4.3 Reflection: Social & Professional Networks

FB or Facebook is my connection to my past and my present. I live in a small beach community and many of my friends from high school are still around. We have a very strong connection via facebook including organizing multi-year events such as all-comer track meets, alumni events around homecoming, and keeping up with activities that are going on. We share updates on family, health and the events that shape life as you grow up. For me, it's like slipping into a really comfortable pair of sweat pants after a long day -- I get to catch up on people who made me who I am today. It's my check-in on the world and my morning wake-up. Since I deal so much with technology, and recently moved to a new school site, facebook helps me to stay a bit more connected.

I use the internet to find new lesson plans, media to help reinforce concepts and academics to help my students "get" the material. I am pretty good at finding things that I need, however, there are days that I have to allow myself to just surf. The internet, and all the connectivity, can easily distract you and I can often find myself totally engrossed five or six degrees separated from what I was originally looking for. I know this about myself, so I give myself permission to just surf and veg out at least once a week while being on the internet.

I know that students also do the same, however, I think students don't necessarily know how to find the items that they are looking for effectively. I don't think students will go deeper to investigate multiple sources. They tend to just STOP when they get one or two hits and don't necessarily persist to find more than one perspective. Now that teachers have started training students about the credibility of sources, it has started to get better. Would students respond that the internet helps them with their learning? I think so. The main difference is that I use the internet to help me search and confirm or revise my thinking on a matter, whereas students may only use that they find as a quick snapshot without necessarily going into enough depth.

To help students develop a learning network online, I would introduce them to reader applications, like google reader and search/topic alerts. This is one way that students can have items of interest delivered automatically from many sources. All they would have to do is to go to the reader on a regular basis to see what has been posted by people they are interested in reading about or sources that they have found to be interesting. Also, developing tweet profiles separate from their personal sites. Getting a linked in account -- many of our students are required to create them for themselves as part of a career class. I would encourage them to find sites, blogs, etc. that feature content that they are interested in. Want to learn more about robotics? Look up a few blogs, websites and follow them on a regular basis with a news aggregator like google reader, etc. Find twitter hashtags that you again, have information that you are interested in following. Pinterest is new as well and there will always be something.

3.1 Reflection - My classroom uses many 2.0 tools, but I am always looking at ways of increasing the use of those tools to enhance student learning. My economics and business math courses both use moodle and some online evaluation tools quite extensively. Students are also required to maintain and update via various assignments a google site that serves as an electronic portfolio of sorts. I have used glogster, voicethread, poll everywhere, google apps for education (a site hosted specifically for our middle school students soon to be rolled throughout the district), moodle, gaggle.net (for email), learn2type (for keyboarding instruction and remediation), slideshare.net, etc. My classroom is always a mixture of students interacting in groups, occasionally listening to mini lectures that I will sometimes prepare with jing (a screen capture and narration program which is free) so that students can then access the presentations 24-7 after the initial presentation of materials to the students. I am always trying to improve student's access to the classroom materials without making my course just a watch a video and answer a question. I thought about the following assignment after reviewing some content with my students this past week and re-visiting Google Tours via google earth. Below is a brief description of the beginnings of the assignment. ACTIVITY: Using Google Earth's tour capability, trace the effects of creative disruption in the global marketplace. Your will be part of your presentation that should show knowledge, understanding, integration, application, analysis and evaluation of the concepts of the "invisible hand" and our core basic economics concepts as summarized in our Handy Dandy Guide (HDG): 1. People economize.

2. All choices involve cost.

3. People respond to incentives. Incentives are actions or rewards that encourage people to act. When incentives change, people's behavior changes in predictable ways.

4. Economics systems influence individual choices and incentives. How people cooperate is governed by written and unwritten rules. As rules change, incentives change and behavior changes.

5. Voluntary trade creates wealth. People can produce more in less time by concentrating on what they do best. The surplus goods or services they produce can be traded to obtain other valuable goods or services.

6. The consequences of choices lie in the future. The important costs and benefits in economic decision making are those which will appear in the future. Economics stresses making decisions about the future because it is only the future that we can influence. We cannot influence things that have happened in the past.

SPECIFICS: Your group will be randomly choose a creative disruption to research. Remember, you will be reporting based on your role as an economic adviser for the country that your group was assigned at the beginning of the semester. You will need to use a variety of reliable sources, based on what you have learned via your English classes. They cannot be from social media, blog sites, wikipedia, etc., and you will need to accurately document your sources with the appropriate citation format for the discipline of economics. You tour must include: background about the industry, a thorough explanation of the process and challenge of the industry/innovation you have selected, and the economic-based reasoning, principles, that are expressed and exemplified as a result of the industrial/innovative shift.

