Tea POT

Hello fellow POT travelers,

I am pleased to read your midterm reflections, and see your journeys.  We’ve each taken a different journey over these past twelve weeks.  As it turned out, my Fall 2011 journey involved several new experiences.  One of them was, of course, this Program for Online Teaching certificate course.  In addition, unintentionally, I traveled other new paths of growth.  My next-door neighbor persuaded me to sign up for a triathlon with her, so I completed my first-ever triathlon in October.  MiraCosta College opened a new session of Weight Watchers at Work, and I’ve never been a member of WW before, but I jumped in.  I’ve been attending weekly meetings and have lost almost a pound a week over ten weeks, but it’s a lot of work to work that program.  I have an interview tomorrow for a full-time temporary job, so I’ve been reading and studying to prepare for that.  My mother’s health has been declining rapidly, so I’ve made several road trips to Phoenix as well.

All this is to say that the time commitment of four to five hours per week sounded reasonable, but hasn’t turned out as easy as I thought.  In addition, while I’m very comfortable working in the Blackboard course management system, I am not a technophile.  In fact, I’ve experienced significant technophobia this fall as so many new tools came our way.

With some significant make-up work, I’ve gotten something posted for each week.

Week 1: Introduction

In many of my writing classes, I have my students complete a writing sample on the first day of class and I return it to them at the end of the semester.  I feel as though I’ve had the same experience here. What I see when I look at my post from September 1st is idealism and ignorance.  I thought I knew something about teaching online because I have used Blackboard for years and attended some workshops.  I’ve been schooled this fall in how much I don’t know!  I teach classes that meet in a computer lab, but it’s very different than distance, asynchronous online learning.
Week 2: Teaching and Learning Online

Note to self: over the break go back and do more with the week 2 assignments.  This week totally got past me.
Week 3: Pedagogy and Course Design

I appreciated the beginner’s questionnaire this week, and as usual I ended up somewhat in the middle.  Not extremely teacher nor student centered.  I managed to stay on track this week, but at this point I still thought I knew something about teaching online.  My bubble was not yet burst.
Week 4: Materials for Online

This week I got going with Facebook’s POT group, and I took a look at Prezi, but didn’t jump in.  I was impressed by many of my classmates’ presentations.
Week 5: The Online Syllabus

Two of the more valuable points from this chapter were about managing expectations for the students and providing a map to the class.  I hear it again and again: students need to know when you are and are not available, even more so than for an on-ground class. Also, as I get more handy with the tools of the trade I want to provide tours and more of a personal touch.
Week 6: Creating Presentations

This week I ventured up to the Faculty Technology Center to use headphones and a webcam to create a Jing presentation.  I wasn’t able to upload it successfully.  This week I also learned that making a video with Jing creates much larger files than screen captures with audio narration.  Since this time I have gotten my own set of Logitech headphones so I can Jing on my own.

Another note to self: Try a Slideshare during the break.
Week 7: The Online Classroom

Facebook was an easy hangout for me because I was already used to it.  I participated in live chat with a few members of our cohort this week.

Week 8: Creating Community

Pilar’s presentation was inspiring to me.  I am so impressed with the comfort and warmth she communicates to her students.  I got more involved in commenting and reading your posts, which helped me see what the rest of you were up to.
Week 9: Student Activities

This week was the Second Life meeting, and I used the link to observe what was going on.  This is when my mind began to expand on how much can be done that is outside of the CMS box.

Note to self: do the week 9 assignment of finding links and posting them to diigo.  I have a diigo account but I’m not handy with how to use it yet.
Week 10: Open Platforms for Teaching and Learning

Okay, another note to self:  Work on my Google site.
Week 11: Intellectual Property

This topic is important, and it’s up to us to think twice and not just grab and go when it comes to text, images, and so on for our teaching.  The UT site is very thorough and helpful.

Week 12: Resources Online

This week’s work followed up well from week 11.  Now we have a good collection of resources, free from copyright problems.  I love library databases, and use them often for myself and I send my students there also.  We just got word of a trial subscription to a new one for our campus, here at MiraCosta: Academic Video Online from Alexander Street Press is a new collection of over 10,000 streaming videos from 21 discipline collections. Trial URL: http://vasc.alexanderstreet.com

To wrap this up, there are a few specific holes in my first semester’s work, and my goal in the off-season is to fill in those holes.  All the work we have done so far has been valuable, and even reviewing my own work and commenting on it has been worthwhile.  Now I know where I stand and what remains to be done.

Best wishes to all with the end of semester activity and the wonderful break that many of us as educators are privileged to enjoy.

Carol

Here goes my next attempt. I have saved the Power Point slide as a jpg image and now maybe it will appear as an image instead of a link.

Wow, it worked!  Baby steps out of technophobia.

Here are some of the ways we can connect our students to improve retention:connectedness slide

Pilar Hernandez is awesome, isn’t she!  What I liked about her presentation on building community in your online class was not only the content, but the way she engages with the learners.  She has a warm inviting heart toward the participants in the workshop, and I can see how that warmth translates into her online classroom.

