As we entered our second week of graduate studies, I personally felt a lot more confident in my abilities. Considering that I have never participated in anything like this cohort (an online program), I was unsure how I would be able to perform on the online assignments. However, once I sat down and hammered out the tasks, following the rubrics in sequential order, my nervousness was alleviated. It most certainly is a lot of work to keep up with, but anything worth doing is going to be hard. To our advantage though, we all of the benefit of leaning on one another for support when it gets very difficult.
However, despite the fact that there is a lot of work, I feel like I'm taking away a lot from the assigned tasks. I cannot speak on the behalf of the entire cohort, but I have personally taken education classes that felt more like "busy work" than applicable information.
Starting with the social bookmarking, I will be able to apply all of our graduate content into my classroom. Many times I come across a website that I like, and utter the phrase, "I should tell Russ about this (the other high school math teacher)." Social bookmarking is a great way to mark the site immediately and let Russ take a look for himself. In terms of online storage, I've never really considered it's application, but it certainly makes sense. As I'm in the process of setting up a website for my students to use, I'm trying to put a lot of my lesson plans on my computer. I have been around computers too long to know that all it takes is one virus, or one power outage to lose a whole lot of work. Storing information on "the cloud" offers a safe backup to saving things on a desktop. Finally, in terms of using a web cam, as I might be teaching Calculus next year, it will be more than beneficial to be able to hold video conferencing with my students (who will be from multiple school districts).
I hope everyone else is finding their experience beneficial, and look forward to your comments!
This week I thought I had a lot more free time to personally sit down and hammer away at the work. I was wrong. :) However, I was able to find multiple little pockets of time to work on one task a day. I must agree with you when you say that it seems like a lot of work. However, none of it seems to be busy work. I enjoy learning new things and I think if I was not "forced" to try some of these things I might never try them or learn about many of them.
ReplyDeleteAfter I read your paragraph about Social Bookmarking, I agree with you and wanting to share bookmarks with other teachers or even students. At our school we have a website full of links the kids can go to and access from home that are "fun" and kid safe websites. My problem is that I work in a very small school. We only have 2 teachers for each grade until you get to the middle school. I teach 5th and 6th while another lady teachers 7th and 8th. I think social bookmarking would be more beneficial to us if we could incorporate other neighboring schools and their math teachers. The problem is that I do not know them. Do you think it would be possible to get other teachers to share with you if they do not know you? I am not sure everyone would be open minded to this. :)
Jared - I like your idea of storing your info. online, but what happens when your network is down (as happens in our buildings all too much)? If your network is down, you have no lesson. Likewise, if you have things only on your computer and the computer goes down, you're out of luck. Just to be safe, I think that I would save both ways and lose that risk of not having a lesson at all. I love your plan for the webcam lessons with other buildings!
ReplyDeleteSarah is right about planning for outages in your online learning. We tend to think of the internet like electricity. It is just always on. Yet both the power and the network can go out, and either one can prevent you from using your online resources and lesson plans. It is always good to have a backup plan available. Either a local copy to supplement the online one, or a paper copy.
ReplyDeleteYou should also plan some backup activities for you Calc students, in case the power or internet goes out duign those classes.
Things change and stay the same - teachers used to wonder what they would do if the mimeograph machine broke down. Now we wonder what to do without the internet. What kind of activity could you have in case of a technology problem?
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