As I say good bye to my classmates and we wrap up our discourse, I am reflecting on how much I have learned from everyone’s discussion thoughts, shared professional experiences, sharing of additional resources, and looking at each other’s projects.  I am thankful for their support in our shared efforts.

Yesterday I was asked what areas besides Social Studies I am certified to teach.  A superintendent informed a family member of mine that the more areas a teacher is certified to teach in the better the chance they will be hired so that when they lay off other teachers you can take over their classes too.  OK, I’m not quoting but that was the gist of it.  This brings up larger questions about our economy, the deepening gap between the poor and the rich, and the way our public schools reflect these problems.  So where else am I focusing on getting certified?  I’m putting my bet on Elearning and the use of online education in the future of schools.  Good luck to all of us. 

Some additional links to technology tools:  Teaching with Technology Resources; List of Virtual Worlds; The New York Times Learning Network; Tech and Learning

S. Rubenzer -FINAL PROJECT- Assessment in ELearning

This has been an incredibly long week.  Late last week I was informed that I was being given an opportunity to interview for a 7th Grade Social Studies Teaching position.  I had been working on organizing my final, my learning objectives and assessment for an online course in Economics at the high school level.  Then late last week my whole focus changed.  I spent days getting ready for the interview and started to replan my final.  I started really thinking about how I would teach this 7th Grade Geography class and how I would implement online tools in the classroom.  Tuesday I had the interview and by Thursday (or maybe it was Friday) the dream was over, and I was focused only on the final I was planning for a class someone else is teaching.  Poor me, I know.  I needed to attend a wedding this weekend so I bought a new laptop and have been working the kinks (of my ability to use it) out as I’ve been polishing my final up. 

My final is a hypothetical 7th Grade Social Studies course taught as a hybrid class with f2f students and online home schooled students participating in the classes.  This process became very real for me for a while there; the opportunity to interview and plan for a real class was an excellent exercise.  I was able to truly consider how I would need to plan for the students’ interests and how the assessments would work.   

I would like to put my final in a webpage format for Module 8 and connect it to my ELearning EPortfolio in Jimdo. 

I look forward to reading everyone else’s finals!

Links to some tech issues in the news:  NYT article on WikiLeaks; AP article on WikiLeaks; NPR on trusting Facebook; PCWorld article on Facebook Data Issues

I created a survey this week to utilize with a lesson that could work with my final project:  Student survey in Zoomerang 

A  little stressed out.  Late in the week I was informed of my opportunity to interview for a teaching position as a 7th Grade Social Studies teacher.  I am now refocusing my final project to coordinate my effort to become prepared for that interview and to have a lesson ready to teach.

Public radio happened to feature educator Rafe Esquith.  I keep listening to this in hopes that I am able to reduce my stress and soak it in:

This week we are working with Bloom’s Taxonomy to write higher-level, clear and concise learning objectives.  I am posting my learning objectives in a wiki so my classmates can directly edit and comment on them there.  Right now I just have my midterm learning objectives posted there that needed to be reworked.  I have a problem fitting my intended learning objective into one clear, concise sentence which includes the behavior, condition, and criteria.

We are starting to work on our final projects for this course.  I need to finally decide on what my online course will be for the final project before I can write those four learning objectives for my final.  Because I am currently looking for a Social Studies teaching job (grades 6-12) this final project is a great opportunity for me to write up a real plan from scratch for a class I could potentially teach (probably in a bricks and mortar school using online technologies to raise our Blooming learning level).  So I’m deciding between Social Studies areas to create a week of learning objectives for.  I’m thinking the course would be either: Economics, Global Studies, or Civics.  I will decide and get my final learning objectives on this wiki soon I can get help from my co-collaborators/classmates.

Links to Learning Objective Writing Tools:   Instructional Guide to Writing Objectives,        Article on Writing Learning Objectives,  Backward Design Process

This week we read a course description for a high school level class, C. Casey’s “Studying the First Amendment: Exploring Truth in Journalism.”  This activity was to get us thinking about how written learning objectives really stack up in Blooms taxonomy, so we needed to match 3-4 of Casey’s assessment activities to one of the six categories of Bloom’s taxonomy.  This was a good lesson for me to look at how though the intention of the learning objectives is felt in the course description, Casey failed to write learning objectives that raised the level of learning in clearly measurable ways.  We also looked at how the course would transfer to an online environment.  This activity had me thinking of how online tools can really raise our ability to produce higher level assessments for our students.

