Without a doubt our professor, Lisa O'Neill, has been the most involved and present of all the instructors. She designed a course that was laid out and easy to follow, and then stayed on top of everything. I was pleasantly surprised to see her contributing to the discussion posts by poking and prodding our comments for deeper reflections. Additionally, each unit ended with a summary of the discussions that were had using quotes and references from what we had discussed! I was floored the first time I saw one of her summaries. This was definitely a first. The course itself introduced us to many new concepts (for me at least) with respect to Educational Technology and teaching online. It also brought me back to previous learning I have had in my other educational programs. The first unit had us reflecting on our teaching practice and who we were teaching. I believe that this is always a good starting off point and by bringing in the the course specific approach of designing distributed (online) learning it allowed us to get into the mindset for what was coming. Unit two in the course focused on establishing meaningful, memorable and motivational contexts to our learning plans. This was a throwback for me to my MED research on Creating Meaningful Experiences in Physical Education. This unit threw me for a loop. I had been teaching online for a couple weeks in the Nova Scotia school shut down and while not overly satisfied with the results was fine. Then WHAM, a reminder of what is important to me in my teaching - creating meaningful experiences. I wasn't doing anything of the sort with my online program. It was stale, blah and boring. Worse still it was just Physical Activity, not Physical Education! Immediately I started to revamp my online program for the students and tried to make it more meaningful and memorable for them! Unit three in the course conveniently looked at designing an activity to teach online. After the unit 2 wake up call, I had come up with an idea for a sharing activity that would be personally relevant to the students, would challenge their computer abilities and would offer a glimpse of their skill development in an activity from the PE program. Hopefully it would be a fun experience they could share with their family while making their video and slides presentations. In my mind it checked the boxes and I just had to figure it out. Luckily for me, that was essentially the activity design module of the course! Then "disaster" (not really), we were going back to face to face learning and the online experiment was over. I wasn't going to get to try my "Show What You Know" activity after all. Unit four in the course brought in the concepts around what makes a good online facilitator. This again reminded me about what teaching PE with the intention of creating meaningful experiences is all about. Searching online I found lots of graphics that detailed what it means to be an effective teacher, the one I found which I liked the best is below. It is from the blog of Dr. Caitlin Tucker. Improving the Course
As a practicing teacher, one area that I feel could be improved to better serve us as both learners and as educators is the activity design assignment. By rearranging the focus of the assignment to make students create a blended learning program that could be given either face to face, only online, or blended (face to face and online) and expanding it and in such a way so that over the period of a couple units we create a program rather than a single lesson I believe practicing educators could gain a better understanding of the development of an online learning program, but would also be creating one that they could implement in their own classrooms. I'm of the opinion that many educators taking these courses are both looking for the theory behind the learning but just as importantly they are looking for practical things that they can take and use in their classrooms. Additionally, I think that a developed program for online learning is a better fit for the Expression of Interest (Funding ) assignment at the end of the course. The other assignments in the course, this e-portfolio and the pecha kutcha are both reflection pieces that students will get out of what they put into them. As a teacher reflection is a skill that must be developed and nurtured and many educators may lack the interest, time, or inclination to do so with their practice. I know that personally, when I get into a rut teaching it is because I have become stagnant and have not been reflecting on what I a doing with the students, what is working, what isn't working, and why this may be. The start of online learning for me would be a great example of just such a time. Comments are closed.
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E-PortfolioThis e-portfolio will take the form of a blog and will record my progress in the Diploma in Educational Technology from Cape Breton University. Categories
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