Course Takeaways

I have enjoyed the blended and online instruction course over the past couple of months. It has been difficult at times to find the time to accomplish everything, but I have learned many things that will impact my teaching going forward. I realize now that I too often use substitution or augmentation as a way to implement technology, simply using technology to replace an existing lesson idea. It really challenged my thinking to hear a video in which an educator talked about his daughter learning the piano through youtube videos. I have done the same thing. His point....students don't need teachers to learn information. They can get it more easily through the Internet. Our job is to curate resources for them and create lessons that challenge them to apply their learning. I learned that we need to give students more ownership and choice over their own learning, and that collaboration is critical to learning in a digital environment.

I have discovered some good resources, such as symbaloo, popplet, screencast-o-matic, and bubbl.us (already have used bubbl.us in class and students loved it).

I thought that I was fairly competent in my use of technology in the classroom, but now I realize that I can be doing so much more with my students.

Social Media In the Classroom

Earlier this year, I decided to do some live tweeting during parent teacher conference down time as a way to engage students. I simply made silly remarks about the ins and outs of meeting with parents. Many of my students enjoy following my twitter. I think it's a good way to connect with students. Having said that, I have heard a lot of negative things about how students use social media. I have a Facebook, but don't really use it, and I have never 'friended' a student. Many teachers do, but I feel like they are taking a big risk to charter into those waters.

I would consider using social media in the classroom if I could figure out what kind of educational value it might have. Certainly, a teacher could set up his/her own page as a way for students to keep up to date about what is going on in class. If social media is used just for the sake of collaboration, then I think tools should be used that have a strictly educational purpose. I am not sure that we can get students to shift their focus at this point and use twitter or facebook as a tool in the classroom. Too many potential distractions.

SpicyNodes

In my classrooms, I have students create a lot of webs. For instance, we do one in Personal Finance in which students think of strategies for getting out of debt. I would use the web site, SpicyNodes, in two ways. One thing I would like to do is present notes to students in this format as a way to engage them and give them logical thought patterns for understanding the content. I would also like to have students use the web site to create their own mind maps. I have not used Spicy Nodes, but I will be trying it out in the near future.

SpicyNodes could work great in the business classroom for....

• Creating Business Ideas
• Doing a SWOT analysis
• Analyzing an annual report
• Comparing different types of competition
• Comparing different types of economic systems
• Understanding the insurance process (Application, Policy, Claims)