Links to Bloom’s Taxonomy resources:  Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, Blooms Digitally

This week I worked collaboratively on our jigsaw midterm project.  I did reasearch and worked with Zoomerang as an assessment tool.  I came across an interesting note in a study on a web-based survey’s results measuring K-12 online educators’ technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK).  In the conclusion was this, “While online teachers are confident in their knowledge related to pedagogy and content, they are less sure of themselves when asked about their technology skills.”  I hear that!  Especially when I’m trying to figure out some new program or manuever around some website with a goal in mind but no idea of how to get there.  Clicking around in the dark.  Luckily usually I find my way and sometimes with a little help from classmates.  (Thanks you guys.)  

Also this week I had MTV on in the background as I was typing and did a little catch up on my pop culture.  I am amazed at how integrated technological advances are in our pop culture.  MTV is holding a competition to become a TJ (Tweet jockey), and there is a phone service company running advertisements about their speed/accuracy contest for young texters.  This reminded me of a NPR radio show on texting and its effect on young people’s writing skills.  The guest supported the idea that young students are becoming better writers due to their increased communication via text messages.  They have authentic enthusiasm to write.  I keep thinking about how we can incorporate texting and smart phones in our assessments. 

Link to similar NPR show:  “Teen Texting Soars;Will Social Skills Suffer?”   

-Archambault, L. & Oh-Young, C. (2009). Putting the T in PCK: Exploring the Nature of the TPACK Framework Among K-12 Online Educators Using a Web-Based Survey. In I. Gibson et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2009 (pp. 4008-4014). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

This week I caught the HBO documentary on Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman killed on the streets of Iran in the protests of the election in 2009.  It is an amazing story and reminds me why political reforms must be internal and organically develop from the people and their culture and can not be artificially forced upon a government to make them “democratic.”  How this relates to ELearning is that the documentary spends a good amount of time describing the importance of the citizen-journalism that went global during the events from the Iranian people sending video of the protests and violence via their phones and blogging and tweeting.  The government tried to block these, but help came from around the world.  One young man, Austin Heap, a former gamer in California, worked extensively collaborating with others online to use/manipulate the Iranian government’s internet systems so that information could still get on the internet posted from the protesters.  This is the world we are living in.  This is the world that students are going to be working in.  We have to stay current with our educational technology.

Links to ELearning Assessment tools:  Top 100 Tools for Learning

My concept map is based on a hypothetical online or hybrid course teaching Social Studies to 7^th or 8^th graders.  The audience could include homeschoolers, international students, or students in a brick and mortar classroom integrating online educational technologies.  This is a general course with emphasis on American citizenship/civics and the factors (geographic/historical/cultural/political/economic) which influence the development of world regions.  This concept map is connecting learning objectives to assessments for a lesson in a unit on the U.S. Constitution.  This is not a completed design, just a starting point for further planning development.  I would need to practice the use of the assessment tools to refine how exactly the assessments would be set up and develop rubrics for each activity.

Here are the links to my proposed assessment tools:  Exam Builder.com, U.S. Government Game, EduBlogs.org, Democracy Simulation Video Game, Global Student Forum-Twitter&Facebook Activities , Nation Building Simulation

We used Inspiration software to create our concept maps.

Sidenote:  Happy July 4^th to everyone!   (If not is U.S. does the country you are in celebrate a similar state holiday?)

The interactive inventory is an ingenious way in which to present a lecture or a reading.  We were active participants in the presentation of the material and various parts of our brains were activated as we processed the information.  What a great learner centered assessment on learner centered assessments.  Also it used the Lee Iacocca- pull them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you told them effective method of presentation in the assessment/inventory.  

Prior to this week’s readings on blogs, particularly the Edutopia article by Echlin listing the main uses for blogs and looking at some of my classmates comments about their use or thoughts on blogs, I had not considered blogs much of a useful tool for the classroom.  I had seen them as disseminators of opinion sometimes confused with actual journalism.  But now I have a totally new appreciation for the possibilities of blogs as tools for the classroom.  Now I understand blogs not just as op-ed platforms, but as actual artifacts of people’s experiences and of their coursework if tied into an educational purpose.  Now I see the obvious, that the use of blogs as reflective journals or as class discussion forums is a natural tool to achieve learning objectives.  I will also continue to think about implementing blogs as a classroom management system possibly to be linked to course webpages.

A question by JoAnn inspired me to do some looking around for more examples.  Here are some additional links for uses of blogs in education:

http://courses.uhcl.edu/blog/

  This page, from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, is designed to provide teachers with resources to get started using blogs.

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=3382

  Video presentation “How and In Which Situations Web Logs or Blogs Work: How and Why They are Valuable in Children’s Education” by David Weinberger

It is my pleasure to introduce you to Staci Rubenzer.  She has been a most gracious partner and a very delightful person to get to meet.