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This week I was again given the pleasure of working from home. Personally, this is the aspect of eLearning that I like the most. For colleges that are looking to be competitive with non-traditional students, the use of virtual classrooms to simulate a real class experience seems to be a must. Traditional online courses do not seem to provide the same amount of depth that can be gained through live interactions with classmates.
For the second half of the class we worked on fleshing out our pre-storyboard templates for our lesson on the Iditarod. Read the rest of this entry »
So, last week we worked on designing a lesson module for e-learning that used the Iditarod as the primary content. It was fun to “get our hands” dirty with classmates and start to create an e-learning product. Specifically, it was useful to aid in applying the theories and techniques that we have discussed in class. In researching these, I came across a few webquests that did just this.
Two years ago I attended a workshop that taught teachers to build effective webquests at the Camden County ETTC. These projects, for those of you outside of education, provide students with a generally inquiry based approach to understanding a topic through internet research. All of the sites used are generally assigned by the teacher, giving the students guided instruction. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, I have been absent from the blogs/discussion boards this week because I have been working on a machinima for Visual Design using Second Life. For those of you who have not tried yet, Second Life is a virtual environment that works similarly to a Social Networking site, however all interactions are controlled by 3D avatars.
My group decided to use NOAA’s island in the program in order to teach the viewer about Tsunamis. The video was created by Faisal, Jenn Morinn, and myself and can be found here. Looking at Gagne’s 9 Events, as talked about in class this week, this video would make a nice hook to pull the students into a lesson on Tsunamis, or possibly as the 4th event to present content. Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you who were not in attendance, Amy, Scott S., and I presented on the use of virtual classrooms at the My Classroom to Yours conference. This entire conference was provided by the ETTC/SRI and brought together various teachers, from throughout the region, in order to share successful teaching practices. Through our presentation, we were able to show various uses of virtual classrooms in today’s education environment as well as present various free options. Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry that I missed last class…family commitment. From listening to the archive and speaking with Amy, it looks like the presentation went well.
For the past few months, I have been one of a few “SmartBoard Cheerleaders” in our district. Many of the staff members have become technology laggards at best and really do not see the need to add “more work” into their day. Read the rest of this entry »
So, this week was my first attempt this semester at teaching a subject solely through the use of Wimba. Aside from various hiccups, it seemed to go quite well. I really do enjoy using the program and find various ways in which to incorporate standard teaching practices through the online environment. The more we use the breakout rooms, the more I can visualize collaborative learning exercises and their implications to teaching classes online.
With all of this in mind, it really is a shame to see some of the online classes being given to undergrads. My wife is currently going back to college and is taking five online classes this semester. Though I can see that the professors would be excellent in the classroom, it appears that they really are quite unsuccessful in the online realm. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey everyone,
As you can probably see, I have been using this blog for three semesters with Amy. If you are interested, all of the previous entries met Dr. Ackerman’s requirement for blog entries. I often attach pics and documents in order to flesh out the blog and make it more of an organic dialogue, but these don’t seem to be required this week.
Sorry not to get this up sooner, but I’ve been sick this week. Seems my daughter brought home a bug with her and I’ve been out of work since Thursday…today’s the first day back.
As I said on the Bb posting, I felt that the first class was successful, though the syllabus was a bit daunting at first. Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry to put this up late…actually thought it had gone up but forgot to follow it up and take it out of “drafts.” In any event, it now has the original posting date.
Using Wimba to teach WordPress was definitely interesting. This really seems to provide the goal of removing the teacher from the front of the class (as we have managed to do completely). When looking at how online classes are traditionally taught, it seems that this is a way to provide the true synchronous classroom that is not always felt.
Currently, my wife just started going back to college at ACCC and is taking a couple of online classes. It would seem that these tools would provided nontraditional students with a more authentic class. Her current classes simply require to listen to a lecture or read from the book and then post to WebCT. Without regular comments from the professor, she’s left feeling that she could have taught herself the information as easily as taken a class for it.
In any event, in order to comment on the library class, it was nice to refresh my memory on various research tools, but we did not seem to learn much that has not been used in other MAIT courses for papers at this point. As an additional resource, the Atlantic County Library system provides their research databases free of charge.
A bit more training for our teachers this week in PowerSchool. Wish me luck!
Tomorrow marks our second class…and possibly the last one I attend on campus for awhile with the use of Wimba. I just purchased a Logitech ClearChat Pro USB and look forward to learning how we will use it next week.
Class helped me to realize that this semester will be only as difficult as we choose to make it for ourselves and aside from what we do in class already, it should not totally kill us.
I just posted my profile online and those of you who read through it will find out that I teach 7th Grade in Port Norris School in the Commercial Township School district. We are a very small distict in Cumberland County. After school I teach two technology based clubs each marking period which for the first half of school will be a Videogame Club and my Broadcasting Team for the morning news. On a few weekends a month I work at GameStop as a Game Advisor…which really means that I check people out and give whatever purchasing advice that I can.
This past Thursday and Friday I had a taste of Adult Learning from the teacher’s perspective as I taught workshops on the use of SmartBoards and lesson creation for the technology and another workshop on how to use our new online grading system, PowerSchool. Taking a cue from professors in the MAIT major, I feel that the lessons were successful, but it does always amaze me how different it is to teach fellow colleagues. It is so much easier to teach the students who I generally feel know less than I do…at least most of the time.
Can’t wait to learn more about what I did wrong teaching the workshop 
Feel free to ask me anything you need to about writing a blog tomorrow.
Missed class this week since I was sick. Honestly was probably more fun in class than I was possibly having, but I suppose that should be expected. From the descriptions that everyone left online, it seems like it was a very useful class period.
I have been playing around with Google documents for the past few weeks and it honestly is very nice, especially for a free program. Many of the features will remind users of the Microsoft Office interface, but the ability to share documents over the net makes it very useful when work is needed in multiple access points. After the readings from last week, I could imagine virtual ID teams could find these features very useful for asynchronous collaboration amongst themselves.
