Reflection on My Digital Toolbox

At the beginning of this course, we were introduced to several teaching concepts that deal with technology. The first tool was the TPACK framework, which supports using a balance of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge when teaching. I figured out early on that since I was never officially trained to be a teacher, I am strong in the areas of technology and content, but weak in pedagogy. That is certainly the area where I feel like I have made the most growth over the past few months, but it was also the area where I struggled the most when developing my digital toolbox. It was easy for me to pick up the technology required to use most of these tools, and I certainly have a solid grasp of the content that needs to be conveyed using the digital tools. The hardest part was figuring out how to best utilize the tool to convey the knowledge to my students. 

Another concept that we were introduced to was the SAMR model. Because I teach a computer literacy course, I have already been utilizing substitution and augmentation. I have used some of the tools that I included in my digital toolbox to create assignments that are modifications of the way that I have historically done things, but I am not sure that I have made it to the redefinition stage yet.

I am very excited about all of the tools that I have included in my digital toolbox. As I look back over the semester that I just finished, I will be evaluating each assignment with these tools in mind and looking for ways where learning can be improved using the technology that is available. 

I used Diigo to create my digital toolbox and found that it worked very well. They recently added a tool called an outliner, which let me easily organize my links into categories where I could add comments describing why I saved the links. I actually saved a lot of links over the course of the semester. In addition to the Tools for Creating Course Content section that I created for my EDU 653 course, I added a section for sites with interesting reading (if I discovered a blog in the course of my research that I felt would probably contain interesting or useful information, I bookmarked it to visit on a regular basis), a section with resources for research, one for gamification, which was a concept that I found particularly appealing and want to explore more when I have some free time. I have included a screenshot of the Outliner page of my Diigo below. As you can see, each tool has comments associated with it to help me remember what it does. The numbers are for evaluating the usefulness of the site and come from a framework developed in my Emerging Technologies course. 

I was struggling with the best way to organize my tools until the Outliner functionality was added. Having one long list of links to go through quickly got overwhelming. Being able to assign each link to an outliner category gave me an easy way to categorize my links, and adding tags can further help this process. Diigo is a wonderful bookmarking site and I am sure that I will continue to add links to my page and use those links to find resources that can help me to be a better teacher. 

As far as the digital toolbox assignment goes, I feel like it was a very important part of this course, but because it wasn't due until the end it was treated almost as an afterthought. I think that this could be an even more useful assignment if we were required to share our toolboxes with the other students. Using some kind of screen capture tool to create a video walk-through of the tools that were found and how they might be used would be very beneficial. If the students were divided into groups based on the grade level that they teach, they could share with their group the tools that they found and how they plan to use them. People could share comments on tools that they have in common and compare how they use them. If someone has experience with a tool they could share what worked and what didn't. It would be a great way to get new insights. I feel that the number of tools available and the many different ways that they can be used can be overwhelming. I find it very helpful to see what other people are doing, what works, and what doesn't. I have done a lot of my learning how to teach through trial and error. I appreciate every opportunity that I get to learn from other people's experience.

Emerging Technologies has been a wonderful course. It has given me so many new ideas about how to do things that it is all I can do not to completely redesign the courses I am teaching right now. I will be introducing some of the concepts that I learned next semester and will be expanding on that next year when we update our textbooks. I have no doubt that my students will appreciate all that I have learned.

Digital Portfolios

 Digital portfolios are tools that teachers and students can use to keep a record of work that they have completed. They can be used to show growth, or they can be a showcase of the student's best work. They are certainly a wonderful tool for students in elementary school antd even high school to catalog their growth. I also think that eportfolios could be very useful for students in the creative arts at any level. I personally don't feel that nature f my course lends itself to the use of an eportfolio. My students are learning technology skills that they will use through out their life, but there really aren't any products the create in my course that they could use for an eportfolio.

 Eportfolios are particularly well suited for an online learning environment since work must already be submitted in a digital format. It would be a simple matter for the teacher to help the student to select an eportfolio tool to use and direct which pieces of their work should be included. I think the problem for an online student might be to limit the work that it is included. It would be tempting to just put all work in an eportfolio, which wouldn't necessarily serve the desired purpose.

One area that I feel eportfolios would be particularly useful are for people who are aspiring to enter the workforce. As someone who is hoping to work as an instructional designer in an online environment, a digital portfolio will be a great tool for me to showcase what I am learning in my master's degree program. At the moment I am strongly considering using this blog as my eportfolio for the program. It gives me a chance not only to share learning objects that I have created, but also to discuss the process that I went through to develop them and the learning that took place as well. At the very least I will be using this blog to share things that I have created when I create them. As a part of this class I had the opportunity to begin using html to design web pages. It was something that I really enjoyed doing and would love to be able to design and create my own website for showing off my work. Unfortunately there isn't time for that at the moment, but it is definitely something that I intend to pursue.