I’m inspired to branch out and get away from as she says,  “text, text, text” on my course page, and even in this blog.  The problem is for me that every time I try to upload or embed something, it doesn’t seem to work.  I guess I need to get some help from the Faculty Technology Center.

http://www.archive.org/details/electricsheep-flock-244-55000-0

I’m glad we are paying attention to intellectual property rights. I’ve always been tuned into the copyright issues as a writer and a musician. What’s new for me this week is the wide world of Open Educational Resources. Thanks to our instructors for introducing us to many fine resources. Here is a video clip from archive.org. I didn’t know what an electric sheep was, but there are many flocks of them, and they are the most downloaded items from archive.org.

While I stayed engaged in the POT community, commenting on other POTsters’ posts, week 8 was another week in which I didn’t get around to my own post. My long teaching day is Wednesday, so before I knew it, it was Thursday and we were on to a new week. At least the semester is going by fast! For me that’s a sign of a good semester, when it flies by and I don’t know where the time went. As for community, building community is one of the joys of teaching for me. I attended a workshop in which Laura Paciorek, a POT cert graduate, talked about the types of connections we can build. I coupled her ideas with Parker J. Palmer’s thoughts in his landmark book, The Courage to Teach.

connectedness slide

As an English composition instructor, I’m familiar with plagiarism, citation, and fair use copyright. I try to teach the basics to my students, but the issue gets more complicated all the time. Nowadays users can just go to YouTube to download songs instead of buying them, for example. Thank you, Robert, for the video and intro to these issues. I had not seen Flickr and the available images for free use, or “creative commons” there. Thanks for sharing them! I’ve attended the MiraCosta library sessions on copyright use, and as Robert said, if our class page is password protected, we can use items more freely. Also, as the librarians said, publishers don’t want their material copied and pasted, but they are happy to have links. This is because our use of their material actually drives traffic to their website. My husband works in Internet Marketing, and website traffic equals money. Any website that sells advertising wants visitors, because they can charge for ads based on their visitors, unique visits, time spent per visit, pages viewed and so on. So whenever I can, I try to post external links to articles I want students to read. That keeps me from copying, and sends valuable traffic to the publisher.

To be honest, like my students I also do a quick Google search when I want to find some information, or even a teaching idea. I try to look for OERs (from Chapter 8 another new acronym: Open Educational Resources) or I look at a variety of sites to make sure I have the right idea, and then I compile my own material.

During week 5 I joined in the Collaborate session hosted by Todd Conaway. I have to say that I am impressed with Collaborate (formerly Elluminate Live). I have a friend who is doing all her course work for an MA in Education through synchronous sessions in Elluminate. She really feels like she is part of a learning community as she and her classmates interact with the professor every Tuesday evening. I experienced this when I attended a POT session hosted by Louisa Moon a couple of years ago, before joining the POT cert cohort. It was amazing for me to sit at home at my computer, see Louisa lecture on the Webcam, and show her slides, and type in a question and have her talk with me to answer it. I experienced that kind of live interaction during the Collaborate session hosted by Todd on October 6th. The downside, of course, is that students don’t want the time constraints of a live session. But there is so much value in the real time interactions with other students.

Any of you more experienced online instructors care to weigh in about the feasibility and value of regular synchronous sessions for an online class?

During week 4  I joined the MCC POT page on Facebook. I put my POT energy into checking Facebook, and guess what happens there. Distractions. While in the live MCC Facebook chat, a personal friend popped in for a live chat, so I multi-tasked, chatting with a personal friend at the same time. Meanwhile, I never got around to my weekly blog. As I reflect on it, Facebook is too distracting of a place for me to use as a classroom. In my brain Facebook is for recreation, not for learning. I guess that’s worth reflecting on from a pedagogical standpoint. I think I would not use Facebook as a learning management system because it’s a place to play and socialize. Being a POT student on FB made me realize that I don’t like mixing my “work” and play.

Ko and Rossen (p. 205) talk about peer editing and review as an important student activity. Peer review workshops are an important staple of any writing class because students help themselves while they help each other.  When my students see how their peers have approached a writing assignment, it opens their eyes to the strengths and weaknesses of their own approach.  In my classes I often have students use the “track changes” feature in the reviewing tab in Microsoft Word.  Students can make changes to each other’s documents that will show up in red, and they can add comments that show as bubbles in the margin.  Now that Turnitin has also added a peer review feature, class assignments can also be set up for “Peermark” in Grademark, the grading feature in Turnitin.com.

As for using blogs for teaching, we are putting that idea to the test here with the POT cert program.  Personally, I like to keep things organized, and so I prefer a dedicated location for teaching my class.  In other words, I don’t want to use my Facebook page as a classroom management tool, and I want a blog to be dedicated to one class or course.  For me, Blackboard works for that because there is one page per class.  Blogs and wikis within the CMS work better for a class discussion than the discussion board itself, because students can follow the discussion as it rolls along rather than having to click on each post and then on each reply and back and forth and so on.

By the way, today I saw the list of the top 40 POT cert authors in the sidebar, and I am in the number 40 position! I laughed out loud I am so impressed with all the good thinking and posting and linking and creating that I mostly sit in awe and try to add two cents once in a while.  I just try not to sound like too much of an ignoramus.
I like the way we are going to get caught up by mid-semester: get caught up or let go.  Don’t let the train keep dragging us behind.  That’s good program management, Lisa and team. Thank you.