CEDO 550--FInal Reflection

Facilitating online learning was a class I really didn’t think I would take, but I am glad I did.  One thing that stood out to me is that good teaching is good teaching.  Good lesson planning and development is good lesson planning and development.  The same basic elements apply to good teaching, no matter what the forum.  

That being said, I do realize there are certain things that you need to focus on as an online teacher.   Timely feedback becomes more important when there is no face-to-face interaction.  Thinking about this actually made me realize all of the opportunities for feedback there are in a traditional setting, and I think sometimes teachers may miss some of these opportunities.

Building relationships is also more of a challenge in an online environment, or at least it is something you have to make a more conscious effort to do.  The building of teacher-student and student-student relationships happens no matter what in a face-to-face environment, but in an online environment, more thought needs to go into planning activities that can facilitate the building of these relationships.

In our last posts we talked about the future of online learning, and like I discussed there, the future of online learning is difficult for me to predict.  However, I know it has a place in education, and it is up to us as educators to make sure it is implemented in a way that continues to facilitate student learning.

Final Reflection---CEDO 525

            This class has actually given me a refresher course in teaching best practices.  Sometimes I feel like we spend too much time with other work in education (i.e. staff development days that hold no meaning), that we forget to talk about what really is “best practice” in education.  By taking a hard look, and a reflective look, at the important instructional strategies listed by the class text, I have been able to re-examine what I do as a librarian and a teacher.  I am eager to change some of my practices and perhaps even help other staff members take a reflective look at their practice through the lens of these strategies.  I think the class text would make a great all-staff book study.

            One thing this class has solidified for me is the desire to try Readers’ Notebooks on a blogging platform, I like the feedback possibilities and the ease blogs bring to reinforcing effort and providing recognition.  However, I need to explore how to make this easy to manage for teachers, meaning I need to learn more about RSS.  A summer project!  :)

            I love how this class focused on best teaching practices and how to incorporate technology to support these practices, rather than focusing on technology first.  That is such an important lesson.  Technology is something that should not be used just for the sake of using it, just because it is the latest cool thing.  Technology needs to support student learning and teaching best practice.

The Future of Online Learning

The future of online learning is hard for me to predict.  I am still just learning about what tools exist to facilitate online learning, so I feel like I am just beginning to fathom the possibilities.

One of the easiest predictions to make is the rise in online learning for subjects that are difficult to staff with fully qualified teachers.  The Georgia Physics example is just one example.  I think foreign languages will be another subject area that can truly capitalize on online learning; hopefully, schools will finally be able to offer languages that have been largely unavailable to date.  

Another easy-to-predict use of online learning will be to use it for gifted and talented students.  When a student has the talent and desire to really delve into a specific subject area, online learning will help facilitate learning for that student.  They will be able to go further than perhaps they would have otherwise, and hopefully students will be able to learn from experts in the field of study.

I think it will take the next generation of teachers, those who grew up knowing nothing different than the always-connected, social media –filled world, to truly move education further along the online learning road.  These future educators will be skilled in blended learning and online learning environments because it will be how they learned, how they collaborated, and how they created knowledge.  Exciting to think about, but difficult to predict!

I have a hard time imagining a world with no face-to-face learning and brick-and-mortar schools, but it is definitely easy to predict a shift to include more online learning and more flexible scheduling to accommodate for more specialized learning for all.

Reflecting on Identifying, Practicing, and Hypothesizing

Identifying Similarities and Differences:  Identifying similarities and differences involves higher level thinking and can lead to deeper learning for students.  I think it would be a great way to work with vocabulary in the content areas; however, I think it is easy for teachers to overlook this kind of activity because of….you guessed it…TIME.  Technology can definitely be used with this kind of instructional strategy.  This strategy would work perfectly with a SMARTboard, and would. in fact, capitalize on a SMARTboard’s interactive capabilities rather than just using the interactive whiteboard as a glorified projector.  Teachers could create a file where students could move vocab words into certain categories, or teachers could group vocab words together and students could guess the categories the teacher is trying to create.  Whatever the activity, this instructional strategy is very important and can help teachers take their lessons and their students’ learning to the next level.

Homework and Practice: I am interested to see what the future of homework and practice truly looks like. Will classrooms go with the flipped approach?  Will all students get technology tools to take home to even the technological playing field?  Will learning truly become anywhere, anytime learning?  Our school currently issues netbooks to students for the school year at the 6^th and 7^th grade level.  This practice holds a lot of possibility and has been a boon for many students and families.  It has also raised a lot of questions in terms of maintenance and repairs and, more importantly, in terms of what constitutes good homework.  Having this technology should allow teachers to create and assign more meaningful homework and practice.  I also read an article recently denouncing the premise of flipping a classroom, arguing that we really should be questioning if just taking the traditional lecture and homework, lecture and homework approach and flipping it really adds value.  The author argued that simply taking the lecture out of the classroom doesn’t necessarily make more a classroom or teacher any better if the assignment and assessments weren’t meaningful and engaging.

Generating and Testing Hypotheses:  This is probably one of my weakest instructional strategies, but could easily be added to my teaching with a little thought and effort.  Having students generate hypotheses about the unit or the lesson ahead and writing about what they predict and why will help promote student learning.  It will also add purpose to their learning (and perhaps will help them become better hypotheses-makers in the class in which they are most accustomed to making hypotheses, science J).  Technology could easily help play a role in the incorporation of this strategy, through things like blog writing and tools that can be used for bell ringer activities (like Lino.it or Wallwisher).  I will definitely have to make incorporating this instructional strategy more of a goal next year.

Using Web 2.0 Tools for Formative Assessment

I agree with the premise of the article "Web 2.0 Use May Not Be Formative Assessment".   We as educators need to remember that simply using a technological tool does not mean that learning occurred; feedback is a vital step in the process of formative assessment.

Using blogs in a reader’s workshop model could be a very effective formative assessment.  This year, students in 7^th grade are using traditional composition notebooks for their reader’s notebooks, and they are being used more as a summative assessment.  I envision something different.  I think the reader’s notebook should be used as a formative assessment, where the teacher can give feedback over the course of several weeks.  At the end of the unit or set of teaching points, the students can reflect over their work and choose one of their blog entries to edit, revise, and develop – using the feedback that the teacher (and perhaps even classmates) provided.  

Blogs would definitely facilitate this process.  They make the feedback process easier, the students get to experience “publishing” their work for an audience, and the never-ending stack of notebooks to carry home and grade is eliminated.  Blogs also can be used throughout the entire formative assessment process; they can be used for student responses, teacher monitoring and diagnosing of responses, and teacher feedback to responses.