I have used many 2.0 tools. For my economics course, I am trying to develop ways for students to put the basic concepts of micro and macro-economics into application. My thought was to use the google earth tour process to have students work with the concept of creative destruction. This concept essentially has students think through various causes and effects of changes in the market on various stakeholders and products -- think disruptive innovation. The use of google tours via google earth would allow students to track the various industries and countries that are impacted with innovations and changes in the market.

The tour would allow students to trace the various suppliers and resources that go into every single product -- even the simple pencil to help them see how small, seemingly un-related items can lead to a large-scale change in a market. A sample of the beginnings of the assignment are shown above. Google Tours would add the connectivity element that is sometimes hard for students to grasp. Being able to physically show how so much of any product is interconnected and can be affected by even the most seemingly insignificant change (a flood in Thailand, for instance, knocked out Honda and much of the electronics industry because the area hit was where microchips were produced -- a major supplier for the world--and the area had record flooding), can bring about changes to price, supply, demand, etc.

Students would be assigned or asked to choose from a list of innovations with the assignment to trace how the improvements and innovations have impacted the economy as a whole of either the world, the country they have been assigned to work with, and the U.S. economy as well.

This assignment would emphasize allow the students to move through all aspects of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy by using the basic economics concepts of supply and demand, opportunity cost, scarcity, etc. to frame their search for connections all the while applying their knowledge by analyzing the cause and effects of various decisions (quotas, tariffs, subsidies, production, expansion and contraction policies, etc.), evaluating the long and short term effects of these decisions, while creating a google tour showing the timeline of the decisions, the locations of the impact as well. Students would be able to collaborate with each other though use of google docs - sharing a document with their plans and research; creating a bibliography by developing a form through a spreadsheet, that they could simply add as they came across good resources; present their tour by embedding it into a prezi presentation, a glogster "poster", or even creating a voice thread site for students to respond with, a google site with quizzes, videos showing background about the topic/industry/innovation, etc. The options for the use of the tools is really limitless. Students could even choose which would be best based on the audience they were focusing on and which media would best convey their message and allow for the easiest embedding of the tour.

Directions for students would need to clearly explain how many "stops" on the tour would be required, what type of analysis would be needed, the format of the final project with lots of practice on how to incorporate the narration, the notes, the pins and location markers, how to export the file and how to prepare it for presentation. Students will need to have extensive plans, scripts, storyboards, outlines to make sure that everything has been thoroughly researched as the actual preparation of the tour, when trying to be very specific can be quite tricky. Another aspect is to have a firmly established timeline, and unlike me this week, check to make sure you know the due dates. They would also need to have presentations about the various tools so that if they were indeed going to be given many options for which type of media they would be using, that they would also have time to practice with the tools to see which ones would best fit their needs. Oftentimes, students will use only what they are comfortable with even though something else may better fit their vision and better relay what information they are trying to convey.

2.2 Reflection: Methodologies of the Online Instructor (Pass / No Pass) In your reflective post this week, think about the following questions:

1. Reflecting on the information covered in this module so far, how might your instructional methodologies need to change in an online or blended learning environment?

2. What skills and strategies might you improve or expand upon in order to best support student learning in a blended or online environment?

Teaching online requires a whole new set of skills in order to be successful. Whereas the basics such as designing assessments and some form of lesson and unit planning pull from some of the skill sets necessary for traditional classroom teaching, it's just the tip of the online iceberg.

PLANNING - You have to have the whole course planned in advance. No more use of incremental teaching and planning. Online environments require you to have every assignment, every detail, every module, resource, etc. planned in advance in order to allow for student success. Whereas in a traditional classroom you may be able to adapt the pace or change your schedule to adapt to where students are in the learning process, with a blended/online class you have to be way ahead of the game. In the blended environment, you can make some of those mid-course corrections, but in the more student driven, online environment, this is not so much the case. Since you will have students working ahead at their own pace, you have to have all assignments and due dates established well in advance, taking into account your ability to get work returned before the next assignment is due so that students can also receive the necessary feedback.

This is a big area for me as I tend to adapt based on the face-to-face interactions with my students. Planning a whole year in advance, before getting to know the personality and academic skills and challenges that my students will be bringing with them to the table, not to mention the ever-changing historical landscape when dealing with economics (one of my courses), committing to a specific plan of action is really difficult for me. Traditional teaching allows for more easy mid-course corrections. For truly serving the needs of my students, having all my teaching ducks in a row all at once, is a daunting task. I like big picture and the minutia needed to truly serve the online needs of students is challenging. Having been through a few courses myself where the planning and grading were not well done, it was extremely frustrating.

