Mod 4 Midway
After the first week of this module I have thought a lot about teaching and learning. My most intense thought has been an echoing of Pelz’s statement that teaching online can make you a better f2f teacher. I have also made some monumental advancements as a learner this week. Part 4 of the manual and Alex’s Breeze Presentation brought to some unexpected realizations. As a third year teacher, I have much to learn still and Alex’s presetnation of the content about teaching presence really triggered me to think about some of the methods that i have never used well. Not because i don’t want to-just because life is daunting! As is this blogging assignment-wow!
I want to establish a strong teaching presence. I do have interesting content to deliver, I plan and organize it for long hours. I do want to create a learning environment where the students are interacting with one another and with me. This point has consumed my mind this week. I realize I am afraid to facilitate interaction and discussion amongst my own students in the f2f and am not fantastic at establishing teaching presence as a student in an on-line course. There is such an element of time consumption in high quality discussion. What an i expect from high school students? Is Voicethreads a nice stepping stone into creating students who have teaching presence? Or does Voicethreads not offer enough room for interaction? I need to play with Voicethreads this week when putting my learning activities into my course shell and make a decision about that.
This blog seems to offer an opportunity for me to sort of allow the stream of my consciousness to flow and it is relieving. I just remembered another piece of my online course that i wanted to play with. i would love to teach students how to reflect. But, reflection is another one of those mysteries to me. There are different types of reflection and I feel uncomfortable telling students to doit when i don’t really know what it means. We ask students all the time to simply reflect-what does that mean? Again, this is an activity i have incorporated into my course.
What i have noticed most about myself this week is that i am still a learner. By pushing myself to interact better I can learn to teach interaction to my students. I realize one of the hardest things that i do “is build the airplane while i’m flying it.” I ahev done a lot of learning this week and hope to apply these new things into my course this week.
What has challenged me most is just the volume of work. there are so many things to do. I work on creating better discussion posts and I lose time to design my course and then there is another assignment and then there is the other class I am taking and the 3 different things i am doing in there and then there is work and summer pd and this expedition that we need to plan and haven’t well enough. I am slightly scared to try and out my activities into my course and make them work and make everything congruent and complete. I’ll do it though.
