Course Reflections

641 - Understanding Virtual High Schools "The Blue Course"

This class was a very interesting class, my first online instructional experience. After the initial shock of the enormity of the online undertaking, I settled down to complete my assignments and began to experience what it meant to be an online learner.

I understand the importance of setting a schedule, and goals to keep me on pace with the course. Distractions of real life and my job were always encroaching on school work time and finding a few hours, let alone 10, was like hunting for the grail. But commitment means everything to online learning. A lesson which is prominent in the opening module of the Virtual High School. I learned so much in this opening course and had a reality check for balancing work, school and family.

In reflecting on this class, I am now the student and have renewed apathy for my own students. I must take with me the difficulties of juggling life and remember to be flexible and understanding of my students. This experience has reminded me of life on the other side of the desk. I vow to be more apathetic to the needs of my students and be more open to new approaches and ideas.

The culmination project for this class was a power point presentation. click here to view.

642 - The Online Academy "The Green Course"

In the green course I read the text A Classroom of One by Gene Maeroff, which tells us about the history of virtual learning and learn about GMU's: The Online Academy. Through Maeroff I learned a history and basic under standing of online learning. In further chapters Mareoff described several online programs and looks at the pro's and con's of virtual learning. With these reading I complete my assignments as any virtual student would.

Again having a schedule saved me hours of aggravation. My assignments were done on time and for a first time in my career I can say my writing had improved. I was experiencing great success with my essays and had gained a sense of pride about my work I have never experienced before.

I take away from this class a sense of accomplishment about my skills as a writer. I have worked very hard and has paid off in my grades and in my teaching. The amount of work I have been completed and my juggling abilities have improved greatly. I haven taken a pride and ownership of my education which I have never experienced before.

This course's final project consisted of a briefing paper. Click here to view paper.

643 - Online Mentoring 1: Building Relationships "The Red Course"

This course placed me in the position as a mentor of an online learner. Throughout the online experience a mentor has been assigned to work with me. That mentor had given guidance and instruction. Now in the red course are roles were reversed and it is I who sat in the mentor 's chair. Through related articles, I learned and used sound and proven techniques for mentoring. These steps in the mentoring process were essential to forming a strong bond between the two parties. As I read and experienced the situations in the red course I thought back to my situation in the "Blue Course". I understood and made connections between that experience and the one I was working in now. That connection cemented the concepts of the mentoring process.

I look at my students in a mentoring role and see how I affect my surroundings. My students know they can trust me to tell them the truth. I coach in lessons and guide as much as possible. This small port hole ito online mentoring glimpses at the pace of online mentoring. It will be a small link in a very long and powerful chain of learning.

The final project for the red course was a job application for The Online Academy.

717 - Teaching with Multimedia/Hypermedia

This course has been a difficult one to process. I believe I will be processing this for classes and years to come. This class used the text Teaching with Technology, by P. Norton and K. Wiburg. This material focused on using aspects of technology as a tool in designing lessons to formulate deep understanding of material, thought processes and pedagogy.

This class has been the most useful of all. In looking at how to design classes, I have focused on my own instruction and made modifications. I look to model the instruction design around real world situations.

This course ends with the creation of this web site. Looking at assessment as a part of the whole picture I can look inward to the heart of the lesson and focus my lesson design on the journey to the idea.

As I continue of my web path, every semester brings new and exciting things to learn and I look to the next big thing to be even better.

I have recently experienced the importance of a content expert and what they bring to a learning environment. I plodded through with what I could do and found my limitations frustrating. I worked to the best of my abilities and still could not manage to make a dent in the content I was writing about. It was only until I was motioned to step back and try a different subject matter that I understood the true importance of a content expert. A vital component of creating a strong solid online class for students to take. Understanding that failure has made that experience more useful. I take to my new course a true respect for a content master and the other pieces of the course creation puzzle as well.

EDCI 716 Principles of Technology Integration & Design

What an outstanding class. I have worked hard in learning how to create and use this technology to mesh well with my teaching experience.

I know a fair amount about technology, especially graphic manipulation and web design. However, learning the Macromedia suite of software has raised my learning curve greatly. I am able to manipulate images for professional looking web publishing and I have been able to assist others with their learning as well.

In the following links, I have demonstrated some of the web development tricks of the trade. Drop Down practice Roll Over Practice Submit Box . Podast practice video practice. To further enhance my learning, I have used these techniques and tricks of the web publishing trade to create items for for the stats class on The Online Academy.

I plan to be using the lessons learned from this course for a very long time. I look forward to continue learning the Macromedia bundle and creating Flash documents.

