CEdO550 Week 6

My students are gaining 21st century skills by learning how to expand their creativity using web 2.0 tools, working collaboratively with students in other countries and excelling in project-based lessons. Currently, my school district does not offer any type of online learning, however, we are in the process of collaborating with 2 other area districts that are our size and may offer online courses through these districts. My concern with the Virtual Schools legislation in Wisconsin is cap of the number of students allowed to enroll in virtual schools, with no more than 5250 students enrolled in a school year. During this module, I was excited to learn the difference between synchronous and asynchronous facilitations. I'm glad to have received the experience in online facilitation and after practicing with my short class on internet safety, I feel much more confident in my abilities to facilitate an online class.

CEdO550 Week 5

In reflecting on my teaching experiences to date, I would say that the proportion of teacher centered vs. student centered lessons has been 50-50. This is my 3rd year teaching, and as a library media specialist, I try to incorporate many 21st century skills into my lessons, including group collaboration, which is a trait of student centered lessons. I was able to identify more than one authentic assessment when I was trained in PBL - project-based learning and authentic assessments go hand-in-hand. The rubric I created for my lesson clearly defined expectations and scoring so that my students would know exactly what was expected from them for the assignment and they would have the rubric to refer back to if they had questions on if they were going down the right path when completing the project. While working with this module, I had success while doing something new involving differentiation. I did incorporate differentiation in my lessons, but it's more on the fly; I do it automatically as the need arises and don't always take the time to document the differentiation strategies in my lesson plans. IN REGARD TO WEEK 5 WEB CONFERENCE - I like Shawn's comment during his presentation that "everyone's equal on cyberspace - everyone looks the same". That is true in so many ways. If a student is taking an online class, I think there's less prejudice because you don't make the judgement based on the typical "first impression" when seeing someone. I noticed this when my students were corresponding/collaborating on a project with New Zealand students. For 4 months, they only knew their New Zealand friends by what they wrote in their emails. But, when they sent photos and noticed that none of them had shoes on, my kids immediately assumed they were poor...which they weren't, they just didn't have their shoes on when the photo was taken!

CEdO Week 4

I have not experienced any problems using Brainhoney. After the first few days, it became very user-friendly to me and I feel that I am navigating through it just fine. In using this week's module, I tried using many of the features in Elluminate during my facilitation of the last week's web conference. I was surprised at how easy it was to facilitate the class using these features. I love how a ppt or other documents can be loaded into Elluminate and also being able to add blank slides in the presentation for taking notes. I can imagine using Elluminate in working with my grant consortium group to meet online when our schedules make it impossible to get away from school. These examples of online learning have provided me with a good foundation for teaching an online class. I teach in a small, rural district and we are thinking of collaborating with two other rural districts to offer AP classes. This class has given me the experience I need to facilitate an online class with these two other districts.