271 - Philosophy from Week One: Learning skills and integration, incorporating vision, reflection and collaboration - the perfect combo for learning.

So, I'm thinking that 271 is going better than I first thought. After the first class, I was kind of bummed, because my students just sat there in awe, not asking any questions. I was afraid I had totally lost them and it was WAY over their heads. We had some really cute ideas. Luckily, I had all early childhood education students so I was able to really focus the software and aim of the course. Hans took all the Agricultural Education students. I really think you need to connect education more directly to students. This is shown throughout education. Many accomplish this with a smaller group, but if you can tailor the instruction to better meet a whole group of students, isn't that better? More ROI. :)

Anyways, I was so pleased with my first planned course. I first had my students draw a representation of themselves in a Paint program (to learn how to use Paint). Next, I had them save those in the Public Folder (to get them used to saving things and where to save them) so they could present their drawing to the class. As they were explaining, students were supposed to take notes (using Word or Works or Notepad) of students who had similarities to them. Then each student came up and we used Kidspiration to draw connections to one another to emphasize how we share common bonds. I wanted to build a community of learners.

Since the course is still fuzzy to me, it was difficult to explain. It felt like I was going by the seat of my pants, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE being able to be creative and think of these types of things.

I was also able to introduce them to WebCT Vista (where they were supposed to post an introduction of themselves), Blogs (using Elgg.net), and the course in general. We just reviewed how the cases would work and viewed the three movies files I had which were the first case. I'll talk about those in a separate blog.

I am also having the students keep their own blog in Elgg. They subscribed to our EDCI 271 community where there will be a community blog (for course suggestions or it could be used for debates or posting about different technologies and how we could use them) and a community wiki (where we will define ideal technology integration and come up with one class definition). Overall, I really want to emphasize learning the technologies while accomplishing technology integration visions. I think this may be the key. They are learning both skills and integration techniques all at the same time while reflecting and collaborating. I discovered this accidentally, but what a brainstorm! I love it! Plus it's students centered. I asked them to answer a survey that lets me know what technologies they wanted to learn about. Therefore, I can tailor the course to meet their wants and needs. The important thing is to remain flexible.

271 - Philosophy from Week One: Learning skills and integration, incorporating vision, reflection and collaboration - the perfect combo for learning.