EDIT 644 Online Mentoring 2: Promoting Self-Regulation "Black Course"

This course used the text Developing Self-regulated Learners, by B. Zimmerman, S Bonner, and R. Kovach. This text and class is designed to help us as online mentors to understand and assist our students with self-regulation, and self-efficacy.

Throughout this concept, students learn to set goals related to their study habits, use learning strategies, self-monitor changes, and adjust their strategic methods. In working with this course the material was difficult to comprehend, until it was applied in the challenges that went along with course. This class made me use my web publishing skills to create a resource page for understanding and using self-regulation techniques.

The following link takes you to my work. mentoring3 I see the importance of this class if I am to be useful as an online mentor. I hope to be able to apply my training as a mentor and make relevant my efforts.

EDIT 646 Online Mentoring 4: Moderating "Turquoise Course"

This class was by far the best online class I have taken. What fun to read from the text (Won't hear me say that often). The relevance of the material and the use of the online simulations made this course so enjoyable. I believe because I enjoyed so much I have learned more from it. The text, The Thinking Classroom: Learning and Teaching in a Culture of Thinking by S. Tishman, D. Perkins, and E. Jay, was so well written. My favorite sections were the multiple examples of classroom use for the culture of thinking.

There were so many activities to do for this module posting it all could cause trouble. 6 Burma Shave activities, email simulations, another activity, and creating brochures for a series of workshops we would be presenting.

The culminating activity was my acceptance speech for recognition dinner in my honor. speech In looking forward, I see this course as most useful in gaining experience in the mentoring process.

EDIC 713 Graphics and TV Video Production

This course expanded my media production skills to include video production, pod-casting, and continued manipulation of graphics.

With this class I put my theory into practice and used my skills to create interactive web pages. Many of my activities overlapped into EDIC 714. (see for artifacts) Perfecting my techniques and using as much technology as possible, I have been able to create interactive and educational online experiences for students.

In using these features in school, I can see the interested and delight of students grow and I hope to build these skills into my teachers as well. HAving them be able to work with this type of media will take any class and raise it level of interest.

EDIT 790 and 791 Practicum: Instructional Technology -

This class is the design and creation of courses for the the virtual high school. I began working with the statistics course and learned very quickly how important a content expert is to the design and creation of any project.

Knowing basic creation techniques was not enough to create an active interesting course students would want to take. I floundered and became frustrated with my lack of progress. Ultimately it was my lack of knowledge in statistics which influenced a change in course wear.

In changing courses to personal finance, I finally found a sense of ownership with the course and feel I can accomplishment from my creations.

EDIT 721- Web Based Learning

This was my total immersion into an online learning web-based situation. This course taught by Dawn Hathaway, was my instruction on leading a group and being a successful group member in an online venue. This course was a lot like a swimming lesson where you are tossed out of a boat in the middle of a lake and told to paddle. I had been working with small groups and preparing for this role, but just like in student teaching, you really aren't prepared until your in the middle of the lake.

The readings we had done for learning to be an effective online learner and presenter were well versed in theory, practice applications, and the tricks of the online trade. I firmly believe I have experienced every, online phase, online personality type and online problem that could happen. This intense learning situation left me with a valuable lesson and has formed a base line for future online situations, post early. The longer I waited the worse my situation would get. I found myself scrambling last minute accomplish things which could have been easily obtained sooner. Once I understood this was how I needed to learn the class moved very smoothly for me and my work became much better.

I am very pleased with myself in this class. I worked very hard to be a good group mate and did my very best to be clear facilitator. I have set appropriate and realistic goals and actions for future online situations and I will be very successful. I had so many reflections, I pasted them in a word document for later review and contemplation. My last reflection I had a little chuckle with. We had to describe our group. I choose community, because that to related to family. We were a family group. We worked well on united causes, tried to our do each other with individual situations, ganged up on each and made amends. But most importantly as a family we learned from each other and always came back to supporting ideas and complementing one another.

As for the subject matter of the course that was an excellent experience. We covered a plethora of experiences and I tended to focus on MUVEs. I want to do my research multi-user virtual environments and tried to focus my final project on such a virtual simulation. Course reflections.

EDIT 730 -Analysis and Design of Muti-media and Hyper Environments

This class was again about VHS production. Julia and I were relieved of Statistics and were assigned Personal Finance. We began over the summer creating all the important and required documents for a successful creation of an online class. The curriculum map, correlation of SOLs, and other documents gave us our skeleton for setting up our web site. We created our themes and modules and began working on modules. I began with module 1: Goals and goal setting. For the first time I finally found a subject I adore and was able to apply all the software skills I had acquired. The sense of accomplishment and ownership I have gained has been inspirational to me. I really enjoy working on this course and looking forward to it's completion.