Module 7

We are at the end of the course! This week I worked hard on creating my final project. I created 4 assessment tools and related them to my course about food safety and HACCP. I feel I learned a lot through this project. It helped me try to relate my content to an online course and how to use different assessment tools.

I received great feedback from an individual student. She helped me drastically create my final project. The small errors I did not see, she did. Classmate feedback is great because as the person developing the project you may not see the little thing

Module 5 Reflection

Module 6 was a great way for me to look at different learning exercises. By looking at the other students charts it gave me a feel of what they would do and made my mind think how I could implement different exercises in my online courses.

One student asked if I would be able to use online chatting in as a discussion. I think this a great way to get instant feedback from students. I have used it in a small group before when doing a project for an online course. It worked great! I just wonder how many students would be able to meet at a specific time each week, I think it would be hard to gather the entire class to use online chatting.

Bloom's Taxomony

Sometimes I wonder how my content will be able to fit into an online course. I feel that a lot of my content for classes I will teach is more of a hands on lab experience.

Looking at the Bloom's taxomony I could relate to putting the information online easily. There are so many tools to use that are available to discuss, work as groups, collaborate, etc. Like many other students have commented on using Wiki or Google docs. I think these are great tools for the students to collect all their thoughts. splitting the class into small groupsand trying to solve the issue is also a great way to work online. I think it is important to make them small, having more than 3 or 4 people in a group makes it very difficult for students to work together in an online enviroment. Disscusion boards are also a great tool for students to throw around their different ideas and make comments on other students. Discussion boards can serve as the only discussion in the online classroom. Having an active discussion is important because there is no face-to-face contact.
Harke taxonomy.doc (92 KB)

New Link to Midterm!

https://bluedrive.uwstout.edu/users/students/stagerg/flash/toolbox.html

Here is a new link that should work.

This project really turned out great. Stags had great skills to put together this great and creative website. I enjoyed working with everyone on this project. Everything came together perfect. Communication was kind of hard for me. It seemed like a lot of the communication took place while I was at work, so I missed out on that.

Midterm Project

For the midterm project we used the "jigsaw" method of doing group work. Jigsaw is where a project is divided up evenly through the group members. Through this project I worked with:
* Gregory Stager- reviewed Adobe Captivate
* Dustin Miller- reviewed E pals
* Nancy Chapko- reviewed Quia
* Christopher Danula- Microsoft Grove

http://https://bluedrive.uwstout.edu/users/students/stagerg/flash/toolbox.html

Emerging Technologies

Something that sparked my attention right in the beginning of the document was "Emerging technologies." I was speaking with one of my instructors about online courses. He has been teaching at Stout for about 30 years. He is being forced to facilitate online courses. He does not like online courses because he likes the face-to-face interaction of students. This is a very hard thing for instructors to move to when they have always taught in the classroom. I have notice in my program that the majority of classes are offered online. Why is this, why is everything going online? In 10 years, do you feel like everything will be onlnie? Another question I have is cost for online course cheaper or more expensive? Does the school pay money to have a online system to teach classes?
Some great benefits of the emerging technologies is that instructors are now able to have their grade book online. As a student I really like this concept. I am always able to keep on top of how I am doing in the course. This also helps the instructor because they do not have to keep calculating grades for students. Another perk is that instructors are able to have the exams/quizzes all online. This is helpful because the instructor does not need to correct the exams, unless they are short answer.
I have been a teachers assistant for a couple years at Stout, helping instructors with grading and duties. I have had the opportunity to enter grades and upload content. Entering grades was not easy to me. It seemed to be hard to navigate around, because only so many students were listed on each page. I have also heard my instructors complain about the Learn@UWsystem. I believe that this will change. After time new upgrades will occur and make things easier for both the student and instructor.

** I got quite the response on this topic.