lifelong learning…

What did I learn this semester? I learned that I can always improve in what I am doing and that I should never settle for mediocre. Things can always be better! I have learned to keep a critical eye on my work as an educator and have learned that the tools available for learning are coming out faster than we can learn them and that keeping up with technology is a challenge in itself. I have also learned that if you can’t explain why you do what you do, then you need to sit down and really consider the reasons you do why you do them. For example, if you ask students to do warm-ups before singing, the purpose is to prepare the voice for singning! If you ask students to reflect on their learning, there should be an underlying purpose, perhaps pushing students to dig deeper into their understanding of material, and learn how to articulate what they have learned clearly.

I know that I have learned these things because I think about them a lot. Now that I know a little bit more about how people learn and how to sequence learning activities in a way that will maximize learning, I think about what I am doing in my classroom each day and try to look for ways to improve and enhance learning in my classroom.

One example of what I really learned is that it IS possible to combine F2F environments and online environments to create a very personalized and motivating learning environment. The online environment provides learning in more than one learning style and appeals to so many types of learners. The F2F environment allows students in a music class to have authentic performing experiences and a place to get to know one another. Having more than one area dedicated to learning can only enhance the student’s overall learning experience.

A second example of what I really learned is that it takes students and teachers to create teaching presence in a course. It is up to the teacher to set the students up for having interactions that really promote learning and teaching. Learning isn’t directional, in that it doesn’t come from a book and go straight into your brain, and voila! you have learned it. It takes interactions, discussions and feedback to make meaningful and deep learning experiences.

What helped my learning in this course was having such great discussions with my classmates and fantastic guiding questions from Alex. She really pushed us to perform at a high level. This was the most challenging course in my Master Degree career at UAlbany. I loved every minute of it. I think that pushing students to perform at higher levels helps them to break the plateu of what they think they are capable of. Usually they are capable of more than you think. It also helped my learning to use diigo and rate my posts. At first I thought it was painstaking and hard, especially when I spent an hour on constructing a post only to recieve a 2, but as I learned that it was more about teaching others, I began to perform better and was more motivated to teach something new and provide a cool resouce in diigo.

I don’t think there was anything that hindered my learning. Learning is what you make it. It is up to you to view challenging things as challenges rather than obstacles. It’s all in how you look at it. I felt that my learning accellerated during the course of this semester and I am happy that I am finishing my masters degree with a feeling of accomplishment.

My feelings about this course are great! I would recommend anyone interested in online course development to take the course with Alex. She makes everyone in the course feel welcome and comfortable, which is the key to being successful and having students who are motivated to working with her. I have learned that I could stand to be a little more personable with my students and our relationship outside of class will grow and this will make the learning that happens in class so much stronger. Relationships and feelings are one of the underlying keys to success in a course. If you have a teacher you like, don’t you want to work harder to please them? I know I do…and I know that I don’t really feel like working for someone who berates my feelings and is insensitive.

Thanks to Alex for a wonderful semester! The learning journey this semester has been quite challenging, but worth every second! I wouldn’t change a thing!

(4)

After conducting my own course review, I think I am pretty good shape overall. I spent a lot of time creating rubrics and assignment directions in the past few weeks and I think the time I spent doing it paid off. I did need to update some of my older documents in the course information area, which I did today, because they were outdated already! I had made changes in the actual module structure and changed my mind about how to grade the students from when I had originally created my document, which I think is expected. I also had to change the titles of my modules in the course documents areas and refine my learning activities so that they matched up with what the students would see in each module.I tried to make my tone more inviting and conversational. I also took some time to add a parental permission form because Alex had suggested it back in the beginning of this course. I wasn’t really sure what to say in the document at that time she suggested it, but I think that now I understand that I just need to let parents know what their child will be doing on the web and be sure that they approve of what I am asking for. I also added a portion to the permission slip for the student to sign telling me that they understand that this course is to be used for learning and that they understand that they are responsible for what they are doing online.

I had my 16 year old brother review my course using the peer review checklist and boy did he do a thorough job! He didn’t miss anything. I asked him to review the course because I wanted to make sure that he understood what he was supposed to do and in what order. I figured that if he understood, the students using certainly would! He said that he liked the composition assignment the best because he wanted to use Finale notepad. He also liked the links to the rubrics and asked me to show him how to make a rubric. It was a teachable moment. My brother is good at spotting mistakes in spelling and grammar and finding inconsistencies in wording, so I appreciated him helping me identify where I needed to make revisions.

