Journal+7

WEEK 7

Prompt  Reflect on how you perceive yourself as an online learner? Are you well-prepare to be an online leaner? Tell us about what you need to improve in order to be a successful online learner.

Description This week I reflected on my achievement and struggles as an online learner. For this reflection I was reminded of my first experiences with Cuyahoga Community College’s 2003 online classes compared to my Akron masters class this summer. My self-reflection as an online learner opened my eyes as how I should be as an online educator.

Impact After reading the weekly articles about online learning, I learned my strengths and struggles that I experience as an online learner. I struggle with signing in multiple times throughout the week, Monday I sign in and read what’s due for the week, and I usually read all of the resources posted. I watch the youtube videos, read the articles, and explore websites given. I read the question(s) for the discussion board topics. I usually finish up the weekly assignments in 1 day towards the end of the week. That leaves multiple days of not signing in. If something was changed on a Tuesday I would not check for quite a few days, which didn’t really happen this quarter, but in the future it could. I am active on discussion boards, reading everyone’s posts before I choose which one I find the best is for me to comment on.

When reflecting on how I will be implementing more technology use in my classroom I remembered how I was when I was 18 as an online learner. When I was at Tri-C I took an online class that had reading from a text book, and online quizzes that were multiple choice, due at the end of the semester. Without weekly due dates I did not manage my time very wisely. There were no enrichment resources available to reinforce activities, which made it difficult for me to connect the material being taught to real world scenarios. It may have been because the classes were general requirements classes being taken for many different majors, but it made it challenging for me to connect to the content. This technology course for educators felt a lot more personalized. Even though I was interacting with people who taught different subjects and grades in different communities, I felt like I could connect a lot more to the content and material the class had to offer. By breaking down my online learning experiences and habits, I realized what my priorities should be when educating online. The purpose of the lesson has to mix with the use of the technology. The students need to clearly see the correlation. I need to breakdown the overall final product into sections with strict due dates. That way I can monitor who is understanding and keeping up with the activity and who needs additional help. I plan on crea ting a program for online journaling and peer editing which reminded me of one of my Tri-C classes. The class required 500 word posts and two 250 word responses to peer posts. I found myself more stressed about the word count than the meaningfulness of the responses. With that being said, as an educator planning on implementing more technology use in the classroom I will not focus too much on the length of writing assignments, rather I will emphasis meaningful and reflective responses to create a positive and effective evaluation of peers work so students can develop and enhance their writing skills.

 Knowing that I will be enriching my classroom next year with more technology based learning, which will take more time to start and monitor if I want to do it effectively, I need to make sure my educational process is not disturbed. That is one thing I did not have to worry about for this class, dividing my educational time with my job as an educator. I am going to have to schedule time to log in more frequently to springboard and I might not be able to work on the assignments in such a large block of uninterrupted time so I will need to schedule time daily. I was fortunate this class to have a very organized teacher who posted information weekly, and ahead of time so we could work at our own pace, but I may not be that fortunate in the future.

Intent As a learner, I am going to be more organized with my time. I am going to block off time in my school’s webmail calendar to work on school assignments daily. I already include meetings and block of time after school hours to grade projects in my email calendar along with my personal life events, so my personal and professional life will not interfere with each other and will be balanced appropriately.

As an educator, I am going to learn from my struggles, knowing the 8th graders I teach are still learning how to manage their time, workload and organization skills. I will try to create videos with instruction demonstrations that they can frequent whenever they forget how to find something. I will also make multiple due dates, chunking larger projects, so I can monitor student growth and pinpoint problems before the whole assignment is to be complete.