Takeaways

This Five Star course has been a wonderful introduction to blended and online learning.  Having had prior experience with online courses through my Masters program, I wasn't a stranger to this approach.  As a teacher in a traditional brick and mortar structure, having MY students move to a more online based approach to traditional public education is scary.  It disrupts everything that I've spent years to build.  However, this class has helped to to focus on what my priorities should truly be as an educator.  I should always be working to grow and develop as a teacher and consistently put what's in the best interests of my students first. 

For some students, an online classroom is going to be the best place to learn.  There are things in the brick and mortar structure that interfere with their educational opportunities.  Those things can be dampened, but never fully eliminated.  Other students thrive in the traditional classroom and setting them in front of a computer at home wouldn't work well, or serve their interests.  Most students in upcoming years are going to start to see more of a blended curriculum, taking the best of both approaches and combining them into a new curriculum model. 

This is something that I as a teacher need to be ready for.  Often teachers will moan and groan about changes in education and are slow to adapt to changes.  Change is difficult to accept, but teachers need to be on the cutting edge of these changes so the best interests of their students is constantly at the fore of their professional thinking.  At the point a teacher gets comfortable in their teaching is, when I believe, they begin to lose effectiveness. 

This course has given me several applicable items I will be able to take and share with my colleagues to make every teacher in my building more ready than what they currently are for this new shift in education.  We have to delve into this shift prepared and practiced, because the students we teach look to us as the model of effectiveness within a profession.  If we aren't prepared to do our jobs effectively, what kind of a message does that send to the students?  We should be the ultimate models of professionalism for them to see.  

Using Social Media in the Classroom

As with most things where control is handed over to the students, utilizing social media in the classroom makes me apprehensive.  By the eighth grade, which I teach, most of my students are utilizing different social media platforms.  As a building our technology policies do not allow teachers to communicate with students through these means.  I'm pretty sure from the administration's point of view, there is more that can go wrong with these interactions than benefit their learning.  Our Internet security system Lightspeed comes with My Big Campus.  This is a safe and educational online environment similar to Facebook.  Students utilize this to save papers, access homework, upload projects, connect with groups, and message teachers.  It has all the same features of non educational sites, but goes through the school's filtering system.  We have had to remove computer priveliges from students for innappropriate usage of the site.  They know that communication is monitored thoroughlyI can only imagine the problems that might come with allowing the students non school regulated social media.  As a parent, I would not want my children interacting with their teachers through mediums like Facebook or Twitter.  We do not allow teachers to contact students directly via cell numbers or any other type of private communication out of safety concerns.  I have given students the opportunity to "create" Facebook pages for famous historical figures.  I have a PowerPoint template which simulates a Facebook page and the students input information for that person based on who they were and what they did.  This type of project straddles the line, because it allows the students to bring in what they know about social media, but allows for the professional teacher student relationship to stay intact. 

Curation Tool

In looking through my classmates curation tools, the one that I would like to attempt to implement in the classroom would be...Class Dojo!

I started Class Dojo after Winter Break of this school year and was using it through the 3rd nine weeks of school.  By now things have rapidly fallen apart and the students have even commented, "Hey whatever happened to those monsters?"  The problem I ran into was that it ran up against the current behavior management plan that I was already using in the classroom.  Next year I would like to fully implement Class Dojo as my one and only behavior management system and make that aspect of my instruction completely digital.  I am going to make it a daily open as soon as my computer boots up. 

I want my students to be able to see where they stand compared to their classmates at the start of each class as they complete their bell ringer activity.  I want to set levels for the points and implement a reward system to go along with the points.  Things like using Ipods during study time, use of bean bag chairs, selecting seat in the seating chart, extra hall privileges, and the like.

I love the weekly parent email feature and am now embarrassed that parents have received little to no communication from their little monsters in quite some time.  

Course Application

This will be difficult to narrow down.  I feel like we've had so many new things, in addition to new ways of thinking about old things, that it will be hard to narrow my options.  I think it will be easiest to pinpoint the thing that I will struggle with the most. 

This weeks topic of Authentic Assessment will give me the most trouble.  I love doing projects with the students, but using those as my only form of formative assessment is very scary.  Its radically different than anything I've done in my teaching career.  It's very difficult as a teacher to give up the control of the classroom to the learners.  I feel so hemmed in by the outcome instead of the process of learning.  I know it shouldn't be that way, but I feel that's the present state of our educational system today. 

I will probably be able to utilize the information from the 4th module, New Tools - New Rules the most effectively in my classroom.  I feel like I am very good at taking what I already do and utilizing technology to enhance that.  The SAMR method has also given me a new way to look at the "tech tools" that I use in the classroom and making sure I can use them in a way that truely makes learning the outcome and not just substituting one thing for another.