This course I am taking has forced me to look at things through a different lense. As I develop new and innovative class activities I am looking at a vast amount of online material and wondering how do I compete? I am not a web designer, I have never shot any video, nor am I interested in editing anything for the classroom. I have never made a podcast. But have spent countless hours watching other casts and videos.
How do I keep my students interested. I have a full spectrum of students in my classes. The material and Power Points I use is AP need to be different then the ones I use in a regular class. As I update material I try to incorporate as much new material as I can. Using new video, or existing websites I don't have to start from the ground up. There are many useful sites to get information from.
As educators we need to teach students how to navigate this "sea of information". At times it can be an undaunting task to navigate information and present it in a way that our students can digest. Now add to this the development of an online class. From first hand experience I know how many hours are needed to develop and maintain an online class.
I agree that there are many useful sites out there. I worry that I will come to rely on a video from someone else it may disappear. That is the nature of technology. Maybe if I download the most essential ones, I can avoid big missteps.
ReplyDeleteI am with you Mike in the fact that there are a lot of great things we have learned about, but with more district initiative, it is very difficult to find the time. Personally, I am just trying to keep my head above water this year.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I have learned from teaching a regular class and an advanced class is I have ended up using some of the lessons from one and using it for the other class. I know pacing for these two classes are vastly different, but especially for my Algebra B class, since I really need to break down the topics to manageable parts, I have used some of these lessons and used them for my Advanced Algebra with Trig.
I definitely can relate to your feelings of being overwhelmed at times with all of the new methods and approaches we're learning in this course. I'm not proficient with using technology by a long shot. How do I keep things interesting and educational for students in this new environment? It really does feel like reinventing the wheel sometimes -- finding or creating new resources, but also the whole new approach of being a "guide" for students to gather their their own info. There is a vast sea of information on the web for students to gather from. How do we teach them what's good info vs. bad info when they go into it not knowing much? I've seen students looking for an answer online -- they google it, pick one of the first 2-3 websites that come up and just pick "whatever", generally something from wikipedia. We're going to have to teach them how to discern what's reliable and what's not. In the old days, if it was published in a text, we could be ensured it was well researched and reliable. Nowadays, anyone can create a website and put anything they want on it.
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