Well, after going through Session One of CEdO502, I must admit to being excited to try out online teaching tools but also nervous for the time when I actually do it live with my Menomonee Falls students. I hope to create an engaging course for my middle and/or high school students while imparting just as much content as I would in a conventional classroom setting. The classes I currently teach (Financial Life Skills and Computer Applications) are already infused with technology tools (both are held in computer labs at North Middle School) so I believe that these would be natural courses to move to an online setting.
I like the idea of using Schoology as the base point for any online class I would teach. I can also envision using our Falls SchoolFusion platform in a similar fashion in that I could create the weekly sessions with necessary hyperlinks, blogs, and documents in this district-supported technology tool. Here is the link to my Financial Life Skills weekly home page. Elluminate would then work as a wonderfully effective method for instant messaging and live conversations. I believe my students would love to communicate in this fashion and would be most active participants during those online meetings. The current unit PowerPoints I use in Financial Life Skills (Investing, Banking, Credit, Budgeting, etc.) would be useful in Elluminate. I would tweak them a bit in order to help create more independent thinking for my online students. However, I think they would provide a great base of information for each unit.
I did enjoy creating my own vRoom and experimenting with the many features offered by Elluminate. The various buttons on the whiteboard were very easy to use and I had no problem adding a PowerPoint and graphics to the whiteboard slides. The instant messaging and audio features were very easy to operate and I believe that my Falls students would love using them, to the point where they could be very distracted. I am sure that I will have to devise a way to keep these energetic students focused while maintaining a high level of engagement. I noticed in the vRoom session that I played back from a educational technology forum that even adult learners went off-task when they had the instant messaging available. To me, this took away from the content that the moderator was attempting to present.
Finally, after reading Haavind's article, I realize that online teaching not only requires effective instructional teaching strategies and assessments but that strong moderation and facilitating skills are vital to the success of student learning. I certainly intend on using the Checklist for Evaluating Online Courses and student feedback in order to create continuous improvement for my online courses.
