EDLD+5368+Instructional+Design+Reflection

· What benefits do you see in educators knowing how to design and implement online learning? I think the more educators know about online learning, the better educators they can become. As a technology facilitator on campus, I would say that the staff at my school would benefit from knowing how to design an online learning environment because they would then be able to see all of the different possibilities and opportunities that are available to them within the program. At our school, our Blackboard program was implemented a few years ago, but many teachers still do not understand how to truly use it as an online supplement to their traditional classroom. They view it as a place to put announcements and possibly assignments, but do not fully utilize all the tools that our Blackboard program has to offer. I believe that if my other colleagues were fully trained, rather than given just a snapshot of the options that our Blackboard program has to offer, they would be more willing to implement it in their classrooms. · How will you professionally use your course that you designed? Schoology offers many great tools to implement into my 7th grade math course, but I will probably not use this particular course in my classroom. One of the items that Schoology offered that I hope to implement in my class room would be the use of a classroom discussion Blog. This was the one feature that I particularly liked in the Schoology course; however my school has chosen to use the Blackboard system, so I will most likely be using that particular course. I plan to use this online learning environment to have my students interact via the course rather than email. Currently I have my students use email to turn in an assignment, rather than upload through Blackboard, but I do wish to change that in the upcoming school year. I would also like to have my students utilize the course weekly to access assignments, read announcements of upcoming events in class, and to also visit educational websites to increase their overall learning. · Will you integrate online learning in your role as a teacher/staff developer? I will absolutely integrate online learning in my role as a teacher. I plan to put specific items in my syllabus for next year, such as weekly comments must be made in a teacher led blog. I also plan on having my students complete at least one assignment through our online Blackboard program per 9 weeks. Both of these items will help my students become more acquainted with the basics of online learning, so that they are better prepared in the future. As a staff developer, I hope to plan a staff development session strictly on Google Docs. As I learned with a previous course, the ease of collaboration with this tool will be beneficial to many subject areas in my intermediate school. With the staff becoming more comfortable with this tool, our teachers can have students work together on items, without having to be in the same room with each other. With all of the tools that are available through online learning, I hope to help my students and co-workers become more comfortable with Web 2.0 tools to aid in their learning and teaching. · What questions do you still have about online learning? As I said in my discussion post, I have a few questions and concerns about how online learning is approached in most schools in the intermediate level. How do parents perceive online learning? I know with the wide range of parental controls that are offered with any kind of online learning, I am curious on how parents of 12-15 year olds feel about integrating online learning. I know that I have some parents that sign a form at the beginning of the year, prohibiting their child from accessing the internet at any time at school. Whenever I do plan on using the internet, I do contact those parents and explain what we are doing to see if they would like their child to have an alternate assignment. Most of the time, the parents are fine with what we are doing and allow their child to complete the assignment. With such the wide range of feelings about the internet’s good and bad qualities, how do most educators deal with parents regarding online learning? Another question that I have is, do most schools offer internet ethics before any online learning occurs? There are so many positives about using online education, but with students that are at such an impressionable age, what kind of information do we as educators need to give them about the “in’s and out’s” of internet ethics? Another question that I have is how do most teachers begin the approach of online learning with their students? I have started to integrate more technology in my class room this year and each time I just give my students an outline of what we are going to do and how it pertains to mathematics. I just wondered if there was an approach that other teachers may have used that has worked wonders in the past. · What will you do with this new learning? I plan to integrate what I learned in this course and apply it in my district’s online learning program, Blackboard. One of the aspects of Schoology that I really liked was the opportunity for the students to interact through the course Blog. Our Blackboard program does not currently offer that particular opportunity, so I plan on creating my own Blog and posting the link to it in an announcement in my current online course. I feel more confident in creating and using an online learning environment after this course and I hope that will reflect in my teaching in the years to come. I also hope to integrate more online assignments into my curriculum to increase students’ knowledge of the online learning environment. I would like to have my students not only access their assignments through our Blackboard system, but also submit assignments as well. Also, I have currently been chosen as a sample group to review our online learning community to evaluate and suggest new ideas for our Blackboard program, as we revise and edit our system for the upcoming school year. I plan on taking what I have learned in this class to help integrate items, such as the Blog, into our online learning community to help our staff and students get the most out of the Blackboard system.