Week 9 - Unit Reflection

Now that you have seen what other people did in creating their units, is there anything that you might do differently if you were to redesign your own unit?

First of all, I thought designing the unit with my partner, Kar Hwee, was an incredibly rewarding experience. I appreciated how we tempered each other with perspective and enriched each other’s experience with creativity and alternate approaches. I wouldn’t trade that experience at all.

I liked the LMS we chose to use, Moodle. I found so many useful tools within Moodle, but given more time, I would have explored many more of the add-on modules that are available within the system. Some of them, such as the oral presentation tool Nanogong, were incredibly useful and innovative, and they allowed us to open up the teaching and learning experience to tools that I wouldn’t have originally thought to utilize. There are so many of these modules that sometimes, the research can be overwhelming. Having others help to sort through those options is key to offering the richest subunits a teacher can muster.

More than anything, I gained a sense of how time-consuming it is to be an outstanding online teacher. For one unit, we probably spent a combined total of hours that would exceed four times what I would spend as an in-classroom teacher. The experience of building a productive online unit confirmed what I have read in several of our resources: don’t underestimate the time it takes to be an exceptional online teacher. What might originally seem like relatively straightforward tasks can easily evolve into an incredibly labor-intensive project but one that can offer enormous rewards in both creativity and overall understanding.

Week 7 - Predicting Speedbumps

There is no question in my mind that my biggest concern when designing a math unit on linear equations is dealing with the math symbols themselves. I find this to be a challenge when using any web 2.0 tools with math. How do I use math symbols effectively, and more to the point, where within that web tool do I access them when they become more advanced ? Most of these applications have their own math modules, and it becomes problematic when one is moving back and forth between them.

The more pressing concern, of course, is not how the teacher negotiates these challenges but how the student does. If the student is not clear on how to write “the square root of 17,” then the student’s frustration regarding the inability to communicate can even overtake the challenges of the material itself.

The other challenge in creating any online program, I believe, is to avoid reinventing the wheel. There is SO much information already online that an instructor can access and utilize. At this point, it may be more about wading through all of the options to find an incredibly effective approach/tool rather than necessarily creating one from scratch. I’m looking forward, however, to working on a unit I can put to use next year!

Week 6 - Ch-ch-ch-changes....

I did not change anything in the Google spreadsheet, but this is largely because my original answers were based on the information that I could gather from the web sites or spokesperson from the school, and this information has not changed. I will note that I finally received a phone call back from Insight Schools, over two weeks after my phone call was originally placed. This makes me concerned for any family wishing to enroll their student. The school didn’t know who I was (I could have been a prospective parent!), so I was frustrated. In addition, the phone call I received was from Insight Kansas. This is like calling your local school to get a feel for the place and instead getting a phone call back from the county school board. It was a "big box business" feel - another frustration!

When answering the question of whether my view of the schools has changed, I would say that it has. I was, even with the simplicity of the state school’s web site (Colorado Online Learning), impressed by the responsiveness and organization of the program. The for-profit school, however, left me wanting a great deal more information. It makes me wonder how a parent/child in search of a niche can feel completely comfortable about making an online learning choice!