get overwhelmed with all the different logins and passwords.  There is a site called meetingwords.com. And it's not anything super unique, but it is free.  With no login you can just get a meeting space and share the url with whomever your heart desires.  Typing in it and sharing is so simple there are really no instructions needed.

One resource that is brand new to me that I found during research for this week:  Mindmeister.com 
This is a website where you create "mind maps."  It's a neat graphic organizer where group members can work synchronously and asynchronously with a shared mind map.  The collaborative possibilities for this resource abound.  There is a basic, free version available.  It is, however, limited to creating a maximum of 3 maps.  Below is the map I made just kicking the tires so to speak.

In my past distance delivery classes, some ways I have fostered online student collaboration are:  Class created glossaries, where students define terms by editing the glossary in Moodle; Sharing and commenting on video projects; Scavenger hunts, where students from other schools help each other with hints in a moodle forum; Writing workplace scenarios in forum and responding to other groups' scenarios. 

Something I'm planning on doing for future collaboration is to change the approach to our career videos we make.  Through the course I help students learn about themselves and look into setting career goals.  I want to have students with similar/same career aspirations work as a pair or small group with students from other schools on researching their occupation and creating their video together.  To do this I plan on having the students use a medium such as Moodle forum or Meetingwords.com as a means to share information and ideas, then map out a plan on Mindmeister.com or Padlet.  The maps can be shared, downloaded, or printed for grading.  Finally the culmination of the project will be a slick Animoto video.  I'm already excited to see this come to fruition!

Week 6: Engagement

It should be a given that engagement and interaction in an online learning environment is crucial.  It fosters learning, broadens interactions, hones skills in written communication as well as professional etiquette.  Moreover, it makes the class more fun and interesting for the students, the importance of which bears repeating.  It should be enjoyable for the students!

The PLPnetwork article that was provided with the assignment (http://plpnetwork.com/2012/05/10/distance-learning-how-i-engage-students/) had a point that I have seen manifest in person.  " In an online discussion, every voice is heard, from shy students and learning disabled ones, even ones with special needs, who might not ordinarily speak out."

I had a student in my Jr. High Careers VTC class who was exemplary in our class forums, with insightful posts and comments on her classmates' work.  The next year I had her in my class when I taught in her school in person, and she was the most quiet, shy student.  I'm not even sure what her voice sounds like, she was so reluctant to speak.  The school staff assured me that is and has been her typical personality.  Same person, different learning environment.   Thus, we have a unique opportunity to help students find their voice.

I read over a few articles concerning engagement and for one reason or another I liked this one which is actually the summary and support materials from a past webinar on the topic.  It has an easy-to-swallow little slideshow of tips and tidbits at the bottom which gave me some ideas and reminders.
http://blog.cengage.com/strategies-engage-students-in-online-courses/
Ideas I liked:
-A FAQ section
-An "additional resources" section, where the instructor and students both can add resources to broaden and expand upon subject materiail.
-Vary media.  Get students accustomed to accessing a variety of media.  This is an important skill set.
-Specificity of instructions.
-Provide a summary post at the end of online discussions.
-3-2-1 response.

Things I currently do to foster engagement:
I have the students introduce themselves in an intro forum, create a profile with pictures and basic interests, respond to discussion forums on various topics, create workplace scenarios for their peers to contemplate and respond to, collaborate to create definitions in a glossary, submit creative projects in forums so they can see and comment on each others' work.

Things I read that I want/need to improve upon:
-I'm going to create sections for FAQs and for additional resources.  I want to utilize the additional resources as one means for differentiation.  It can be a tool for students who are working ahead of their peers to have a chance to look deeper into the topics and share what they have found while their classmates were completing a task or assignment.
-I plan to establish a routine of completion instructions for each assignment and activity, so that my students will build a habit of knowing how they can excel in the assignments given, from one to the next.
-I love the idea of a 3-2-1 forum response as an exit ticket out of a unit, assignment or activity.  (3 new things learned, 2 things they already knew, 1 question they have.)

Week 5: Goals and Plans

In a way, one could consider me fortunate.  My Moodle-based class has a lot of room for improvement.  So, in that essence, this week's post/assignment of planning goals and changes to my course has low-hanging fruit in terms of obvious needs in my own course. 

The first thing I want to do is clean up and organize the clutter.  Right now I have several sections in my course, and each section has several links, files, activities and documents. 

 To combat the confusion and direct students to the current day's resources, I have used a label, in this case I took a picture of my hand pointing at an activity.  Then I move the label around to point at different daily activities.  I mean, it serves the purpose and all.  But, the page has all several sections that look pretty much like what you see in the above image. 

I want to change the navigation to one where each course section is closed, with just a neat icon on the main page.  Since we skip around a bit in the class, they all will be visible, but the section for the current day will be highlighted.  After opening the section, the hand can still point the way.  The main page will be much shorter and neater, streamlined and organized.