The next step I am working on in revising my course is making explicit directions about how to participate in assignments and discussions. I have done ok with the assignments part so far, but I think I need to be more clear about the discussions. I need to add a generic page before each discussion that details which buttons to click and add a link to the discussion rubric. I also want to add “milestones” to my course after each module that congratulate students on their work and provide them a chance to play an online game, or do something fun, almost like a reward or incentive for their work.

What I have learned about myself so far during these revisions is that I am really proud of the time I have spent thinking about and evolving my course. It was so much fun to share the course with my brother and he really enjoyed looking at it. He understood that it takes so much time to develop a site and it made me feel proud of the hours I have spent tweaking every little thing. I have also learned that I am becoming more confident in what I am asking students to do and becoming more consistent in my presentation. I am always thinking of new activities to add if I ever revamp this course. There are so many things you can do online, the limit is your imagination and the student’s techno-savviness. I am feeling less overwhelmed and more encouraged to make the course better and better!

One last thing- I feel like every discussion, article and assignment I have done in this course has really made me question why I do things the way I do. This course has helped me become more open and receptive to new ideas and ways of thinking and I believe it has strengthened my teaching ability. There is a certain amount of vulnerability that we each open ourselves to by sharing our courses with our peers. This vulnerability forces each of us to do our best work and think through the reasons why we choose to do what we do in our courses.

What I have learned and considered in this course makes me excited to go back to school in September and work with my students. I have been realizing more and more that I do have a student centered classroom, but I still need to work on improving the student to student interactions and learn to let students take more control, while still steering them in the right direction.

I’m looking forward to reviewing my classmate’s courses and getting feedback on my own! (4)

This week has been very motivating for me as I have worked to build the learning activities in my course. I have been using diigo so much more and and I think more effectively now that I am more secure in how to use it to share resources with the class. I think I have finally figured out how to tag and annotate my bookmarks, though I’m sure I will keep improving as I use it more and more. Diigo is really a cool tool, and so helpful when searching for links to add to my course. It’s so much easier to bookmark them in Diigo and pull up the sidebar to look at what I have to work with. I used to compile web resources in my word processor, and I had to move back and forth between documents all the time. Diigo eliminates that hassle!

What I did not know before is that I would agonize over the details of creating my learning activities and want to edit them constantly. I found myself thinking about how my original plan has morphed so much over the past weeks in this course and I am beginning to understand more and more how creating teaching presence is so important. I think that I am getting the hang of it, but I am worried about how the students are going to respond to one another. I know that everything takes time, and my first experience teaching an online course will be at a par with the students taking an online course for the first time. We’ll have to learn together.

In my course, I have been applying the ideas that learning is knowledge centered, learner centered and assessment centered. As I look over my course, I think that I have addressed all of these items and hope that I can find ways to continually improve my course design to make learning better for everyone. I have provided students with resources to learn, areas to discuss and interact and assessments to gague what they have learned. I have also tried to add a few new things like “choices” and tried to add a database, but couldn’t figure out how it worked. I don’t have much experience with wiki’s but think it would be fun to use in my Tone Color Module for students to create a database of instruments and their characteristics.

In presenting myself to the class in the online environment I have been trying to use emoticons and a conversational tone to communicate to students that I am a human with a sense of humor, just like them. I want to convey to students that I am here to help and willing to provide them with feedback. I am also encouraging students to review the work of their peers and provide feedback about how they can improve. I have created assessments that use rubrics, which I can use to grade them, and I also encourage students to check out their classmate’s assignments. In presentation of content, I am intersted in finding ways to imrpove my own presentation. I reviewed the art history course today and was inspired by the dialouge presented in the content section, but wondered to myself, “how much time did this person spend creating this document?” I just have to think that the finished product that I see is a reflection of constant revision and creativity. I’m sure what I see wasn’t developed in a few weeks.

I have been realizing more and more that as a learner I am very interested in facts and how to present them in a creative way. I also realized that I enjoy challenge and hope that what I have created in my course will be challeging enough for students in 6th grade. It’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like to be a learner at this age, and hopefully the way I present knowledge is at a level that students can understand. I also know that sometimes I need to be pushed a little and feel a bit of pressure to improve my own performance. As a musician I am always preparing for performances, and always feel that the performance was a big light at the end of the tunnel of preparation. My hope is that I can transfer this to thinking about assessments as performances and pace content in an organized way to lead students to the final goal.

What I have observed about myself during the completion of the learning activities in this course is that I can tend to be impatient with the CMS. It just seems to take so long to return to areas I am working in, and I get frustrated with the speed of it all, I want it to go FASTER! I also realized that I need to give myself more time to build the activities, and come to terms with the fact that what I create I am always going to want to edit and make better! I need to remember to give myself breaks and enough time to think about activities while I am building them so I can really think them through.

