With a late start to the course, I honestly have not had time yet to read many of the articles but have however, viewed the power point and gone through this discussion boards.
What surprises me most was the size and amount of time that "virtual schooling" has existed. I was surprised to see that the Florida school dates back to 1997. As I write this, the year does not seem that long ago but to me the technology does seem so "fresh" that I would not have expected any official schooling to being until perhaps after 2000. It was great to get some background on some of the key definitions of schools versus schooling and the categorization of the types of interaction.
As I posted in my initial post, being a teacher I want to take advantage of technology in my classroom, but I anticipate the biggest upside to virtual learning will be creating more authentic, rich, student-student interactions. Even in math a well-crafted, well guided student to student interaction would improve on the mostly teacher driven direct instruction type of learning that makes up most of our teacher student learning in a "real" classroom.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
About Me
Originally posted to Moodle Sunday Night_Copied and Pasted Tuesday...
A little late in getting to our first assignment but better late than never. I am a high school math teacher that wants to continue his education and keep learning how to infuse technology into my classroom. In addition, I want to get an idea of how the future of my profession might look in 5-10 years. I already see some virtual learning options being implemented at the school I teach at now.
I formerly taught in NYC (for 6 years) which is how I became involved with Teachers College but now live in RI, so I already am taking advantage of online learning to keep some continuity in my professional development. The online course I took at TC was Computers and Problems Solving which basically focused on Web 2.0 tools. What I liked about it was being exposed to some tools I could use in my classroom. I experimented with google docs, wikis, Flickr, and Webspiration. It was nice to gain some exposure, however, I sometimes find it a little frustrating to "experiment" with new tools that may or may not be commonly used or transferable to my profession (or may become out of fashion in a year or so). Most of the tools we did use could be applicable to the high school community (my students) but I still find technology roadblocks in my school and a lack of time to efficiently implement the tools while meeting other curriculum demands.
I also found the "collaboration" in that course to be very poorly defined and ineffective. There needs to be some very clear norms/expectations in any online learning environment. I hope this course can help define some new paradigms that are useful for us and for a high school or other k-12 learning community.
I also took 2 online courses to learn Geometer's SketchPad. An awesome technology tool for teaching Geometry. This was more of a "product" course where I just had to independently complete assignments each week. It was agressive but productive and I found the assignments really helped direct my learning and I got just enough feedback to focus my independent learning.
Looking forward to the course.
Gus Steppen
A little late in getting to our first assignment but better late than never. I am a high school math teacher that wants to continue his education and keep learning how to infuse technology into my classroom. In addition, I want to get an idea of how the future of my profession might look in 5-10 years. I already see some virtual learning options being implemented at the school I teach at now.
I formerly taught in NYC (for 6 years) which is how I became involved with Teachers College but now live in RI, so I already am taking advantage of online learning to keep some continuity in my professional development. The online course I took at TC was Computers and Problems Solving which basically focused on Web 2.0 tools. What I liked about it was being exposed to some tools I could use in my classroom. I experimented with google docs, wikis, Flickr, and Webspiration. It was nice to gain some exposure, however, I sometimes find it a little frustrating to "experiment" with new tools that may or may not be commonly used or transferable to my profession (or may become out of fashion in a year or so). Most of the tools we did use could be applicable to the high school community (my students) but I still find technology roadblocks in my school and a lack of time to efficiently implement the tools while meeting other curriculum demands.
I also found the "collaboration" in that course to be very poorly defined and ineffective. There needs to be some very clear norms/expectations in any online learning environment. I hope this course can help define some new paradigms that are useful for us and for a high school or other k-12 learning community.
I also took 2 online courses to learn Geometer's SketchPad. An awesome technology tool for teaching Geometry. This was more of a "product" course where I just had to independently complete assignments each week. It was agressive but productive and I found the assignments really helped direct my learning and I got just enough feedback to focus my independent learning.
Looking forward to the course.
Gus Steppen
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)