It's easy to get completely overwhelmed and overloaded with resources as a teacher. There are just so many options available, but it's difficult to narrow it down and determine what really fits the bill. Looking online to find a resource, then finding yourself down the rabbit hole with dozens of tabs open and at least a few items in your Teachers Pay Teachers cart is not an unusual event. In my current role as a teacher in a blended learning program for students in grades 4 to 7, I find that not only am I spending large amounts of time searching for resources for myself to use in my face to face classes as well as when building and updating my online courses, I am also spending a lot of time curating resources for parents who are working as the home facilitators of learning. This week the topic of our OLTD 503 seminar is Too Much Information! I am sure that this is the exact response that many home facilitators want to give me when they are first starting up in our program. Hopefully I can apply some of what I have been learning this week to ease my own cognitive overload as well as that of the parents I work with. The seminar team this week shared a great blog post/podcast from The Cult of Pedagogy, Are You a Curator or a Dumper? (Gonzalez, 2018). While I don't think I am a dumper, I have not exactly been a good curator either. In this blog, Jennifer Gonzalaz shared 6 curation guidelines: keep the best, lose the rest; chunk it; add your own introductions; use images as anchors; polish your hyperlinks; and always build in white space. While I may have been on track with keeping the best and losing the rest, I sure have not been as attentive towards the remaining five more design orientated considerations. The recommended elink curation tool makes attending to to these principles so easy that it would actually take me longer to present the recommended resources in a less visually pleasing way like I had been before. Being able to create something that looks good makes me want to share it even more too. I am happy to be able to add one more resource to my expanding, yet carefully curated, tool box.
Below is an example of a curated list of web links made using elink.
Reference:
Gonzalez, J. (2018, February 4). Are you a curator or a dumper? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curator-or-dumper/
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The readings, podcasts and videos shared this week made it clear that there are both benefits and challenges inherent to online learning and communication. The flexibility in terms of time, place, and pace seemed to be the primary benefits the were mentioned frequently, while potential social isolation, technology barriers and the self-regulation required by the learners were the most frequently mentioned challenges. In looking at these more closely, it seems as though the flexibility offered by online learning environments is itself both the greatest benefit and the greatest challenge as it is the flexibility itself that requires the learners to be skilled at time management, and self-motivated enough to participate fully in the learning activities and communicate both with the instructor and their fellow learners. What can be a benefit for one person, can be a challenge for the next.
I found the format of this week’s seminar to be a good example of this flexibility paradox and the ways in which the format of a course itself can impact learners in different ways; motivating and supporting some, while being challenging for others. The facilitators set this week up in a way that I would refer to as rigid asynchronous. There were no synchronous activities, but there were specific timelines established for activity participation and completion throughout the week in order to help each learner stay on track to compete all of the activities, and to support learner to learner communication. The timeline for the week that was provided was a strategy clearly aimed to counteract the significant challenge around learner self-regulation. For me, this highly structured format felt too rigid, and in turn made me feel less engaged in the learning, I found I was completing the tasks more for the sake of checking items off the to-do list, and spending less time digging in to the specific pieces that interested me the most. One of my primary motivations for choosing an online program was flexibility of time and pace, and with this format, the pace piece was being determined for me rather than by me. Many other learners in the cohort however expressed an appreciation for the clear timelines and felt that this supported them in engaging with each of the resources and activities throughout the week. This reminded me of a key takeaway from our reading of Teaching in a Digital Age, by Tone Bates, in OLTD 501: “There is no ‘best’ design model for all circumstances” (p. 125). That being said, I do believe that an important element that should be present in any method of course design should be a clear focus on knowing the needs and motivations of the learners. This may change from year to year, meaning that the course design and teaching strategies employed may also need to change, just as they would in a face to face teaching context. References: Bates, A.W. (2015) Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Designing Teaching and Learning Vancouver BC: Tony Bates Associates Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-9952692-0-0. The focus article, Try-A-Tool activity, and G+ posts from the Seminar #1 week helped me to more carefully consider how and why I want to use specific technology tools, including social media, in my own teaching practice. I believe that student motivation is impacted both by the tools themselves and the way in which the tools are used. Jacobi (2018) discusses three basic human needs that come into play when looking at facilitating self-determined learners: autonomy, perceived competence and relatedness. Several of the instructional strategies that can support these factors identified can be achieved using a wide range of tools, including the provision of a meaningful rationale, clear routines and expectations, however the tools used will likely have a greater impact on the implementation of other strategies such as the completion of collaborative activities and developing students’ sense of belonging and connectedness in the class. Tools that do not work smoothly and create significant technological challenges can create a sense of frustration in students that could override the potential motivational benefits of the collaboration and interactions with others. To support motivation, I think it is also important to add some variety in terms of the tools used while being sure to still maintain that sense of routine to support students’ levels of perceived competence by avoiding technological frustrations and cognitive overload (flash forward to Seminar #3: Too Much Information). Completing the Try-A-Tool activity was a great way for me to put myself in the shoes of my learners when they are faced with a new technology tool. I chose to try a Twitter chat, which I found challenging to keep up with the pace of the conversation while also trying to think carefully about the topic, and even quickly look up links and resources that were shared throughout. While I can't rule out the possibility of using this tool again in the future, I know that I need to spend more time practicing with it and researching some of the best strategies for solving my initial problems with the tool. Overall, this was a good reminder of the time required to explore new technologies before bringing them into the classroom, and the need to provide my students with the same time to become comfortable with the tools being used. This understanding of the impacts of the technological tools and the ways in which they are used that I gained during this week is represented in my overall revised philosophy of online communication. Reference: Jacobi, L. (2018). What motivates students in the online communication classroom? An exploration of Self-Determination Theory. Journal of Educators Online, 15(2). Retrieved from: https://www.thejeo.com/archive/2018_15_2/jacobi In our first week of OLTD 503 we began to learn the process of building online community by engaging in some introductory activities aimed at establishing online socialization (Stage 2 of Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model of online learning) among our colleagues in this course (Salmon, 2003), while also beginning to formulate ideas about our own philosophy of online communication. Using padlet to post our OLTD selfies and the Flipgrid intro videos were fun and simple ways to learn a little bit more about each other and build our comfort levels before sharing our deeper ideas and questions in the following weeks. I found the image of online communication activity to be a good way to review and process some of my own previous experiences, and I appreciated learning what the experiences of other cohort members had been as they validated some of my own experiences, like the fast pace mentioned by Shannon and the need to re-model and attend to student differences described by Lindsey, while also sparking new ideas. When selecting my own image of online communication to represent my philosophy and experiences with online communication to date, I chose a concept to represent online communication as being a bridge between the individual worlds that the teacher and each student brings to the learning community in order to emphasize the importance of relationships to the learning process. In response to my image, Marieke shared with me the Community of Inquiry framework for online courses (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000). This COI framework has played a key role in revising elements of my philosophy of online communication over the following five weeks by expanding my understanding of the teacher and student relationship pieces, but also integrating the content and the meaning construction, or learning itself, as a crucial element. References:
Garrison,D.R., Anderson,T.& Archer, W.(2000).Critical Inquiry in a text-based environment: computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Salmon,G.(2003). The Five Stage Model. Retrieved from https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html |
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