When I first entered the VOLT program, I had some experience on the receiving end of on-line teaching, having taken a couple of blended classes in my career, but I had no real concept of how to develop a class of my own. I had very limited experience with our school's LMS and no idea how to use it to provide content to students. I always thought of it as a reasonably powerful force, but did not know how to access it.
I have learned much during the past few months and I see places in my job where I can enhance my teaching by using some of it. I am not in a situation where I see myself going through a complete change in style and using on-line or blended teaching as the majority of my class, but I do see myself looking for ways to bring the philosophies and practices that we learned and shared into play as a way to improve the overall experience for my students. I can envision teaching units or lessons through the LMS and even keeping a supply of emergency lessons on hand which the students can access in my absence.
I particularly found useful the first couple of units of the class where we were actively trying out new things and sharing websites and apps that we were able to instantly see use for in our classrooms. From the very beginning, using Flipgrid to introduce ourselves, I could see value in what we were doing. We also spent time learning about and discussing our learning environment and how were were going to present, discuss, and assess the content we were looking to deliver. All of these things will remain with me as I seek ways to incorporate more technology in my class.
While interesting and informative, I found the unit on Digital Literacies to be more theoretical than practical and not as instrumental in helping me develop curriculum. I am sure, however, that all of the articles and discussions will be swirling around my brain as I make decisions about what to include and how to present it to my students.
I was very interested in our final (for me at least) presenter of the program. Michelle Picansky-Brock spoke about humanizing our classes and I suppose that I never really looked at it that way. I always felt that to be a good teacher, you had to be present and available to your students, but I now will be extra careful to make sure that I am not only present, but obviously present so that I do not even give the impression that a computer is running this particular show. Clearly, our instructors are aware of this situation and were excellent models of how to keep a class humanized.
Through it all, I have tried to preach caution and selectivity when deciding to move classes on-line. I feel that there is a great push to include more and more technology into classrooms and there are not enough teachers willing to say "Hey, wait a minute. Are we sure that that is better than what I am doing now?" Just because something is new and exciting does not mean that it is a better way to share knowledge. I am in favor of using technology and would have a difficult time working without it, but the deciding factor for me it whether or not to add something new to my instruction is if I am convinced that it makes me a better teacher. Technology will keep changing and schools will never be able to change as quickly. The idea of fundamentally changing the way schools work in order to include today's concepts of what students will need in tomorrow's work force is short sighted. Nobody knows what tomorrow's workforce will look like, but I bet that it does not look like what we think it will look like. The most effective thing that we teachers can do is to continue to teach kids to read, write, calculate, and solve problems. If students are really good at those things, they will be fine no matter what tomorrow looks like.
Kurish out.
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