CED 550 - Week 3

This week we prepared to lead a 15 minute discussion on a topic of our choice in one of the upcoming lectures. We also need to prepare an asynchronous discussion thread that corresponds to our topic. The topic that I chose was blended learning. I choose my particular discussion topic because I am interested in flipping my classroom within the next 3 years.

One of the greatest challenge that I am anticipating as an online teacher/facilitator is keeping tabs on all student activity. I will need to carefully monitor the chat window, emoticons, hand raising, technical issues, and whiteboard. I hope to manage this challenge by providing clear directions for student activity and allowing them to control the flow of the lesson. I plan on regulating student conversation by requiring students to raise their hands when they want to talk. I may even utilize the mic restrictions that eluminate offers. I also hope to keep the students engaged. I plan on having all the students use the whiteboard to complete a graphic organizer. While the students are completing this task, I will be able to monitor the chat window, emoticons, hand raising, and technical issues.

As I prepared for my synchronous and asynchronous lesson, I realized that planning a lesson for an online learning environment is very similar to planing a lesson for a regular classroom. Preparation is the main focus of all good lessons (in class or online). I really needed to take the time to research my topic and think about the best way to present my material. I needed to consider my audience and determine the best possible way to keep them engaged. This is a similar check off that I use when preparing any lesson.

We also needed to create rubrics to evaluate the synchronous and asynchronous discussions. My focus for creating these rubrics was to keep it simplistic and easy to evaluate. I wanted to have clearly defined ranges that would allow me to quickly and easily evaluate student participation. I wanted it to be as clear cut as possible.

That is my plan for my synchronous and asynchronous lesson. Check my lesson and my discussion topic. Feel free to give any feedback.

CED 550 - Week 2

This post will discuss a list of statements/questions that we are supposed to be able to answer after this weeks class. I wrote my response below each question.

Identify at least two synchronous and two asynchronous online learning tools that would be appropriate for your targeted online learners.

• Two synchronous online learning tools that I could use with my students are Eluminate live! and Google + Hangouts with the interactive shared whiteboard.
• Two asynchronous online learning tools that I could use are my moodle page or my edmodo page.

List four different types of activities that you might use with your targeted online learners and identify an appropriate online tool to use in implementing that activity.

• Student discussions about Labs - I would facilitate this through the forums activity that moodle provides
• Screencast homework tutorials - I would use screener or Eluminate live! to have the students demonstrate how to do the homework. I chose these two options because they are web based and don't require any software installation.
• Blogs - I would have the students use the wiki feature in moodle because it is protected
• Lab Simulations - I would use http://phet.colorado.edu to complete online lab simulations that demonstrate concepts discussed in class

Is my initial contact warm and inviting? Are there things I did particularly well or could do better in the future? Is my initial contact clear and concise and yet user friendly? What are some strategies that help to format your contacts to make them as clear and concise as possible?

• Here is my initial contact to students about our online course. Read it and let me know if I have satisfied the questions above.

CED 550 - Week 1

This is the first week of CED 550 - Facilitating Online Learning. This course is designed to develop the skills of an effective online instructor. This week we focused on the similarities and differences of online learning, the strengths and weakness of online learning, and how to use Eluminate (a synchronous online learning environment). The main focus of this week's blog is how I can relate the examples of online learning to my own experience.

I have taken a quite a few online course prior to this one. This course is unique because it allows me learn about the skills and the process of creating an online learning environment. I find this to be of great value because I am interested in creating a blended learning environment within my own classroom. One thing that I enjoyed was having the moderator controls in eluminate during class this week. Eluminate is a great way to meet with a group of students and interact in a synchronous online learning environment. Moderators can truly control and guide a productive lesson in an online environment. This is something that I hope to utilize more as I explore the option of a blended learning environment.

I also looked at interactive online science lessons from the online learning gallery. The specific lessons were not as useful as I hoped because they did not relate to my subject area or age level. I did however find them to reinforce the benefits of interactive online learning. This is a great way to test student comprehension of content. Whether it is a quiz, memory game, or labeling activity; all of these activities allow the student to apply their knowledge and receive feedback. I have used interactive simulations from http://phet.colorado.edu/ within my classroom. These have been a great online lab alternative. I hope to continue to explore and discover more simulations and webquests so that I can incorporate them into the online learning aspect of my class.

CED 535 - Week 6: How I plan to flip my Classroom.

This week we needed to answer the following question: What item do you believe you can incorporate from this class into your professional or personal life and how will you ensure that you achieve the goal of incorporating it? If you can discuss it in terms of being a SMART goal for incorporating.

• S Specific - What exactly will you do?
• M Measurable - How will you be able to prove it was done?
• A Attainable - Will you have the resources and time, what might you have to do to make it occur?
• R Realistic - Make sure it is doable, you certainly can add something to a lesson plan or work item, you cannot get to the moon.
• T Timely - Assign a timeline - when will this be done by?

Goal: The concept that I chose to incorporate into my classroom is, screencasting/podcasting. This is something that I envision both myself and my students participating in.

I hope to do more screencasting of my classroom content. This year I specifically want to focus on skills that are not easily translated from the notes (determining significant figures, electron configurations, using Lewis dot structures for ionic/covalent bonding, nomenclature, graph analysis, and math problems). I plan on making the instructional videos accessible on our moodle site so that students can view them at later time if they need assistance.

