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Is this it?

Truth be told I'm ready to let my brain rest in the area of e-learning...okay, not really. I'm already starting to contemplate whether or not what I'm proposing for my Senior English class needs to be taught online. That decision's not up to me, but for the first time in my further education career, I can honestly say I would STRONGLY consider teaching online. It would be a huge stretch for me, but I think I could do it.

Maybe you can be the judge & critique my project proposal...well, at least 4 tools worth, anyway. Check it out: Weege's final project for E-learning

Week #7 Reflections

This week has been all about getting our final project to publishing stage, but it began with the creation of objective writing. I honestly thought that wasn't too big of an issue, but my first attempts (as well as the attempts of many of my peers, I might add) were quite unsuccessful in the eyes of the instructor. Objective writing seems to be a bit more of a science than choosing terms from Bloom's Taxonomy and writing. Though it is a helpful tool, the instructor shed the most light on the topic when she posted, "What I've found is that every institution will have their own way of writing learning objectives and you will need to oblige.
The reason that I like this 'type' of learning objective is that, in order to write it as this level, you must a great deal of course design clarity." It certainly is true that we need to adapt to the criteria of each institution/instructor.

To be quite honest I thought objectives seek to level the playing field, and maybe they still do, but uniformalizing (my newly constructed word) language used within objectives may be necessary to ensure that this happens. The following website was quite helpful when considering the necessary characteristics of objectives for this class/teacher.

http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/art3_4.htm

Week #6 Reflections & such

Okay,
This week we've created a pre-course survey, so here's the link:
pre-course survey -- hope that works b/c I've never done that before ;)

Then we spent a bunch of time discussion/comparing two journalism courses - one by our instructor, one by a former student. Since I'm learning, I'll attempt to create links for those, too
Here's Casey's ...alright, that only takes you to the home page of Stout's course...hemmm...I need some help w/ creating a link to something that's already embedded elsewhere, aparently.
At any rate the concept of cybercoaching became a central item of discussion, while Datta chimed in with this gem I'm taking away this week. It's about a "loop" that exists within objective-creating:
1) first the foundation - the learning objective which sets the 'goal' -

2) to build towards this learning objectives there are the activities -

3) to support the activities there are tools -

4) to discover the efficiency of the activities and the tools, there is the
assessment -

5) the assessment feeds back information to the learning objective.

Hope these things are proving as insightful for you as they are for me ;)

Week #5 reflections

Applying Bloom's Taxonomy to the Casey report was the largest component for this week's learning. I was introduced to Bloom's chart when I was an undergrad & 10 years later it's still around. I think application of higher level thinking projects has merit beyond a simple assignment or quick dismissal -- The taxonomy should be on the forefront of our minds in all assessment and learning activities. In fact, I do use it when I'm creating our choice boards for senior English; it certainly does make it easier to service different levels of learners. I've included the e-article of Bloom's supplied by Laurie:

http://techlearning.com/article/8670



Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)

•Remembering - Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming,
locating, finding
•Understanding - Interpreting, Summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying,
comparing, explaining, exemplifying
•Applying - Implementing, carrying out, using, executing
•Analysing - Comparing, organising, deconstructing, Attributing, outlining, finding,
structuring, integrating
•Evaluating - Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, Experimenting, judging, testing,
Detecting, Monitoring
•Creating - designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making

Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)

Week #4 Reflection Notes

I'm pretty sure what I posted for our midterm reflection covers it all. I've compared what we did with the other two groups that posted & I'd say, comparatively, we're ahead. Compared to the evaluation rubric, we're ahead. I guess I'll rest easy being ahead. It is just such a blessing to have a group that works well together & does what they're supposed to do in a timely manner. I wish I could find the same motivation to write my PDP Educational Philosophy...best get to it!

Wordl or Tagcrowd

Want a funky way of looking at your paper? I tried visiting Tagcrowd & Wordl. They create items that look like this (sorry, couldn't save my own as a jpeg file). Makes you "look" at your paper in a whole different light.

Teamwork for Midterm

A class we took this summer absolutely challenged us & to a point tried to "convert" people into eliminating, entirely, team projects from a final grade. Yes, I know we've all been a part of teams that don't pull equal weight, but gosh darn it, it's so nice when they do...and let's face it, life is just better then. My group of Jennie, Andrea & Laurie was a blessing. We're done w/ the project AND IT'S MONDAY! It feels good to be on top of things b/c so many things are simply not "ahead" in my life right now. I will celebrate this victory amidst the anguish. Who am I kidding, I've got it good right now regardless of the stressor

named Graduate School-Thesis Completion.

GO TEAM!