INSTRUCTIONAL ITEMS - I tend to be best at coming up with items organically. An inspiration for a lesson or for delving deeper into a topic that seemed to interest the students seems to some about naturally in the course of discussions with the students. This aspect of seeing the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) and using those social cues to then adapt instruction the next day is something that I cherish. With the online requirements, I would need to front load a lot of my instruction and translate it into digestible chunks. I am also a big story teller and that is how I get points across to my students, I would need to find a way to adapt that to the online environment. I know that when I have taken courses online, that I often just head to the assignments and get them done, then go back and if I have time, or an interest, will then go back to the source material. It's one of the drawbacks, I see to the online teaching model -- that loss of interacting with the students/instructors on a more personal basis. Nothing replaces that interaction, and I know that many of the students in my face-to-face classes relish that interaction and connection, especially at my level since I teach mostly high school seniors.

GRADING - You have to make the rubrics and criteria available day one and this is an area that I have always struggled with. I do really well at creating real-world, relevant assignments, but getting the rubrics on paper so that students know exactly what I am looking for has always been a challenge. Telling someone what it's not, is always easier than articulating exactly what to look for. This part is imperative for successful online teaching and an area that I really need to work on.

TIME - With the availability of content and assignments 24-7 in the online world, pacing and time for grading and responding daily to emails for questions and student concerns is imperative. This aspect is something that I also struggle with. In my traditional classes I set aside one night a week for grading work from students for summative assessments. Formative assessments and checks for understanding are done on an as needed basis, but for the longer assignments and make up work, I have a standing rule to update on Thursday nites. If you don't have your work in by 4pm on Thursday, it may or may not make it into the gradebook until next Thursday. Somedays I may have some extra time to review items, but Thursdays are set aside for cathing everyone up.

In the 24-7 world of online learning, I would need to be able to set some commitments with regards to time and place so that I would be able to honor the needs of my students. Unlike traditional, online students often will need immediate feedback before being able to respond so if I miss a day from checking emails, etc. I could cause a cascade problem for a student who maybe had only that evening set aside to be able to complete the work. If I miss checking in, they may miss the chance to complete the assignment well. That puts a lot of pressure on the instructor. Then, how do you hold someone accountable if you are the reason they could not complete their work?

INSTRUCTIONAL MODALITIES - (1) more unit/long term planning including providing detailed rubrics and expectations, including due dates; (2) adapting my storytelling to the online world -- something that I really miss with my independent study students; (3) figuring how to somehow get the ideas of the simulations that we do to show specific key concepts translated to the online environment; and (4) organizing materials in an easy way for students to find the information. Moodle is limiting in this area, and still working on how to get it to be a bit easier for students to follow what they need to do.

WHAT I NEED - (1) that long/range planning practice -- just hate to commit to items before knowing the students. I have to learn to accept that much of online learning lacks that personal touch and personality that is unique to the face-to-face experience. Not sure that I like the stripping of that aspect of learning/teaching and worry that too many students will start to equate this "just the facts" just tell me what I need to get a grade mentality that can develop with what learning is all about. If this also becomes the norm, then the teaching profession itself may become nothing more than automated classes with no face-to-face and that would be a shame. Watching a teacher on video is not the same as being there in person. One of the downfalls of the online push.

(2) grading and rubrics. I need to work on getting the assignments thought out and planned in advance so students know exactly what to expect and being willing to slog through the online grading process. Grading online takes so much longer than traditional grading - count the clicks it takes vs. just reading and moving to the next paper- it's a commitment and does require more work on teacher side; (3) willingness to be on 24-7 for my students. This boundary is something that I will need to work on. As a student, I know that I would get frustrated if my questions were not answered immediately when I was struggling with something online. I believe setting expectations and online office hours is something that may be needed so that students understand that there have to be some limits. Right now, it's usually assumed that if you are taking an online course, that you have more access to the instructors online but thinking about it from the teacher's perspective, you still should have some boundaries. That may be the next pushback in online work, although that also some what negates the 24-7 aspect.

I love the opportunities for blended and online learning, however there are some aspects of the traditonal classroom that I hate to see lost in the translation. Nothing will ever replace a teacher interacting with students in the classroom, sharing ideas and discourse, learning from each other in the process. The side conversations and connections made really are priceless and need to be remembered and cherished. Whereas the online and blended models can help students just get through the material, that is not truly what education is all about and I hope that people take some time to remember that just because we can be more "efficient" by moving to online and blended models with regards to what some aspects of the process, we need to remember that education is more than just getting an "a" or covering the curriculum. That other aspect of the process is one that needs to be factored into the equation as well.