Access and Equity

Think about the learning environment in which you are interning. How does access to and equity in this learning environment impact students' learning in their overall education experience?

Well, considering the orientation of GA View, I believe that it is better for those who are visually challenged. My reason for this is the fact that all of the information that you need to access, grades, dropbox, email, discussions, etc., are all on the left side of the page, which is rather different from the Desire 2 Learn/Folio environment. THe information that you need is split up into actually three places, left panel, top panel, and the very top of the screen. Anyway, a person that is visually impaired, in my opinion would have trouble searching to find the information that he/she needs. This also may ring true for those with memory problems; I normally have trouble remembering what is where, and do not, at all, like the design of its GUI. Just imagine for a moment, that you are dealing with a person like Stephen Hawking, a quadriplegic. Can you fathom the irritation, time, effort, and concentration that it would take for a person with limited to no hand-eye coordination to move back and forth on the page. Anyway, just a thought to consider.

Moreover, those who are not great/good communicators and/or strong writers will unfortunately be at a disadvantage in any online setting because of the heavy reliance on discussion boards. I mean, really, whether it is the dissertation or the thesis, I do believe that non-writers are at a disadvantage.

I have used my phone, a tablet, and a laptop/pc to access both sites, and have been successful in performing the major functions of the site. I would therefore imagine that those using TeleTYpewriter (TTY) -sound to visual text- and other things would be used to such an interface, but, I think that it would be also great to provide those with vision trouble with a similar pleasant experience. Many people have used TTS (text to speech) services, but realize how harsh and artificial that voice is. Therefore, though it would only take a little while, it would be very beneficial for instructors to take a little additional time to attach an audio version of the assignments to the text version. This would help those who are visually impaired become more connected to the professor, as we normally attempt to through pictures and video. Our voice is just as important to people with visual impairments as our visuals are to those who wish to bond with us ‘normally’ or visually.

It is important that we realize that we owe a great opportunity and experience to all students regardless to their ability or disability. Therefore, with respect to audio and visual equity, it is important that we do our best to provide an equal opportunity and the best presentation possible for all students.

In an attempt to practice what I preach, I attached an audio recording of my post, as well as a picture of the cross country team I coach.  We won the first trophy in school history and placed 2nd as a Double A school, 600 student body, against 5A schools in excess of 2000 students.

Link to audio files

http://www.yousendit.com/download/WUJZb253T01uSlJMWE1UQw

Photo of the victorious team

Peace and blessings.

Assessing communication in the online classroom

In regards to the assessing and providing feedback for students, it is again highly important that teachers seek out communication not just for the conveyance of learning, understanding, and mastery, but also for struggles with content, life, emotions, etc.  I am known to be a nice person, and that comes out in my communication, such that many of you, that are familiar with me from other classes, were able to pick up on that from my tone.  Also, the manner in which things is turned in is also telling.  For instance, I write my posts late, but do them exactly as I am supposed to, which indicates that though things are rough for me, I am doing the best that I can to get them done as right as I can as soon as I can, but this is very very difficult for me.  This also shows that I value quality over time.  There are others who you can tell that they may value time over quality.  Or for instance, patterns in the posting times, can tell you whether someone is a list/steady/predictable person, or whether they are a night owl/get-R-Done/I'll do it when I can make time type.  That said, the assessing of language can be as telling as a personality profile if you read deeply and intimately enough into it.

The tone part is very cool, because as an English major, I know how words can convey many things.  I found out the other methods when Dr. Green showed me that communication also tells us what is going on by patterns.  In many ways, we are our writing.  For instance, in one class with Dr. Green.  I was normally one of the first ones to post, however that changed suddenly.  She noticing the change, emailed me expressing concern and curiosity about that change.  It was needed, because it was then that I was trying to help my neighborhood after a home invasion spree that affected 3 homes in one single weekend.  It was horrible.  Needless to say, she was professional and understanding, handling things in the best way, while still holding me accountable.  I learned a lot then.

My old Principal says that “Every time a kid enters into the building, that parent is sending us the best that they have got.”  That means here that we as educators have to understand that each of our students are giving us the best that they have, as are we, given their circumstances.  This also ties along with Dr. Giddens, who I paraphrase as saying, so long as I can make my students better human beings, then I have done my job and anything else is icing on the cake.   The most important lesson that we, as instructors of instructors, can teach is the value and imporance of being human, because like an exponential reaction, that will grow into something greater through the lives they impact in accordance with our guidance/training.

Though that was very personal and humanistic, communication can show us also what students value whether it be the theory or the application or usability.  I value the usability of the information, research, techniques, tools, and advice that I receive at this school.  Such that when I post I tend to gravitate towards anecdotes and narratives that capture the essence of just how that modules purpose is valid and valuable to me as a teacher and how I have/do/will use(d) it to enhance my craft.  There are others who post that value facts and evidence.  Such people may be viewed as more dogmatic or orthodox.  The trouble can be how to assess all these different styles and approaches properly.