I also plan on having the students create videos to demonstrate the labs that we are doing in class. The students can then upload the videos to our moodle site and the class can comment about what they learned. This is also a great way to demonstrate the labs for students that wree absent.

My long term goal is to make all of my classroom content available through online resources and screencasting. The students would be able to access these resources and instructional video lessons online so that they can learn the content outside of the classroom. This would allow me to dedicate in class time towards labs, projects, collaborative learning, and individual assistance. Essentially I hope to flip my classroom.

Measuring my Progress: Right now I am focusing on the first part of my goal. This year I hope to create at least one video lesson for each of my chemistry units. I also hope to have the students create at least one lab video for each of the units. This means that the students and I would need to create 9 video each (18 total videos). I believe that this is a realistic goal for this year and I hope to begin working on this during second semester.

As for my long term goal, I hope to continue to work on this process each year. I hope to continue to add more videos each time I go through a course. I hope to have my classroom completely flipped by the beginning of the 2014 school year.

This class has provided me with a lot of useful resources and the motivation that I needed to start making changes within my classroom. I now have a clear goal and timeline for the changes that I want to make. I believe that this process will help make my students become better thinkers and learners. It allows them to move through the course at their own pace and requires them to be aware of their academic needs and behaviors. This is a supportive system that helps individualize learning for each student.

Wish me luck!

Week 5 of CED 535

This week we needed to explore a new Web 2.0 application that we havent discussed in class, we needed to continue to work on our google site, and we started collecting our work for our portfolio.

We were given a few different resources to find new Web 2.0 tools (Go2Web20.net, All Things Web 2.0, Listio, Tech-lou-ology). This list of resources has a great value. I have actually bookmarked all of these website using Diigo so that I can reference them later and find new resources to incorporate into my own classroom. The Go2Web20.net has a great filter tool that lets you find the specific resources you need in an easy fashion. The All Things Web is nice because it has lists of the best voted and most popular Web 2.0 tools. Listio allows you to filter Web 2.0 tools by using keywords. They also post new Web 2.0 apps and reviews. The Tech-lou-ology website is actually our professor's, Louis Loeffler, blog. There are a variety of posts relating to Web 2.0 tools and reviews.

After a quick search, one of the resources I found to be interesting is bubblecomment. This is a cool way to insert video commentary onto webpages. This method is far more personal and really stands out. I hope to use this with my own website for the South Milwaukee Girls Basketball team.

We also needed to collect some of our best work from the graduate program and place it in a folder. This is the first step towards creating our portfolio. While this step seems like additional work now, I am glad that they are having us contribute to our portfolio so far in advance. This will hopefully make the process easier down the road.

Week 4 of CED 535

This week we continued to explore google sites, wikis, and twitter. I have continued to work on my google site for the girls basketball team and I am now following 41 people on twitter. Twitter continues to be a great source for new resources and interesting articles. We also discussed screencasting and facebook.

Screencasting is something that I have done before. One of my goals is to eventually create a flipped classroom. This means that the majority of the instruction occurs outside of the classroom and in class time is devoted for group work, activities, and labs. Some of the screencasting services that we checked out are: Screenr, ScreenJelly, Vocaroo, GabCast, Eyejot, Yodio, JingProject, ScreenCastle, ScreenToaster. I have used eyejot, and jing before. I currently use quicktime's screencasting feature. After recording a screencast with quicktime, I typically upload it to schooltube. I am excited to check out the other services as well.

Facebook is a familiar and popular social networking tool. I like the idea of creating a page for MEIT students and graduates so that we can continue to stay in touch and collaborate about educational technology.

Week 3 of CED535

What did we do this week that you can apply in your school or job and how might you use it?

This week we examined RSS readers, photo sharing, google sites, and twitter. I found all of these resources to be useful for either professional development or student use.

Google Reader - google reader is a RSS aggregator. This means that it collects all of the posts from the blogs that you subscribe to into a single location. This is a huge time saver. Instead of checking numerous websites/blogs, you can just check your google reader. I found this to be a beneficial way of following useful blogs that discuss educational topics. I primarily follow science or educational technology blogs written by quality instructors or professionals. Google reader has allowed me to do more professional reading in the last month than I have done in the last year. It is such as easy way to obtain and filter useful information and I know it will help me grow professionally.

Google Sites - Google sites allow users to create their own webpage and control who has access to it. It is incredibly user friendly. The best part is how easy it is to incorporate any of your goole apps (documents, spreadsheets, forms, etc.). Google sites has removed the fear of creating and managing a webpage. I recently created one for our girls basketball team. It was easy to set up and is a great way to share information. If I didn't use moodle and edmodo, I could see myself utilizing google sites as an easy way to create a class webpage. I can also envision students creating a website to present their research projects instead of a powerpoint. They could then share their knowledge with the world and obtain feedback from others. What a great alternative!

Photo sharing - I created a flickr account a long time ago. I have finally started to utilize it. It is a great way to store, organize, edit, and share your pictures. I can see my students taking pictures/videos of labs or demos and then having them post comments. I believe that they will enjoy this more than doing post lab questions. It also makes students more accountable because their work is public and can be viewed by others.

Twitter - I have continued to utilize twitter as a source of professional development. I have increased the people I am following and I am starting to get updates on some really useful information. It has been another easy way to obtain new resources. I could also see using this as a way to mass communicate with students about information that is relavant to class.