Final Draft- Final Project

Life as a teacher means constant reflection and change/improvements to learning units. After posting my final project for classmates to evaluate I received wonderful feedback and have made improvements on my final project. To view improvements made on my final project click on this link.

Thank You Again to Everyone Your Feedback Was AWESOME!
Jake

Final Project

For my final project I have started to create an online course to teach middle school students new technology uses. This project has helped me to see how course information is put together. Please click on this link to see my final project.

Final Project Thoughts

Currently I am not teaching any online classes. I teach Technology Education to middle school students in a program that has both vocational units (woods, metals, problem solving, electricity, and manufacturing) and technological units which consists mainly of students using different technologies to complete projects in the above listed areas.

For my final project I plan to develop an Exploring Technology class for middle school students. I plan to incorporate learning tools that we have been using in this class. Developing the whole course would be a little overwhelming so my plan is to develop some different learning units and list a possible assignment with each.

Where I am at in my planning is to have students collaborate using a wiki to complete an assignment on web site authenticity and prepare a presentation in Google Docs for a final product. I would also like to include Internet safety and fair use as part of this unit.

The next unit I plan to develop is a unit on blogging. I would like to develop a geo-caching assignment for students and have them post information on their experiences using a GPS to locate geocaches.

As part of the Exploring Technology class student will also use Zoomerang or Surveymonkey to collect data and report their individual findings.

Finally I plan to use a type of course tracking software to develop an online class outline that students will be asked to follow. If anyone has suggestions on what might work best for this I would appreciate the recommendation.

I have started developing objectives for this course but they are not in a final format that I feel comfortable posting at this point.

If anyone has suggestions on how to improve this course I will happily take input.

Pre Course Survey

During this weeks learning module we were asked to develop an online pre course survey. I plan to use this survey as part of my final project. For this reason my survey audience is middle school students taking an exploring technology course. To take my survey please click here.

Week 5 Reflection

During this weeks module we reviewed the different levels of learning associated with Bloom’s Taxonomy. As an educator I am familiar with Bloom and studied levels of learning as an undergraduate and learning levels are usually part of our teacher in services. As we saw this week people have different levels of understanding when it comes to Bloom and also different interpretations of how the different levels fit activities. It was a good opportunity to see how other people evaluated activities and also a good review of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Here is a link to my evaluations of the Casey Journalism Course and how the activities fit different levels of learning.

The Casey course had a lot of good activities, but was not clearly organized which made evaluating difficult. Many of the activities we analyzed overlapped levels of learning. One question I posed to this overlap was this “Was the goal of the activities to allow students to choose a thread of an activity that was challenging to them specifically – thus challenging all learners – or were the assessments designed to fit specific levels?”

Finally this week our final project appeared on the horizon. When I finally found the final project description my major concern is that I do not currently teach an online class and I don’t really know what I would want to teach online. Without a end goal in mind completing this project will be difficult. The project itself seems valuable and will help to improve online classes, but until I have a direction I feel stuck.

Mid Term Project Links

Here is the link to our groups collaboration on Google Docs.

By following this link you will be able to view our final product.

Week 4 Reflection

This week the majority of our efforts were focused on our group midterm project. Our midterm project was a jigsaw research activity. The topic of our search was assessment tools. Our group primarily used email and Google Docs to complete our project. Google Docs worked well for us as a communication tool. Within our group members used different font colors and styles to set information apart during collaboration.

My piece of the assignment was to research Zoomerang an online survey creator. Zoomerang seems to be a powerful survey (even the free version) tool that offers many upgrades. Zoomerang can be used to gather background information on students, organize end of course feedback, and plan and organize events.

Our class discussion this week was started by asking a question about the groups feelings on group grades. As I posted collaboration is important, but when the final product is all that is being evaluated all factors are not taken into consideration. Group projects also do not assess an individuals grasp of content.