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Post #3- C&I 438: PLE’s
As I am in week 4 of my online Medical Terminology course that I am teaching, I am beginning to feel disconnected to my students. It is like I have the class on a routine, can go on autopilot, but yet, I wonder…..is anyone getting anything from this course? I can’t see their faces when they have questions or are concerned or just don’t get it. I feel I am not developing the rapport with student before and after class (as in face-to-faceclasses).
As I think more about ‘whether my students are getting it or not’, I think of Personal Learning Environemnts. As I searched more about PLE’s I learned that this includes providing support for my students to set their own goals, managing their own learning, and communicating with the students during the semester. As I follow these steps, I can continue to help my students learn successfully and pass the class.
Lee Kraus had a unique definition of PLE on his blog. He suggests that learning envionments are developed and facilitated by many tools and opportunties that work together to facilitate learning. There are many educational resources I can take advantage of to help strengthen the learning environments for my students.
Tony Karrer also discusses PLE’s in his blog and how we can work effectively and efficiently not just individually, but also in teams through the tools of Web 2.0. I agree with this and feel taking advantage of these web 2.0 tools is important for me as an online learner, so I can most effectively reach the varied PLE’s of my students. Within the next two week, I am having the students have a Medical Terminology Pronunciation Quiz online through Skype. I will have updates on the outcome of this adventure soon!
Post #2- C&I 438
This week has been a test of patience with technology. As the course management system that I am using for the course I am taking online had troubles opening and lost much of our data/posts; flexibility in how a distance ed course is run became essential. Since our course had to move from the original course management system, I learned about other sites that could support course development and publishing. We moved our course to a wiki site, classmate’s blog sites, and a social networking site, ning. After reviewing other educational blogs on the internet, I was surprised to read Lee Kraus’s blog which discussed some of these same web tools. Kraus even suggested that social networks may emerge as a leading filter of learning content. He hypothesizes that an educator’s role will become more focused on assessment and evaluation and they will serve as the expert in within the social networks. I never thought about using a social network for a class, but now that I am registered with my class’s network, I am very excited and motivated actively participate in the course activities. It is a unique additional opportunity to engage on the internet.
Another thing I thought about as we students quickly switched to blogs, wikis, social networking sites, is the privacy issue that often concerns education and the read/write web. Fortunately, with adult students, there is not as much of a concern with this as there is with K-12 classes. Troy Hicks wrote about this issue on his blog. He also discussed the challenges some teachers face with not having access to some of these internet sites at their school, which I feel is unfortunate. I know in my work, I am unable to get some area dietitians to correspond with my students on our class blog, because the dietitian’s employers will not allow access to blog sites.
Troy also discussed how teachers’ online persona can be hard to develop and how administrators have expectations of teachers’ online persona. As I am even blogging about how my own class that I am teaching online is going, I have to think about who the audience is. I wouldn’t want to become political in any issues of the college I teach for or negatively write about too many things. I understand the concern that administrators have about the published work on the internet. I want to make these educational technologies a positive aspect of my work.
Post #1- C&I 438 Web 2.0
Getting back into reading other people’s blogs can be overwhelming, but addictive at the same time! There is so much out there on distance learning. As I was reading blogs, I came across a blog by Chris Pearson that focused on Web 2.0. This caught my attention as I think using web2.0 tools in distance ed can be a great way to interact students-to-students, and students-to-instructor. There was a slide show embedded in Chris’s blog that better explained ‘web2.0’. First, I was very impressed by the idea of the use of ‘slideshare’ to post this slide show. Is this something I can do for a blog I create for my classes I teach? I was also intrigued by the slide show as it defined web 2.0… “Web 1.0 was commerce, Web 2.0 is people.” I think this is a great way to describe web 2.0 and also helps show the use the web can have in distance education. Having students interact is a great learning technique and web tools such as wikis, blogs, etc can allow for the ‘participatory web’ (as Chris defines it) to help facilitate learning. For my online medical terminology course, I finally have an outline created for my summer course. When I first started creating my online course, I was told by another individual who previously taught the same course, that I could just ‘copy’ all of her materials. She taught using WebCT and having students take weekly quizzes- that was their only task- no interaction. I knew that I could take the easy way out and copy her materials, however, I knew that that was not the way I wanted to teach an all online medical terminology course. I have gathered some other discussion questions, activities, group projects, and smaller quizzes to have more interactions among the students. Then I read Gary Harriman’s blog which gave me another idea: Case Studies.
Gary discussed how case studies are often left out of distance ed courses, but can be a really great interactive learning tool. I can really see a connection between case studies and medical terminology. The case studies could be designed to show if students are really understanding the terminology they are reading with different medical cases. However, Gary wrote about case studies that appear to be designed with a bit more technology savvy programs than I am used to using (html and Java Script). However, I do think this is something I may look into for this online medical terminology course. Medical Terminology is like learning a foreign language. Repetition, repetition, repetition. This is where the interaction and fully utilizing tools of Web 2.0 could make my course my learner-friendly!
Welcome!
Welcome to my blog! I am currently a doctoral student in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at Illinois State University. I have been studying about the uses of technology in education which encouraged me this past year to put many of the web 2.0 tools to use in my classroom. I am an instructor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences where I teach nutrition-related courses and direct the dietetic internship/masters program. This blog site will serve as my place to share new tools and ideas for incorporating technology into the classroom. This summer I am taking an online course called ‘Distance Education’ and I am also teaching an online course for the first time, ‘Medical Terminology.’ Medical Terminology begins next week…..I am preparing podcasts, audio to go with powerpoints, discussion threads,etc. I will share how my journey goes with teaching online for the first time!
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