Week 5

I decided to create my Pecha Kucha on the 5-2 monster defense that I have coached and played in during high school. I had countless documents that I had put together over the years that I had used as informational packets for my assistant coaches and as a way of developing game plans. It was very enjoyable going through the schemes and developing a basic presentation. I found the activity to be very time consuming and the timing on the voice thread to be an obstacle. It would only start counting down the 20 seconds for each slide after you finished the voice over. So I had to time my speaking to fit in a 19 second window. I look forward to seeing how everyone did, though I am sure Kara will wreck the curve.

In conclusion is was interesting to use the rubric for the rubric assignment.

CYA,

Terry

Lesson 4

As exciting as the lesson we are learning are I am experiencing some very mixed emotions. I think we are learning some useful and engaging tools which would work very well to both deliver knowledge and engagement to my online students but the structure of my work is slowly changing from an online educational facilitator to a grading monkey.

We seem to be moving away from control over content, curriculum and delivery to that of a grader of work. This is very depressing when one stops to consider the incredible possibilities that are being developed an exist right now.

I really enjoyed the Animoto production and I can see the benefit of using voice threads in my online teaching. Even though I did spend an extraordinary amount of time on the work over the last six weeks I have fallen behind.

I am also a bit discouraged that my blog has not generated much feed back as I have endeavored to cover topics that I would like to know my classmates opinions on.

Though no reflection I have been late in posting the last view blogs and everyone is quite busy. So to sum up. Busy, enjoying learning the new tools, depressed about not being able to use them in my class, excited I got to produce the animoto for my vacation just love it.

Week 3 blog,

Though I must confess this is week 4, even so it is late in week 4 and with that I should be working on my online class Unit 3 rewrite as the deadline for getting those revision in is approaching quickly. I have continued to take pictures every day but have come to the conclusion that I have difficulty with keeping to a daily schedule. As I said though I have consistently taken pictures each day just as I have consistently worked out each day I have not loaded the pictures daily or logged my work out time on the fitness programs website even though they would reward me with several hundred dollars for doing so at the end of the year.

Is this just a classic case of procrastination? This is not a helpful strategy but nonetheless it persists. It usually does not originate from laziness as I illustrate by the fact that I do work out each day and that I have completed the reading and viewed the provided and recommended resources. With that said.

I have spent two weeks simplifying my presentations for my online classes and I believe it has been helpful. I think the presentations are less hurried and more targeted, which helps us both. The difficulty with this approach is that I do spend more time producing a quality presentation and even more time producing a supportive informational handout. Though much more time consuming it is also very beneficial to my students. I have in the past created supportive resources such as tutorial power points, and suggested websites. Now I am creating a document for each section that has all this information in one location.

In fact I think it will also help our science department. There currently is a gap that is perceived by the instructors to be growing between our educational partner and the districts iQ staff. In the past the curriculum being provided was weak and obviously insufficient for our needs. The science department (and others as well) was united in the vision of online learning to include differentiated learning and differentiated assessment and we thought that the online environment was uniquely qualified to deliver this flexibility.

As so the science department created and supported our own curriculum. The rub came this year when our partner decided to up their game and produced a new line of curriculum. This was predicted to be a good thing a year ago when we discussed with them what our vision for the curriculum was. This included many of the applications and educational tools we have been discussing in this class. The disappointment came in the form of a very inflexible and poor quality curriculum that we were forced to actually use. They would no-longer load our saved courses that we had previously produced. .Which brings us to this school year. Well actually we have to go back to January when they had us review the new course and let them know if we wished to use the new course or continue to use our created course work. We communicated to them that there were many difficulties with using their curriculum and would be using our own. Now flash to 4 days four days before school starts. We were told a decision was made to go with only the new courses. To be far when 4 days prior to the beginning of the school year they loaded their version of biology and we again notified them that the curriculum had severe problems with the content they agreed to have us (me) work with their developers to correct the major issues. The have been very helpful in making the changes I have suggested and we continue to assist them in producing a workable course.

To complete the thought and bring this back to the beginning, I believe by producing the supportive material handouts or links we can build a online open source resource for our students that can complement and fill in the curriculum while giving us flexibility and the ability to insert our curriculum into the provided curriculum. We can remove portion we do not wish to use and supplement with our own as is the case with a face to face teacher.

More on this next week, ok this weekend.