From the observations of myself, I am hoping that my students will give themselves enough time to really think about the information being presented to them and be disciplined enough to pace themsleves. I think that I have broken down my activities relatively well, but there is no telling how the students are going to respond until they are in the learning environment. I realize too that I need to be flexibly firm with students and allow them extra time if they need it, but within reason.

The most challenging thing for me in this course is managing my time wisely. I find that I am spending hours and hours each day on this course alone, 5 days a week. I know everyone is doing the same! I revisted the course information documents and noticed that we are expected to spend 144-150 hours on this course, which is a lot of time, but so worth it! I am so proud of my course so far and feel that the amount of time I have spent on it has challenged me to become a better teacher and student.

The most difficult and uncomfortable thing for me in this past week was trying to work through my course with the knowledge that my 38 year old cousin died of liver cancer on Monday morning. Everyone in my family found out only a week ago that she had 3-6 weeks to live…she only lasted one week. She also has a 13 month old baby. This was one of the most shocking events of my life. I was close with her, she groomed my dogs and I talked with her often. So, needless to say, I know this is a very personal thing, that perhaps I shouldn’t share here, but it made it difficult for me to focus on developing my course. My thoughts kept getting the best of me and I had to take a few breaks to refocus. This experience has showed me that if you set your mind to something, you can get through it. Sometimes a committment, like being in online courses, or a job can help get you through a traumatic experiene.

I am a student in a Moodle course, and I am creating a course in Moodle, so being a student in this course has really helped shape the way I structure the learning activities. It is also nice to be able to think about how I want to structure something and then notice that in the course, the instructor has already decide to use a similar format. I think that I am sometimes unconsciously influenced by Alex in how she sets up the Modules. As I looked at my course today, and went back to look at the discussions in Alex’s, I noticed that I have followed a very similar structure in organizing learning activities. I also think about how much time and effort went into constantly revising and editing the ETAP course. There is so much information in there, and Alex even developed multiple Breeze presentaions and screen casts, which must take so many more hours. I am in awe of how she is able to pace herself as she is assessing us and giving us feedback. How does she have the time to make this course so awesome and still interact with her family? I am still learning so much, and this is proving to be one of the most rewarding educational experiences I have ever encountered.

BTW Alex- Thanks for sharing the personal pics in your blog. It’s so nice to be able to see you with your family, friends and doggies! You certainly know how to enhance your presence in this course.

Thanks for reading!

-Aubrey (4)

Alex’s breeze presentation tied directly with “A Follow Up in the Investigation of Teaching Presence” the article she developed with P. Shea. I noticed that there were many recurrent themes, which I thought lent itself to being redundant, which Alex says is a good thing in the Online learning environment. I would agree. Not only did she present this info as a breeze slide show, which appeals to the visual learning style, she also tied it to auditory. Re-reading a lot of what she said in the Breeze presentation in the article reiterated important themes. I think the part of the breeze presentation that impacted me the most was the idea that teaching presence is knowledge centered, learner centered and assessment centered. I am really trying to re-organize my learning activities by renaming them and making them more kid friendly. I am also trying to focus on how I am going to assess student learning in each of the modules. I am toying with the thought to switching the placement of 2 of my modules, the first and the second, to make them flow a little better and allow students to get into content that will serve as a review for them for the most part while they are learning the new course management system. 

I took a look at the courses for observation again and looked at a virtual field trip of an art gallery that really looked neat. I was thinking that a virtual field trip would tie in perfectly with my composers and time periods module. It would be really neat to allow students to get a glimpse of Vienna or NYC without actually traveling there. 

The most difficult part for me this week is trying to keep the online and offline activities separated making sure that the activities I choose are going to be the best fit for the learning environment. This hybrid learning business is much harder than I was thinking. Sometimes I start to think about the possibilities of what I could do and I overwhelm myself thinking about how to make it work in the online environment and how much writing it will be. I need to tell myself to take a step back and look at the big picture to get a better sense of what is important with regard to big ideas, and back off a little on the details. 

What is working is using a new organizer for managing my learning activities in MS word. In the manual Alex said that drafting out the learning activities would be a paper and pencil activity, but I think this is working ok for me. I made a table that outlines each module and lists both on and offline activities and allows me to look at them next to one another. I am hoping that this is going to be an easier way for me to reorganize everything and find the logical patterns of how to present knowledge that is learner centered, develop community spirit and then assess the knowledge. Like I said before, the assessment part is the difficult thing for me, but I am working on it. The manual gives some neat ideas for activities and assessments which I am going to consider using in each module. I just still really have to think about what I am doing a little more and play with some things. (4)