Week #5 in CEDO 550

This week we took a look at collaborative projects in an online environment. The online socialization provided by group work is always a plus since asynchronous methods of communication tend to be a little faceless and make people not be as civil as they might be. You can see a pretty neat chart summarizing my thoughts below:

We've been looking at the positives and negatives and it seems to me that online education has about a 50-50 rate of positives and negatives. This might help dispel anyone who is too pro regular education or online education. There is a fit for all students and it is great that we have options that can meet the students where they need to be.

Week #4 In CEDO 550

Well the 15 minute presentation went pretty well. It was fun to "take the reins" of an online environment and try out online teaching. We are still in the middle of the asynchronous discussions, but I am amazed at my classmates' level of understanding and ability to communicate. It is awesome being around such passionate educators.

New work this week centers around changing a lesson to make it more student centered.  I have always felt that my AP Physics classroom is very teacher centered because of the amount of content that we have to cover.  This project hopefully will help me move a little away from that and into a more student centered approach. We'll shift a lot of the lecturing to presentations done outside of school and spend more in class time on the important stuff: problem solving.  In order to make this shift I'm going to be using a great app called Show Me that allows you to make small presentations from an iPad. My school has just gotten a set of 15 iPads and I have been wanting to try them out in my classroom, so this seems like a great opportunity.  If you are curious about Show Me check it out here

Week #3 in CEDO 550

This week (well two actually) we took a look at synchronous versus asynchronous discussions and how we can better facilitate student achievement and engagement in both. To help us understand the differences each student in the class will be running a 15 minute synchronous discussion and a topic on our class website as our asynchronous discussion.  For my presentation I will be taking a look at issues of access and equity in the online classroom. The 15 minute presentation will mostly be based on the work of NACOL in their Issues Brief. You can read more about it here.

I am looking forward to see how this all goes.  It should be fun.

Speaking of fun. I got to go hunting for the first time with my father in law. I got really lucky and got a nice sized doe. We'll be eating well for a while, but the trip out plus thanksgiving family obligations has made me fall a little behind.  Here is to catching up!

Here is the deer!

Week #2 in CEDO 550

This week we looked at the differences in Synchronous and Asynchronous communication as it works in online education. We got a chance to see behind the curtain of Elluminate and run a couple of synchronous discussions on a few talking points.  This was useful to see what classroom skills translate into the world of online education and what does not.  I found that I rely on non verbal cues from my students to a great deal and need to consciously recognize that my students in an online setting will not be able to give this to me.  Instead I need to build upon the skills that are being talked about in this class to better serve my students in an online capacity.

Week #1 in CEDO 550

This week we took are first steps into being online educators.  We used Elluminate as a teacher rather than just as a student.  We read articles about some positives and negatives in online education. Lastly we took a look at a bunch of different examples of online modules for learning.  My big three were:

1. Hippocampus: this website has some great AP Physics content inside of it. (clicking the link sends you to Newton's 1st law of motion movie) I hope to use this for creating some supplemental material for my AP and honors students.

2.  Rocket Science 101: this website takes you through the parts of a rocket and what they are used for.  This will be great for my Science 9 students and their rocketry unit.

3. Crash Scene Investigation: this website gives you a CSI look at how to use physics to determine what happened in an accident.  This would be a fun side project for physics to try out.

Week #6 in CEDO 535

As a summary exercise we are supposed to make a SMART goal for how we will implement what we have learned in this class to our own classes. A SMART goal is an acronym for:

(credit for the above image goes to Prof. Loeffler at Cardinal Stritch University)

My SMART goal is to use Screenr to create a series of 30 AP problem solutions that the students will be able to work on and view.  In order to share the work load, I'm going to try to have students create the screencasts during their review time and then we will use each other's results to help practice for the test.  The screencasts can then be embedded into our Blackboard site for viewing, or I can put them up on my web page for the students after I have checked them for accuracy.  This should empower the students to review at their own pace as well as enable me to check for their understanding individually verbally.

Week #5 in CEDO

This week we finished up our google sites and worked on finding new web 2.0 tools. The tool I chose to look at was a flash game creation tool called classtools.net

This tool lets students make their own flash games for reviews or to make annotated pictures.  Here is one that I made in only 10 minutes:

Click here for larger version

This is a great tool and students will love it!  I hope to use it with my students soon as everyone loves to make and play games.