I personally believe, know, and have experienced the power of trust, honesty, equity, respect, and integrity in terms of grading.  For instance, I ask my students, to honestly rate themselves on say a notebook check.  I state to them what I am looking for, what time period I am interested in, and then say, we all know what constitutes an 'A', 'B', 'C', and an 'F'.  Tell me what you truly believe that you should have.  If you lie, I will request proof, and if your proof is lacking, I will grade you automatically as an 'F'.  Not only are the grades always what I would have given them, it does wonders for their integrity and for their self-awareness.  I say that to everyone reading this, when we assess communication, we already know what A, B, C, and F work looks like.  We know the effort according to the quality; we can read the passion in between the beauty of lines; we can feel the intensity through the diction; and we all know BS when we read it.

Words are but black and white skeletons with all the identifying and descriptive power of the DNA in our blood.  When I assess communication/posts, I look for patterns, focus, tone, organization, time stamps, etc.  All these help us to assess and properly identify those who are truly working to learn and develop best practices and those who are looking simply for a raise.

Reflect on your experience facilitating a discussion.

To facilitate a discussion I would make sure to use open ended questions, which require multiple layers of thought and encourage help and feedback. For instance, take the following question: What role does technology have in your classroom? This question, while open ended, does not allow the latitude for discussion that you, as an online professor, are hoping for. You would want to encourage the processing of not only the learner's usage of tech, but others as well. To do so you change your question to the following, What role does technology have in your school? This has more scope, but is too vague as they could talk about the new metal detectors and or HD CCTV (high definition closed circuit television) cameras at the school. Whereas this is technology, it is not INSTRUCTIONAL technology (IT).

How about this one? What role does instructional technology have in the classrooms at your school? Better, add to that though. For instance, prompt them to again assess and analyze the usage so that they can see the do's and don'ts, pro's and cons, etc. You want them to understand that technology, though a boon, can be a bane as well, if not applied properly. SO, What role does instructional technology have in the classrooms at your school? Discuss, teachers who use it well, don't use it at all, don't use it enough, use it badly, or over use it. Here we have given them some talking points which can not only direct their communication, but their communication as a manifestation of their deliberate and critical analysis about the instructional technology in the school. Always remember that learner's communication is to provide you, the instructor, with a window into their understanding and mastery or lack thereof regarding the content, so your questions must always be crafted in a way that achieves that purpose.

Furthermore, consider this addition:

What role does instructional technology have in the classrooms at your school? Discuss, teachers who use it well, don't use it at all, don't use it enough, use it badly, and/or over use it. What category do you fall in now? Where do you want to be? After assessing the state of IT at your school, what realistic goals and time-lines can you set to improve your own dynamic and inspiring practice? What differences and similarities do you see between and amongst the other schools documented by your peers?

This final prompt, I believe, while asking a lot, will spur not only excellent opportunities for inter-student communication, but also intra-student communication, by having the student not only analyze and critique others, but also themselves. If “we are our own worse critics”, then the introspection inherent here will make that more productive via planning for improvement. Additionally, the healthy competition with others in the building and others in the online course will make an amazing difference in the learner's class and the school.

Though I took a while to explain my train of thought in terms of this prompt development, I felt it very important to model, exactly what I am implying 'good' communication does for the teacher-student relationship, it begets understanding of understanding and mastery or the lack thereof. Therefore, I made sure to document my development of the prompt and my reasoning behind the changes. Let us all make sure that every time that we communicate, regardless of the relationship, that we our language is to convey and transmit a message whether that of love, sorrow, understanding, struggle, success etc. So it is up to us as educators to communicate exactly what we want from our students, so that they have no choice, but to analyze and assimilate, think and reflect, as well as perform and produce.

Interning Learners Reflection

Well, I was informed that the learners that I am working with are truly just starting out and that they will be appreciative for whatever I produce for them. In all likelihood, they are intimidated by technology. Therefore, what I want to try to do is concentrate on providing them with easy to accomplish goals, challenging/high quality examples, rationales and success stories, and list the benefits to encourage them when they struggle.

I want to approach this using those pathways as a result of my experience. Since I am an over-achiever and a fighter by nature, then when I am confronted by a massive task, I look forward to challenging myself and validating my intelligence, fortitude, strength, creativity, etc, by overcoming the obstacle. However, as many young and inexperienced teachers, I am teaching the students the way I wish I could be taught instead of what they need. The challenges that I end up placing in front of my students often time intimidate them and cause them to give up, because they lack the perseverance, critical thinking, analytical, and organizational skills needed to tackle complex problems. That said, it is important that I realize that a sizable portion of the students are starting from square one with all the apprehension of a paranoid and hobbled gazelle alone on the Serengeti.

I must ease their reluctance by giving them small goals that have clear benefits, like auto saving Google docs for exporting lesson plans directly to admins and department heads as pdf's, Word doc, Rich Text, etc. Web 2.0 applications which enhance Powerpoints with animation and multimedia, for ensuring greater interest from kids with short attention spans. Teacher wikis for collaboration not just among students but best practice examples from other teachers, and much more.

