Implementation Plan

The context for this implementation is creating interesting and challenging assessments for students.  As all good teachers do, the quest is to create an assessment that ensure learning continues to happen when students work on it - an assessment for learning and not of.  To enable this, a good practise that I like to adapt is designing feedback points to ensure that they are on the right track and.  Working on small chunks of the assessment at a time makes it less daunting for students - a modular approach from my days as a programmer!

Having used posters as an assessment once - quite sceptically, I was quite satisfied with the way it panned out. It required students to summarise their research/case study, to be succinct in their choice of words, use visuals to highlight findings and more important be creative.  A natural extension of this format would be to use an online poster for an assessment in a course in Quality Management.  Students would develop a poster with a supporting summary document to identify a quality problem in an organisation, examine the impact, analyse cause and effects and suggest a solution.  With a bit of preliminary research, I decided to use Glogstere  a popular tool with educators.  It seems very easy to use and I was impressed with the body of work done mostly by school students.  Although, I have not seen too many examples of its use in tertiary education, it seems to have the potential.

I'd like to follow up with a literary review of posters as learning/assessment tools in general and the potential of graphical and interactive blogs as emerging technology tools.  A short survey or a focus group meeting with students is part of the plan to obtain their feedback and incorporate it into my evaluation.

That's the plan.

PGCTHE-Course Selection

Title of the course: ECVL N205-Site Surveying. This is a basic course for civil engineering students that provide appropriate theoretical and practical surveying skills for civil engineering related projects. The course also provides opportunities to foster team-work and develop problem solving skills for civil engineering applications.

The course mainly consists of two components: 2-hours of lecture and 2-hours of practical work. The course is offered to both morning (am) and evening (pm) students. The pm students are working professionals who are trying to develop their professional skills alongside holding a full-time job and meeting their family obligations. The daily schedule of these students is very rigorous and normally extends from 6:00 am to 11:00 pm; traveling to the job, work, travel to college, and driving home. Therefore, any relief in terms of delivery of instructions can help in maintaining their interest in pursuing the college education.

I am planning to substitute the lecture-component based on class-room instructions with e-learning primarily consisting of BB Vista and WIMBA. A real-time interaction with students after lecture session will be developed using smart phone technologies. At the end of each lecture session, student’s feedback will be registered using a short survey. Instructional components and delivery mechanisms will be modified in response to these surveys. It is expected that this project will provide students with additional family-time, save their time and money by reducing driving time, and improve their learning and comprehension.

My Personal Learning Network

I'm a bit word weary now and hope this picture speaks for me.

One of the tools that I like to use is a mind map or a brainstorming tool. Helps me figure out my stormy mind. Creating this has brought out the fact that I do not use webinars as effectively as I should. So during this upcoming PD week at work, I will attend one.

Now there is a plan..

Technology I've used in my classroom

I've enjoyed reading what others have used in their classroom, and decided to update you all and let you know what I've used.

It is such a coincidence that module 2 is on this topic, given that in January I just defended my thesis at Exeter University in the UK, and although the degree is in TESOL, I studied how my native Arabic speaking students reacted to using an interactive math software program in their math class.

I had all kinds of ideas about the success I would experience and given the fact that I was able to create it myself, I knew exactly what they would like, so I made it colorful, meaningful, fun, interesting (those are my adjectives btw) relevant, and I even included music.  How could they not be impressed?

Almost overwhelmingly, they did not like it I found, much to my disappointment.  I believe Dr. Neil Hunt talked about this briefly on a post he made on Moodle.  It's their surprising conservatism regarding trying something new that ultimately surprised me.  They did not appreciate moving out of their comfort zone at all, and wanted to be told what to learn and how to learn it and when I would test them on it, and wanted no part of exploring on their own or independent study.  It was just too much of a conceptual leap for them.  Perhaps in baby steps?

So that's my experience to date.
Thanks for your interest.
Nancy

Welcome

Welcome to module 2.
I look forward to working this semester with Seema and Gita and Ghazala and Sharmila and Majid and Firoz.

Problem accessing Moodle

Hello,
Did anyone else notice when you tried to sign onto Moodle, that it doesn't work with Firefox or Internet Explorer?  Remember how we had problems with the blogs last semester, and found they only worked with Google Chrome (or at least for me anyway)?  Well I found that Moodle only worked on Google Chrome as well.  Just wondered if anyone else had that problem.