Community Building in Online Courses

 Community building is an important aspect of online courses. Research has shown that students who are engaged with their online courses are more likely to successfully complete them. Having just finished writing a literature review on the use of asynchronous discussion forums for a course that I am taking, I feel like somewhat of a subject matter expert in this area. Discussion forums aren't the only way to create community, but they are certainly one of the most widely used. Creating engaging and interactive discussion forums that add to the learning of the student is a very challenging task. Thought must be put into the questions that are being asked - problem solving or debate type questions tend to engage the student more than questions that require a simple, straightforward answer. Discussions are also more successful if they are graded and if the instructor is involved with the discussion, steering it and giving feedback. Clear explanations of expectations or examples of what a quality post looks like, as well as clear, concise rubrics will also tend to generate higher quality participation and interaction from the students. Allowing the students to create audio posts can be a possible alternative to text based forums and has shown some degree of success. Other areas where interaction can take place in online courses is through group projects, synchronous meetings and correspondence with the instructor and/or fellow students, but discussion forums are by far the most consistently used. The fact that most discussion forums don't generate a sense of community or contribute to learning outcomes for the student is a problem that needs to be addressed in a lot of online courses.

I have tried to use traditional discussion forums in my online courses in the past with very little success. There is minimal interaction between the students. The responses to the posts are either all directly related to the primary post, or to the response made directly before. An example of a typically discussion forum from one of my online courses is shown below. The prompt for this post was

Photo editing dates back to the 1860s. Manipulating photos can be done to misrepresent products, sensationalize something in the press, or cause somebody embarassment. There hae been several controversial photos that have been edited and placed in magazines or newpapers, such as a 1982 National Geographic cover photo of the pyramids in Egypt and a 2008 picture of vice residential candidate Sarah Palin. What do you think about photo manipulation? Are there times when it is ok? Times when it is not ok? Find an example of photo manipulation and address it specifically in your post. If possible include the image(s) or a link to the images in your primary post. As always, minimum or 300, cite your source(s), primary posts are due by Thursday, 3 responses by Sunday.

Even when the students find the topic interesting, posts tend to be rather dry and boring. In an effort to get the students to put more thought into responses, I changed from forum discussion to blog posts. The blog environment gave the students more creative control over their content and generated much more interesting and thoughtful responses, but it took away the interactivity. 

In my online explorations this semester, I discovered a tool called padlet that allows for creativity and interactivity. I have redesigned this forum for the students to do on padlet. I will break the students into groups of 4-5 students so that the number of responses doesn't get overwhelming. I am hoping that the non-linear format and creative elements will get the students more excited about participating in the forum. A screen capture of the redesigned forum is below, or if you can go directly to the padlet to see how it works.

I am very excited about this new tool and how it will work in my classes next semester. I will be looking for other ways for the students to collaborate as well. We will most likely be using Google drive to collaborate on some work and I plan to have a few mandatory synchronous meetings. I am optimistic that I will be able to generate more of a sense of community in my online class using the technology tools available to me.

Designing Learning Objects

When designing learning objects for use in the classroom, it is important to consider who the intended audience is and what you are trying to teach. Once you know this, you can figure out the best way to present the material. Because I teach both concepts and applications in my classroom, the methods that I use can be drastically different. When I am teaching Excel, I typically spend some class time demonstrating what we will be doing, but a majority of the class time is spent working in Excel. A learning object that I would use in this situation might be a video that is supplemental to my classroom teaching. The video below is an example of a learning object that I would use when I am teaching Excel. This video was created using Screencast-o-matic and demonstrates how to perform several steps in one of the homework assignments. I find this type of video to be very helpful in an online course since I can't demonstrate in person.

There are so many tools on the Internet for designing learning objects that it is almost overwhelming. I have to confess that in the past I have mostly adapted the standard PowerPoints that come with my textbook for use in my classroom. To be honest, it was just the easiest thing to do - why re-invent the wheel? I did pick and choose what I wanted to focus on and re-arranged and added items where needed, but that is about all that I did. I am a creative person by nature, so discovering all of the tools that are available for creating learning objects for the classroom has been like Christmas morning. Every time I learn about a new tool I start thinking about ways that I can use it in my classroom.

I shared a video that I created using Animoto in my previous blog. This is a tool that I am sure I will be using quite a bit in the future. I like to share videos in my classroom, but can't always find what I need -this tool will let me put my own together.

