CEdO550 Week 3

I think the greatest challenge I will face on an online instructor (besides getting over my nervousness!) will be making sure the material I am covering with the class is not too boring. Without the convenience of observing class as I would during face-to-face instruction, it makes it difficult to know if the class is nodding off or actually paying attention. To solve this problem, I would make sure that I am changing modes, asking lots of questions and encouraging class participation to keep them on their toes! I think the most important piece of facilitating my online discussions is to be extremely prepared. I can't just wing it when leading the class. As I prepared my asynchronous and synchronous discussions, I found it very helpful to have a written outline to follow. I believe it will make it easier for me to stay on task with my objectives and keep the class flowing at a good pace. I chose Internet Safety as my discussion because as a LMS, it is something I promote during my elementary library skills lessons as well as with my discussions with my middle and high school students. Developing the rubrics was the most difficult part of the assignment; appropriate assessment is never an easy task. I wanted to make it simple, yet still have point value. Basically, I created my rubrics based on student participation, if they did the assignment, and how much they contributed to and extended ideas of their classmates.

CEdO550 Week 2

My experience with online communities has been primarily with this cohort. It was a little rocky at first, but as we got to know each other by working in groups and became more familiar with the online classes, the classes became much easier. Since being a part of this cohort, I've actually taken what I've learned about online colllaboration and use it in my grant consortium meetings. Our district shares a large technology integration grant with six other districts and finding a common meeting time/place is difficult. We've gone to working on "Go To Meeting" and working on our grant through Google Docs. The biggest benefit of online collaboration is just what I previously mentioned, it is very time efficient to work online when we are all pressed for time with our many job responsibilities. I believe the greatest challenge of online collaboration that I've experienced has been technology issues....could be internet being down, or learning how to use some new tool or software (such as Brainhoney). I've always worried about students who chose their schooling strictly in the virtual world because of the lack of socialization and participation in normal school events (music/band concert, sports, prom, etc.). Even after reading the advantages of virtual schooling, I still am somewhat apprehensive promoting it as the sole education a student receives. But, on the flip side, I can definitely see how a student would flourish more in a virtual class if they are shy...getting their opinion online through discussion boards, blogs, etc. will help them enhance their communication skills and perhaps break through the shyness barrier.

CEdO550 Week 1

Identify 2 Asynchonous and 2 Synchonous online learning tools: Voicethread (Asychonous) is a multimedia web 2.0 tools that allows anyone to comment on individual slides within the presentation. Google Docs (Asynchonous) allows anyone with editing rights to the document to put on highlighted comments. Facebook and Twitter (both Synchonous) are real-time, social networking sites. Four types of activities for online learners: Moodle (start a discussion thread asking each student to respond with their opinion on the topic). Wikispaces (each student create a page on the class wiki the introduces themselves to the class). Twitter (during class, I enter a tweet and ask each student to respond to it immediately as part of the classroom discussion). Wallwisher (during class, ask students to go to Wallwisher and enter their responses immediately as part of classroom discussion). Initial contact warm and inviting? Things I liked about it and could improve on: I thought my initial contact letter was inviting. I started it by congratulating them for being selected to participate in the class, so hopefully that helps them feel that their participation in the class is highly valuable. One thing I will change that was brought to my attention by another classmate was that some of my bullet points seemed to be out of order. I will definitely review it before submitting the final copy because it is imperative that directions for online courses be exactly correct. Initial contact clear and concise? Strategies to make it concise: As stated above, it was brought to my attention that some of the information on the contact letter may appear out of order and may be confusing to my students. I will be correcting before submitting the final copy. One strategy that would guarantee that my directions are in accurate order would be for me to go through the directions step-by-step myself as if I am the student taking the class and verify that I am able to do whatever the task is that I'm asking my students to do.

CEdO540 Week 5

Really liked working with Google Trends. Our group trended everything from peanut butter to vacations, to ice cream flavors! It's alot of fun and extremely interesting to see the internet activity. I will be showing this to my Business Ed teacher as I'm sure he will like it for his marketing classes.

Researching the different data table websites was also interesting. I've actually used many of them in other research I've done, so I was pretty familiar with them. The comparison was nice because now I know which ones I will use more regularly with my students.

CEdO540 Week 4

Creating a survey was kind of fun. Outside of surveying my students and teachers on technology use for our technology plan, I've never just surveyed the general public. Our group is still analyzing the data, but I am very pleased with the adversity of the population who took it. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it was extremely easy to get the survey out to the public. I passed it along to my sister, who passed it along to her co-workers, who passed it along to their friends. It would have been much harder to get these same results if we handed out a paper survey. Plus, I think its easier to keep an online survey anonymous. Howerver, after reading up on Bill Tancer and how he conducts his research based on searches through IP addresses, I have to wonder if the survey results are truly anonymous? Could there be a way to identify by email address who took the survey and identify their individual results?

CEdO540 Week 3

As usual, the statistics homework completely confused me. I don't think I've ever felt so stupid as an educator...it's only numbers...why can't I wrap my mind around the equations? My groupmate, Andrew, really tried to to explain it to me. He's such a trooper! But, what can I say, I still don't get it.

However, we've made great progress with our survey! Our survey focuses on opinions of Walker's budget repair bill. We'll be giving it to a large population other than teachers, so it will be interesting when we analyze the results. We used Surveymonkey to create it and it was very easy! I've passed the link along to several people I work with, as well as my sisters and people they work with. Isn't technology great...if we had done a paper survey, we never would be able to reach a variety of the population so quickly.

CEdO540 Week 2

Another week of statistics, another week of utter confusion! However, I was extremely happy to research the Capterra site. Not only was it a great resource for locating survey software, I was impressed with it's functionality! I like how you can drill down to the exact features that you're looking for. I will definitely be sharing this with my staff as part of our software purchasing process. In regard to survey software, I will be sticking with Zoomerang or Survey Monkey for my educational purposes. Many of my staff use both and have great success with ease of use and reporting capabilities.