I am currently enrolled in a master's program, in which I have been required to make occasional posts to my blog. Here are my responses to the prompts that I have been asked to complete this week:
A concept that I had not taken the time to fully study and understand was that of LMSs (Learning Management Systems). I have had to research these a bit for other courses but, never delved into them because I thought that they were not applicable to my teaching environment. I had previously understood that all LMSs either required teachers to create their own content/lessons on that platform or had to be joined with another platform to be utilized. Since my company has set curricula that cannot be replaced or changed, I thought that an LMS could not be implemented within my company. However, while conducting research for our most recent project, I discovered that there were a large variety LMSs available, that many of them had varying structures and features, and that there were LMSs that would potentially work with my company’s requirements and current format.
I cannot identify
one particular strategy from this course that I would implement with my
students. However, I have been able to
wrap my head around several tools (like a student-based blog) that I might
implement with them to enhance and extend learning. I would also implement the
LMS that was featured in my latest project, Edmodo. Edmodo offers a social media-type
format that I would be able to use with my students without interfering with
the curricula that my company utilizes. My
fellow teachers and I have traditionally struggled with learning extension and
enhancement since our classrooms are solely online. Utilizing Edmodo would also provide ways for
us to do that within a user-friendly format.
By the end of
this course, I hope to better understand how to integrate the concepts centered
around digital citizenship and ethical technology use in my particular setting. I teach in small groups and one-on-one
sessions that last 25 minutes with a set number of instructional slides to
cover during that time. I try to work
these concepts in frequently. However,
my constraints make it difficult. I would
like to feel more confident in my efforts and know that I am providing the best
possible educational experience for my students.
Teaching digital citizenship is so important, but can also be a tough one to try to fit in with everything else that you are trying to do in the classroom. I know that I have fought against teaching it in my physics courses, despite how important I know digital citizenship is, simply because I do not want to sacrifice my instructional time to the topic. I cover it in my Computer Science course mostly because it is a required part of the curriculum that students need to know and understand for the AP Exam.
ReplyDeleteI am also leaning towards adding student blogging to my class to help them. While I can see this fitting easily into computer science, I want to challenge myself and my students to blogging physics this year.