Mel Bro

Kearsley

brownie685 — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:56:22 +0000

Kearsley gives several topics of research for online education. Those topics include: student achievement, school-level impact, class interaction, virtual conferences, and learning communities. He talks about how technology has an effect on all of these topics and how we can research them in order to determine where the future of technology and online education is going. But it’s not just technology that we have to research. We also need to research how the class is being taught and evaluate who the course is being taught by. There are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to online education.

Chats

brownie685 — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:47:38 +0000

Even though I don’t really speak in the chats I think they are important. They keep the class connected as a whole and allow a sense of being involved in a class. With online education it is hard to know the opinions of others, and the chats let other classmates know how their peers feel about certain topics and give them better insight to the topics they are unsure about.

How Technology is Transforming the Lecture

brownie685 — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:46:51 +0000

I found this article on the OLDaily blog and thought that it was interesting (http://www.universityaffairs.ca/2008/11/03/how-technology-is-transforming-the-lecture.aspx). In this article, a professor at York University makes web videos as lectures; however, his students gave him feedback on the lectures and told him that they did not like them. So he started doing some more research and looked into things like the students’ attention span and what they liked. After his research he decided to break his lecture into parts and allow “funny” breaks in between.

I think this would work for a lot of online courses. Teachers can get feedback from students as to what they liked and didn’t like and teachers could adapt to what the students have suggested or make improvements based on their suggestions.

Fear and Humiliation

brownie685 — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:32:24 +0000

After reading the article on fear and humiliation I have realized that this is a major part of learning. We need to learn to get over our fears and the fact that we might be humiliated to accomplish the things that we need to do in life. If we never get over our fears then we will not grow as humans. We will sit idly by and watch others who are fearless get the things that we deserve. Same goes for teaching, I know that it is hard not to be nice but sometimes we have to push and be mean because we care and want to see these students succeed. I know that we can not make students go places that they do not want to go but we have to try. We have to push them, make them see that they need the material and the lessons to get by in life successfully. But then there are those times that we need to stop force feeding them and let them fend for themselves, because as much as we want to believe it, there will be those times that we are alone and we have to do it ourselves. That goes for school, work, and life. Its a tough world and as teachers we need to prepare our students for that. We can make learning fun but it also has to be serious.

Nature of Web and Evaluation

brownie685 — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:18:35 +0000

The global nature of the web, I think, does have some effect on the way that we teachers evaluate our students. Since there are times that sites may not work and students have a hard time accessing the things that they need for class then we are more lenient on the grading. However, the evaluation can be hard if we find that the students have been searching the web and stealing information with giving credit. Since we can find almost anything that we need online then we have to be a little bit more careful when it comes to plagerism and things of that nature.

Goals and Objectives

brownie685 — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:06:34 +0000

Comparing the goals and objectives of an online course and a classroom based course, I don’t see much of a difference. I think that they will be the same. There may be some slight differences but still essentially the same. The basic goals are to have students learn, which is the same in both situations. How we get them to learn maybe be different since our objectives in the classroom invlove hands on materials, lecture and social interaction, where with the online course we have to use technology to get students to be self motivated to learn.

Fisher Students Demonstrate Learning

brownie685 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:44:39 +0000

The article that I found is called Live in the Classroom! Fisher was teaching two classes, one in Snow Lake and another in California, and decided to have the two classes collaborate by use of live internet. They used both audio and video Skype to do the collaboration. He taught the students what it was used for and how to use it and then shortly after the students in snow lake were talking and shring information with those students in california. Later they had a guest that showed them more about the sharing of files, elements of video and still picture and showed them videos about the information. Then shortly after the students were back at it using all the information that was just taught to them.

Assessing student who thinks as a learner

brownie685 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:32:53 +0000

Ever have one of those students who you feel is one of those overachievers? Maybe its because they are thinking like a learner. To assess those students we can assign them extra things to do for assignments or add more things for them to do. We could also assign them to tutor others in the classroom and maybe assess them on how well the other student improves. This relates to constructivism. As teachers we really cannot assess creativity but we can try. The student constructs their own knowledge by using the material that they have already learned and if they can use that to find new ways to do things, especially in math then maybe we can do the things i have previously mentioned to give those students a little more credit.

“Portfolio”? Big Deal?

brownie685 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:12:21 +0000

These days most of what you hear about is the portfolio. Do we really need to have a portfolio? Yes and no. We can get by without one, we don’t really have to stress it, but I do think that it would come in handy later on in the students school life. As teachers we do not have to add something in the students portfolio every week. I think that in the portfolio we can pick the students best works and maybe a few that could use a little work to show how the student has improved throughout the years. Current teachers, future teachers, counselors, parents, and even the student themselves can have access to the portfolio and see how the student has improved and maybe discover other things that the student could improve on and become a better student. Even if we don’t have portfolios we can still do the same things. Instead of keeping a professional portfolio students can keep up with work using Word or even blogging.

Teachers writing about whats happening

brownie685 — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:05:20 +0000

Teacher these days are using blogs to let the world know what is happening in their classrooms. Some teachers have blogs with other teachers and some have blogs that link them to the parents of the children that they teach. Some blogs between the students and the teachers are private so only the students, teachers and parents have access to them. Then there are those teachers who have blogs that write about everything education. They share ideas and things that they have done that have worked in the classroom as well as in an online course. Some teachers also use youtube as a way to express what is happening in the educational society.