By the way, I have dabbled a bit in the Moodle themes we have available at LKSD and have not quite found what I'm looking for.  Furthermore, I haven't been able to figure out how to add a theme.  If any classmates have any suggestions for a Moodle theme that looks good and can help me accomplish the above, by all means please say so.

The 2nd goal for change is to create a useful and engaging (hopefully fun, it's a junior high class) course navigation video for the students to use.  It will be located right in the "getting started" menu at the top of the page. This will be especially useful as I always have some students who join the class sometime later on in the course, after I have already shown the class how to navigate the webpage.  This way there will always be a guide, on the ready, for any newcomers, or any who might need a review.

These are both goals and things I have not yet done.  My 3rd goal for the course is something I dabbled in last year but didn't gain much traction.  Now that I have a little better understanding of checklists and completion tracking, I want to utilize this tool to a much greater degree.  I'm hoping that it will help me with pacing, my students with keeping themselves current, and the remote site teachers in tracking their students. 

Gratitude: Week 4

Hi folks

I apologize for the tardiness on this week's posting.  I began an itinerant stint out in the village of Platinum this week, and have been busy getting set up, acclimated and rolling forward with classes.  Last night was the big Halloween slumber party at the school.  Plenty of fun, games, scary movies and junk food were had by all, but it was a very late night.

On to this week's topic-how I teach myself and troubleshoot with my LMS.

Currently I use two LMS.  I'll start with my secondary, which is NCCERConnect, virtual classroom made by Pearson to support their various NCCER curricula.  Getting started was a bit of a chore for me initially, and I probably could not have pulled it off without their channel of YouTube tutorials.  Once I found it, it made a world of difference for me.  In fact, let's take a moment of thankfulness for YouTube. It seems that no matter what it is you are trying to accomplish, somebody out there has recorded an informative video  to help you along.  If only bandwidth allotment issues were not something we had to deal with...

On to my primary LMS, and the real focus of my coursework here, Moodle.  For me, and the things I have tried to do up until taking THIS course (Thank you Nicole :-)  )  my Moodle help searches have all been one-stop shopping so to speak.  We at LKSD have been so fortunate to have a coworker, Andrea Pokrzywinski, who has set up a Moodle help page on our LKSD Moodle.

Many of the things on there are tutorials created by others on YouTube, but the nice thing is, she has it all laid out in a logical sequencial format, and is super easy to find.  In getting started in Moodle 2, between her page and her willingness to help me out in a bind, Andy has been a real lifesaver.  What you see above is just the tip of the iceberg on that Moodle page.  I don't know what access others at Kodiak district have to this page, but if you can access it, it is a great resource.

The best title I could think of for this week's post is "Gratitude."  YouTube, Andy P, and Nicole F are my sources for learning how to improve what I provide to my students via my LMS.

Quyana cakneq!

Week 2/3

For this week I decided to improve the Moodle course page I use for my spring semester VTC course, Junior High Career Exploration.  I wanted to make the main page "getting started point" more user friendly and less cluttered.

Some of the important files such as the VTC Protocols and the listing of VTC assistance telephone numbers had been links to word documents previously.  This meant that a student would have to download and open the document in order to view it.  In the spirit of immediacy, I changed these links by adding a page and then posting the content into the page.  Now when my students need to access these files, one click makes the page open in a pop up window.  I set up the size of the popup so that it will fully display the content right away. 

I also created an HTML block with a link to the class streaming video site.  Now my students can easily find streaming video if they missed a class.  The big red "play" button opens the streaming video in a separate popup window.

Week 1 discussion: LMS

This is the first week of Ed 565, and our discussion topic is:  "What is an LMS? What is the purpose of an LMS? Share examples of LMSs other than Moodle."

So first of all, LMS stands for Learning Management System.  These are electronic web-based platforms used as a medium for instruction, collaboration, giving, collecting, and grading assignments.  There are a lot of different ones now, as enterprising educators have put their expertise to a new focus, and of course some greedy companies have sought a new angle to cash in on education budgets.  That said, there are several good ones, and they serve a very important and increasing need in today's learning landscape.

For us in rural Alaska, the need is clear and obvious, as we have students spread far and wide.  In order to provide the breadth and depth of education that every person on this planet deserves, we need to step outside of brick and mortar schools.  This same type of need is experienced by others as well, such as:  homeschooled students, students at very small schools/districts, transient students, companies employee training programs, and of course correspondence students of distance post secondary education.

We use Moodle and it works great.  Other big names in LMSs that I have dealt with are Blackboard, Edmodo, Skyward, Alecks.  Right now I have a couple of students working on their NCCER Core Curriculum Certification, and that uses an e-learning site through Pearson.  It has an e-text, multimedia library, built in quizzes, interactive reviews, concept checks and trade term vocabulary development activities.  Now that myself and my students are becoming accustomed to it, it is working out.

It's not the most stylish format, but it is effective enough.

Thanks for reading :-)
-Brian