Week #3 Reflection Notes

Okay, since this is my space to put my thoughts - here goes: I am STILL scratching my head with concept maps. I understand cluster maps, I understand flow charts. I understand mapping out learning objectives and understanding...BUT I am still not 100% certain I understand them as we're supposed to as they pertain to this course. The reading links for concept maps were extremely difficult to track. Many of them seemed like problem-solution scenarios but I didn't see anything that looked like something that was created with INSPIRATION or BUBBL.US...I'm wondering if the links I clicked on were incorrect. So, here's what I felt like:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8647879253211409572&ei=jDPRStuSMI-MqALD99nGBA&q=scratching+my+head&hl=en

On an unrelated note I'm feeling my suspicions -- it's really difficult to keep up with other students posts unless I'm intentionally following their blogs. Okay, typing this convinces me -- I'm going to spend the next 15 minutes looking at others' blogs to see if I'm on the right track...Guess that would be helpful to do, too, since I can't see anyone's concept maps they've saved in the course discussion section, anyway.

Okay, I just visited about 8 of my classmates blogs & here's what I'm seeing (in a random list):
-some fantastic-looking blogs (really liked how Jennie created a reflection spot for all 8 mods in one spot, clever)
-some bare-bones...3 of the ones I visited had only week 1's reflections - I think this instruction was unclear to more than just me
-Perfect-storm posts: people got more out of that article than me...I'm on information overload & wasn't able to process the different tools present. (Better bookmark that article for later).

Week #2 Reflections

This week we created our blogs. I've used blogger.com once before and got the initial quirks out, so this time around I was able to put a little more thought into arrangement, picture entry, including interactive links and such. I saw a fellow educator use her blog as a place to keep a photo-journal...I think I'll try that in a future post. Certainly looking at other people's blogs has been an eye-opener. I guess I don't really think of blogs as a place for gathering followers BUT it makes it much easier if you don't want to get too involved with 2-way communication. In those regards, these blogs are much like caringbridge is for patients; proof-positive that we all just want a place to be heard.

Concept Mapping - morphed

I used bubbl.us to create this simple concept map...actually a bunch of students and I sat down & we worked together. At the start of the unit they knew little-to-nothing of Amish; by this point you can see that some concepts were becoming clearer. The purpose was to classify/categorize different areas they were learning about so they could view closer the inner workings of how beliefs effect habits/actions/daily life. The next tier to this activity is to then draw comparisons and contrasts to typical "English" lifestyle. This concept map now includes the Objective Description AND what the proficient parameters were at the onset of the project.

Assessment: Teacher-centered or Learner-centered?

I've taken the test & I understand what's being said. I fall mostly under the student-centered approach (as I'm assuming most did). The prompts seemed loaded to favor that category. My gut tells me a mixture must be reality. I teach mainly high school seniors whose ambition is not to continue education in a typical 4-year setting. Right, wrong or indifferent, motivation levels are inherently lower in the courses I teach (or maybe it's really me & I need to get out of teaching...but I don't think so). An entirely learner-centered approach works well when you have students who are willing to put in the effort to learn; if, however, you are begging kids to do ANYTHING, learner-centered approaches yield frustration.
2 cents

Week #1 Reflections

One quote in particular from the Lee & Allen reading stuck out to me:

"Another important aspect of edublogs is the asking of questions by peers, self, and the teacher. The research associated with cognitive information processing has thoroughly demonstrated that asking and answering questions about information to be learned can greatly improve comprehension." (Lee & Allen, 391)

I guess I'm a 3-year-old at heart, but I find myself questioning things, probably to a fault. Blogs with reflective and thoughtful followers can certainly teach peers, self & teachers much. I'd venture to say we'll have a vast amount of information collectively in our blogs by the semester's end. But I'm also willing to bet I'll fall into Vang & Fang's study that read, "And yet, only two fifths (40.0%) of the respondents indicated that they found no time to read everyone’s posting." (7) Not enough hours in the day...

Class Introduction by Rick

Rick, Damian & I did a triangular intro. Below you'll find Rick's picks of info on me:

Hello everyone. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce Matt from La Crosse. He is currently teaching high school English from a windowless classroom, running the drama department and helping out with directing his first Madrigal Dinner (I had to look that up). Over the last 10 years his resume also includes running both journalism and yearbook classes.
Matt moved from Colorado Springs with his wife and 2 kids Wyatt who is 5 and Ayda - 2. There in the Rockies he hiked, biked, and bow hunted.
He is building a 12x10 log cabin playhouse for his kids in the backyard and anxiously waiting to graduate in December so he can start training for a marathon which is an item on his bucket list.
Matt believes he is “blessed with more than he deserves and is continually reminded of ways we live on an incredible planet”. He seems to be obsessed with the TV show “The Office” and secretly longs to spend more time outside.
He is looking forward to changing some of his teaching-style to e-learning.
Welcome Matt. It’s been a pleasure. Rick from Buffalo WY