Welcome! Allow Me to Introduce You to My Course!
This whole process has been an amazing experience and I am very grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow as a professional and an individual.
The course that I created is called Balanced Literacy: Encompassing the Whole Child. It is created as an asynchronous professional development opportunity for teachers. It is housed within Treaty Education Alliance‘s online school which uses Moodle as the platform for course delivery.
You can view a previous post discussing my course profile here.
Take a Tour…
This is the link to my course overview on youtube:
Accessing the Course as a Guest.
You are more than welcome to log into my course profile as a guest. It is important to note that as a guest you do not have a ability to comment on, or respond to, any of the dialogue in the forums. To login, go to https://learn.educationalliance.ca/. Scroll down to enter as a guest. Then use the password: Balance.
The Creation Process.
When I heard that we are going to be creating an online course as one of the final projects for ECI834, I was a little bit intimidated. Creating asynchronous professional development opportunities for our teachers is something that our Alliance has been talking about for quite a while. We do have an online high school that is housed in Moodle, so I knew that this would be the best place to build the course I am developing.
I feel that the building process from week to week was gradual at a good pace that allowed me to discover new ways of thinking and different tools that support online learning. Within ECI834, we are encouraged to read through eachothers blog and twitter posts as well as communicate in breakout rooms and through discord. I really enjoyed the breakout rooms. I think they were the most valuable to me. It is nice to see the faces of my classmates as well as hear their points of view first hand. I also enjoyed the blog posts and the opportunity to write my own. I honestly struggled with discord. I appreciate how it is a great place to ask questions and get almost instant feedback, but I also feel like I would almost have to force myself to go there and ‘talk’ just for the sake of talking. I found it hard to fit into my life.
The building of the first module in Moodle was a bit of a task initially. It seemed like I needed a crash course to get things going and I wasn’t sure which direction to go in. It did seem to come together in the end. A big thanks to the people in my class who reviewed my module 1! I took into consideration all of the feedback and made as many changes as I could. You can read a blog post about it here.
Module 2 seemed to be a little bit easier to put together. I think this was because I was more familiar with navigating Moodle and the editing functions. I also had a better vision for what module 2 would look like. The thing that I struggled with the most with module 2 was figuring out the forums and how I was going to make it as user friendly and interactive as possible. I ended up making them a ‘forum set up like a blog’.
Future Endeavours.
One thing I have been thinking about it how we have learned about so many cool tools (e.g., flipgrid, canva, google classroom & forms, loom, padlet, etc.) that we can use when teaching online. I feel like I maybe didn’t get the opportunity to use all of them within my online course as some other people may have. This may be due to the target audience of the course that we are creating, and the content of my module 1 and 2.
In the future, I would like to become more familiar with the list of online tools and incorporate them into PD opportunites and/or share them with our teachers.