Creating Collaborative Communities - Week 4

I hereby resolve to:

• Focus on building collaborative opportunities outside of discussion forums
• Use personality assessments to get to know my students
• Use personality assessments to group my students
• Investigate Online Learning at lower grade levels
• Ask Dave W about their information literacy skills program
• Create really clear instructions on how to cite images, and which ones are ok to use

The biggest Aha moment I had was when I decided to start creating myself sort of a manual for online teaching. It was inspired by the amazing conversations I was having with my classmates, and I didn’t want to lose a single thing they had to say or resource that they posted. It’s an overwhelming task to accomplish while immersed in the course itself, so the for now, I have created a PDF of the threaded discussion in the course so I can capture the conversations. When I have spare time, I can go back through the discussion, whether the course is available in D2L or not, and try to collate them into a resource for myself, and perhaps others, to use. I am curious to see if I will be able to completely redesign my two high school courses based on what I learn in this program before I offer them to students again.

Another Aha moment I had was when we were asked to look at personality type and grouping. For so long, I have despised group projects, as a learner and as a teacher. There were always those who did more than others, and made working in groups frustrating. The idea that personality type may come in to play in creating better groups is something I am very interested in experimenting with. I am mentoring our health teacher as she builds her online health course, and she is allowing me to experiment with different aspects of the assignments as I work through this course. I used the Bourne/Bond poll to group students for their first activity, and it seemed to work out really well. I was fascinated to see that all members of the Bond teams waited until the day before to start their projects, and those in the Bourne groups started their work as soon as the groups were assigned! I am curious to see how grouping students for both projects and discussions will alter the way students see group work. I am most curious to see how online learning works at lower grade levels. I really want to see what an online classroom looks like in, say 2nd grade. How does that work? Does it work? Can it work?