Connections

I've decided to take a few courses to reactivate my teaching certificate. The first class that I'm taking is a "Wikis, Blogs, and Web Publishing" course offered by Rich Kiker. Even though I teach a similar course at Drexel University, I figured I'd learn new technologies and strategies to enhance my courses. I'm getting way more than I thought I would. I have been inspired to seek new challenges and work towards goals that have always been in the back of my mind. Those goals are now at the forefront and I will publish them here once I have refined them in my head. I know what I want to do....I want to work at the university level to get teacher educators using social media to enhance the learning experience for pre-service and graduate level teachers. First, I need to re-establish my social presence. This blog is my first step. A reflection as I work to refine my network: For the past 10 years, I have read blogs as a way to learn. It was my main method of professional development since I am an adjunct. It was a great way for me to seek out new strategies, research, etc on my own....for free! I now believe that a way to communicate that to my students is to model the process for them. This is a CHANGE for education and professional development. Tom Whitby discusses in a post dated 10/16/13 that how blogs are connecting educators, thought leaders, and administrative leaders. He states, "To be part of the change, educators need to be part of the process. They need to connect, comment and contribute wherever possible in our connected community of educators. That is where our voice as educators is the strongest. Connectedness is our best chance for positive change that is not mandated, or legislated, but rather collaboratively established." The blogs have been present for several years; however, it's time for teacher educators to become part of that connected community of educators. Tweet

New Ventures

Many educational leaders are talking about the use of technology in schools, specifically the use of social media. It's been a "hot" topic for years. I began teaching at the college level 10 years ago and have been using it in each of my classes. I figured that if I expected my students to use it in their classrooms, I should model the effective use of social media in "my" classroom. It wasn't until recently when I began teaching a "Social Media in the Classroom" course that I realized that most of the teachers and/or pre-service teachers in my classes haven't been exposed to the effective use of these technologies in their other college level education classes. Why? This is the beginning of a new adventure for me. I'm refining my social presence with the vision of modeling effective use of social media in graduate and undergraduate level teacher education courses.

Live Blog of Richardson's Speech

First Response

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Learning Online

Learning Online is such a HUGE topic and one that could span an entire semester (in fact it does in EDTEC 448!). However, we're going to take a couple of ours tonight to discuss this topic and all that we need to think about in order to make it a success. First, I have a short video clip for you to view just to get you thinking! Go to this blog and click play on the short video at the top. Then, scroll down to read the comments that people posted. How does this video clip shift your thinking about using WebQuests/NetQuests or other types of learning experiences on the Internet? What about multimedia in general? Does being able to "click" on text change things for students? As quoted in our Jonassen text, Morrison &Morgan (1999), state, "'We do not learn much from looking at a model - we learn a lot more from building the model and from manipulating it'". Does being able to click on something qualify as manipulating it? How?

In addition, we also need to think about how we will get our students online (conveniently) and what our students need to know in order to be successful with the online learning experience. There are many ways to do this, but I'd like to focus on three different methods of organizing online learning experiences. Tonight, we'll look at the following: a Word document, www.weebly.com, and www.wikispaces.com. Depending on your students and the type of learning experience, you could choose one of these tools.

Here are a few questions I want you to think about when planning online learning experiences:

1. What do your students need to know before going online?
   2. How will you get your students to "dig deeper" for online content?
   3. How do we get the students to further than, "But I found it on the Internet"?
   4. How do you teach them to search for information online? Visit here first.
   5. How do you teach them to evaluate the information they find online? Visit here first. Then, visit here.

Finally, to really get you thinking, here's what's coming with technology...Talk about being "clickable"!!