Prezi is another presentation program that I have recently discovered. It is a way to create non-linear interactive presentations. I used Prezi to create a "lecture" for my chapter on digital security and privacy. I started with an image from the textbook and added either "slides" with additional content or videos that supplement the topic. In the past, I would have given the PowerPoint presentation then we would have watched the videos. With prezi we can just watch the video when we get to that part of the talk. Below you will find a screen shot of this prezi. Click here to go to the actual prezi.

Blendspace is another tool that I just discovered and am very excited about. I haven't had a chance to create anything with Blendspace yet, but here is a link to a Blendspace that I discovered on Digital Tools for Blended Learning. I see a lot of potential for this tool and will most likely be using it in the future to create lessons for my courses.

Finally, infographics have been popping up all over the place lately, and I personally really enjoy them as a tool for learning about a topic. I haven't created one yet, but I am planning to. Piktochart is a tool that can be used for creating infographics. Below is an infographic that I have used in my class. I love that it is clear, concise and easy to read. This is definitely something that I will be putting together for use in future classes.

Digital Storytelling In My Classroom

I have been reading and investigating digital storytelling as a resource for teaching in an online course and am very excited about what I am learning. When I first started researching, most of what I found seemed geared toward elementary education - with kids animating books that they have read or creating their own stories to practice their writing skills. I struggled at first to see how this would translate to a college level information technology course. A little more investigation helped me to see that it could be a useful tool. I could use it to create content when I can't find what I am looking for and I can have the students use the tools to demonstrate what they have learned. Below are a few of the things that I have learned or tried or plan to try with regards to digital storytelling.

Using Digital Storytelling to Enhance My Lectures

This is a tool that really got my creative juices flowing. Because I was more than halfway into the semester I didn't get much of a chance to try it out, but one of the assignments in the Emerging Technologies class that I am taking required me to make a public service announcement about Digital Footprints and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out Animoto, one of the digital storytelling tools that I had discovered. The video that I created is below and it tied in quite nicely to my unit on Social Media.

Digital Footprint Video

Using Digital Storytelling in on Online Environment

I also had to create a note card story for my Foundations in Distance Learning course. The purpose was to look at critiques of distance learning and analyze them to come up with solutions. My story tells the tale of two students - one who had a poor online learning experience and one who had a good one. It tells the story with the perspective of the teacher as the point of view, however my research into digital storytelling has me inspired to rework it so that I can use it in my online course. It would give my online students a better understanding of what they need to do to be successful. I will add that video to this blog once it has been created, but in the meantime, the one that inspired it is below. It was created using Screen-cast-matic.

A Tale of Two Students Video

Below is the Tale of Two students video updated for use in my online course. I am testing it for the first time this semester - we shall see if it makes a difference

A Tale of Two Students to use for Students instead of Teachers

A Great Example of Digital Storytelling

I feel like there is endless potential for digital storytelling in the classroom if one has the time and energy to put into creating it. These videos are just my beginner's attempt at using digital storytelling. I stumbled across a web page today that is a wonderful example of the full potential of digital storytelling. It is an interactive web page called the Parable of the Polygons and it teaches about society in a very entertaining and interactive way.

A Brain Dump of Tools that I Discovered and Ideas that I Have for Them

As I was researching for this blog I came across several websites that I or my students might be able to use as tools for digital story telling. The first is Animoto which allows you to create videos by inserting pictures and setting them to music. It is how I created my Digital Footprint video and could be used for many other topics as well. I haven't come up with a project for my class that would use this video yet, but I plan to keep stewing on it because I think that it is something that my students would enjoy.

Another tool that I came across in my research was a sight called Jog the Web. It is a sight that lets you compile a series of web site links and add comments to them. The way that I anticipate using this site is not traditional storytelling, but one of the topics that we explore in my course is how to maintain a computer. I have the students create a maintenance manual that they can use to maintain the computer that they use for their college courses. Lately the results for this project have been very disappointing. I feel like Jog the Web may be a tool that I can use to help with this. I have two ideas for this site. The first is a rework of an assignment that we already do, which involves analyzing web sites to see if they would make a quality source for a research project. I could send the students to the websites through Jog the Web and use the comments section to give them instructions on what to do once they get there. The other idea is to have each student create a Jog the Web of the sources that they think they might use for their project. They can add comments for each page explaining why they think it is a valid source. This might make the assignment more manageable and easier to grade.

The last storytelling tool that I am considering right now is screencast-o-matic. It is a screen capture tool that I am already using to provide video feedback for my online students. What I envision is a more tech version of a digital story. Instead of typing up how to perform maintenance tasks, the students would create a video manual. They can demonstrate how to perform a task and explain to my why and how often to do it. Again, it might make it easier for the student to be more successful with this assignment.

I am sure that I will come up with plenty of other ideas for using these tools now that I am aware of them. I am very excited for the potential that they offer for my courses.