Sometimes the surprises in life come from out of nowhere. I’ve been a gardener forever, both indoors and out. I’ve tried to grow both camellias and gardenias for a decade and never had them actually open the tight little buds that they set. But this is the camellia blossom that greeted me at the beginning of the week. I wasn’t expecting it, had no idea it was coming, but ahhhh what perfection. The same thing happened in classes this week when Sheila reappeared in First Class saying, Where’s my desk! And then Susan, just two weeks out of leg surgery, surprised us and brought herself to the grad center for classes this week.
Elaine said we could have fun learning so I’m choosing a word she used in class as my vocabulary word for the week. SPOONERISM means to swap (transpose) the sounds in a sentence. The American Heritage College Dictionary uses the example: Let me sew you to your sheet for Let me show you to your seat. But I will explain how I wrote this entry by saying that I’m simply pulling a habit out of my rat….I mean, pulling a rabbit out of my hat…surprise!
There was a lot of conversation this week about the use of blogs. I was surprised to find that very few of us are comfortable in this realm. But, I reread my blog from Introduction to Online Teaching and found that I wasn’t comfortable the first time either. In fact, that was the biggest obstacle I had with that course, but in the end I thanked the instructor for taking me out of my comfort zone. Now I’m pretty comfortable with blogging and I had a wonderful time changing this template with tricks I learned from Jen in Web I. In a course I’m teaching I use the VARK (visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic) Inventory Questionnaire as a tool for helping students to understand their learning style. It’s a quick online way to learn how one prefers to take in and give out information. I was prepping for class next week and thinking about my own results from this questionnaire. According to my results, I prefer to learn by reading and writing, which means for intake I like readings, notes (yours are awesome Meaghan), textbooks, essays, and teachers who use words well. To study concepts I like to rewrite and reread notes, put stuff into charts and diagrams, and rewrite ideas and principles in other words. For output I like to write…it even says I like to arrange words into hierarchies and points. Small surprise - this blogging assignment is right up my alley.
I have two lingering questions from our work together for the first two weeks. When Elaine asked at the end of class what the situational factors informing instructional design were I could not remember the teacher as one. It seems as though the teacher is not just a little part of this jigsaw, but the one putting the whole thing together. Did anyone else have that thought come up for them? The second question came up when Jack spoke about a static and a dynamic classroom (which was a great tie-in to the network IP address stuff we’re learning). How can I create an online classroom that does not feel static?
Elaine said we could have fun learning so I’m choosing a word she used in class as my vocabulary word for the week. SPOONERISM means to swap (transpose) the sounds in a sentence. The American Heritage College Dictionary uses the example: Let me sew you to your sheet for Let me show you to your seat. But I will explain how I wrote this entry by saying that I’m simply pulling a habit out of my rat….I mean, pulling a rabbit out of my hat…surprise!
There was a lot of conversation this week about the use of blogs. I was surprised to find that very few of us are comfortable in this realm. But, I reread my blog from Introduction to Online Teaching and found that I wasn’t comfortable the first time either. In fact, that was the biggest obstacle I had with that course, but in the end I thanked the instructor for taking me out of my comfort zone. Now I’m pretty comfortable with blogging and I had a wonderful time changing this template with tricks I learned from Jen in Web I. In a course I’m teaching I use the VARK (visual, aural, read/write, kinesthetic) Inventory Questionnaire as a tool for helping students to understand their learning style. It’s a quick online way to learn how one prefers to take in and give out information. I was prepping for class next week and thinking about my own results from this questionnaire. According to my results, I prefer to learn by reading and writing, which means for intake I like readings, notes (yours are awesome Meaghan), textbooks, essays, and teachers who use words well. To study concepts I like to rewrite and reread notes, put stuff into charts and diagrams, and rewrite ideas and principles in other words. For output I like to write…it even says I like to arrange words into hierarchies and points. Small surprise - this blogging assignment is right up my alley.
I have two lingering questions from our work together for the first two weeks. When Elaine asked at the end of class what the situational factors informing instructional design were I could not remember the teacher as one. It seems as though the teacher is not just a little part of this jigsaw, but the one putting the whole thing together. Did anyone else have that thought come up for them? The second question came up when Jack spoke about a static and a dynamic classroom (which was a great tie-in to the network IP address stuff we’re learning). How can I create an online classroom that does not feel static?
1 comment:
There was a lot of conversation this week about the use of blogs. I was surprised to find that very few of us are comfortable in this realm.
I, too, am always surprised at the resistance to blogging that I find on the part of Pedagogy students. But as you point out, not all are comfortable in the reading/writing realm, especially when confronted with the reality that one's words will be online and viewable by others (unless one takes time to implement some privacy measures.
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