Week 18

This is the course system I am suppose to set up in for a post masters class. Announcements speak for themselves. Calendar too and I just found out how to load to it. Messages are equivalent to e-amil and Forums are back and forth chat where I post a question to answer. I see Forum like a class discussion and it does not pan out to feel as a class discussion. For next quarter I will have a video chat or a group chat. Chat room is like IM ing and only one or two students ever show up. polls? Roster just a list of students. Syllabus the usual Lessons go with the book. Resources is where it gets interesting but the students usually do not look at them because they are sources that take time to view and read. Assignments although clear are not set up to open to other pages so that I can require videos or articles. Tests and Quizzes are easy to set up and grade.

What is missing? The classroom, the environment, the feeling that a person is there to learn. My goal this year is to use the schools interface, but then add on Google plus (The university requests us to use it) this can help us promote the feeling of community. I also like the idea of the blog. The way we are doing this in our class, I feel as though I can see other students stile,  what are their opinions and what they got out of the reading. My idea is a community needs to be formed in the classroom and this is what invites people to participate and return to the class. It is frustrating to be a person who is trying to learn about education and never see, hear or interact with anyone. It all seems counter productive.

In my high school classes I am on the other side of the coin. I work with homeschoolers who now use online classes to fulfill high school requirements. Just four years ago my kids who were home schooled did not take a single class online. They either attended community group to learn with friend  or attended college classes or community center classes. The rest of the time they played and used computers to play a variety of games (some inadvertently taught history and others were purposefully educational).

The homeschool kids today are in classes that look, act and talk like a classroom class. Same curriculum, same homework, same everything except the lecture seems to be missing and the other kids are missing too (they don't chat online because they never met in the real world). My job as an ed-therapist is to help the kids learn how to teach themselves. What we used to get from a lecture and our friends, is not in an online class. These homeschoolers usually work individually and they are suppose to sign in once a week to talk to their teacher about the weeks unit. I have found that what is missing is interaction with other kids and adults to learn from each other. Structure is missing too. For example a math project is assigned but no explanation is given on how to go about deriving the equations, finding data and keeping the task simple enough for a tenth grader to understand and put together. Sometimes a video is shown to the students and then a packet needs to be filled out, but half the questions were not in the video. What is interesting is that a text book is not assigned to these specific classes so the kids do not have a reference book.

I would like to see more interaction between the teacher and the students, more reference material and a viewable grading system. What I hope to do when I am working with these students is to fill in the background knowledge that seems to be missing in their classes.