Also, I need to be prepared to offer my novice tech students a simple guide to follow with some of the more challenging work done for them. In other words, if I were teaching trail blazers, then this class would be called Discovery, but this is an INTRODUCTION class, which helps me to understand that I have to assist them with assimilating something that already exists into their life. Just as when we introduce a person to another, we give them a name, context, common interests, explanation of importance, etc. I have to do this for technology and therefore need to help these elementary teachers overcome their fear of “stranger-danger” and realize that this new trend is their new 'BFF' (Best friend forever.

I will accomplish this by providing small incomplete, but thoughtful examples of starter ideas for modules. Completing projects or assignments myself first, and ensure that all aspects of what it took to complete are explained. And just in general being thorough, taking my time and never assuming. By doing so, I know that I will be able to take these tech-know nots into tech-know-buffs. (I know that is probably the worst pun of the 21^st century. My apologies.)

Online Intern Environment; Old vs new: GA View vs. D2L

Describe the learning environment you are interning in.

I am interning at Georgia Southern with Professor Giddens. We are using the Georgia View online learning system, which I prefer to the Desire 2 Learn (D2L). The Graphical User Interface (gui) on GA View is far better organized than the D2L environment. One reason that I prefer GA View to D2L is the spatial organization and formatting of the discussion areas/boards/posts. There is too much white space in D2L. The tabbed style of organization would be fine for a simple back and forth conversation, where there may be only a couple of volleys, but when you are navigating between conversations that have 5 people replying to replies, then texts tabs over 4 times within a window that is only a few inches wide and ends up with only about 5-six words per line before returning to the beginning of the next line. This makes a short reply take up a lot more space because of the abundance of white space on the left, residual of the tabs. I could not imagine how foolish this would end up being in a class with 20 or more students responding to a single topic. I shudder, really at that thought.

In retrospect, I must admit that the situation I described took place on a full screen monitor at normal resolution, maybe just a 1024 by 768. However, after looking at things on my widescreen laptop monitor, things really are not that bad, and was probably the result of “sticker shock” at the sudden change from one environment to the other.

Moving on, the 'see who's online', new email, discussion, reply, etc. functionality changing from an automatically displayed icon that takes you directly to the new content, changing to a drop down box after you clicked on the class takes some getting used to. That said, it just seems as though it was easier to be social with GA View, because it seemed to have been designed with the intention of fostering, encouraging, and easing communication regardless to what. I mean think of this logically, the main page after you login is like the hallway after you arrived in school. You don't just chat with people you are in class with at the time, so why have it organized that way with the D2L online environment. I guess it made sense to somebody, but not really to me. Yes, it is highly convenient if I want to chat with a person in a particular class, but, though I have never used this word previously, it just seemed that the communication features for GA view have an “intuitive” and/or natural design.

One last thing, I like the way that GA View had the main topic always just above where you are on a discussion page, so that you could always look up to remind yourself of the context, with D2L it requires more scrolling. And that goes for other things. For instance, changing from one discussion to the other requires an entire page change, rather than just a switch via in frame navigation and there is no left title skeleton/tree to navigate through. It makes the environment seem disjointed in comparison to GA View. Furthermore, you cannot collapse individual replies to take up less room on the screen and have the original only one line above, you can only bulk collapse all replies to a single entry at a time.

D2L is not all bad though. I do like the calendar being on the front page. It reminds me of how Dr. Green had a calendar of due dates on the main page of her class, which kept you informed of your deadlines, whether you liked it or not.

A lot of this, I think, boils down to the way Dr. Hodges put it in a discussion that he, Dr. Clark, and myself had this past Friday, “Do you really not like D2L or is it just that you got switched midway and haven't gotten used to it yet?” I had to really consider the validity of that statement, because it was indeed somewhat true. One of the most foolish things that we, in this technology field, could ever do is get comfortable and set in our ways. Ceasing to change, grow, learn, and develop; to stop adapting to our environment, which hurtles along advancing at the near light speed of human imagination, is a faster path to extinction than a meteoric “E.L.E.” (Extinction Level Event). The innovations and changes which are the hallmarks of this modern world should always be welcomed and embraced with open arms. Not stubbornly constrasted against the past, simultaneously declaring ourselves antiquated and inflexible, but compared to the past for the purpose of merging the wisdom, discretion, and morality of past experience with the much anticipated and amazing new possibilities made possible through innovation.

Project of your choice

I, like one of my fellow students, have been struggling and wondering about the project of my choice, simply because I am completely out of my element. There is a distinct reason that I am NOT teaching ELE, and that is because I really don't understand how kids that young work. I truly need to work on that because in a few years, Lord willing, I will be starting a family and, being the man that I am with a particular personality, often find it hard dealing with things that are illogical. Which pretty much defines so much of the youth experience nowadays. Anyway, I am working on shifting my mind from online assignments for aspiring online instructors and secondary teachers who hope to use this technology in the classroom and involve the students in the usage, to determining exactly what are realistic expectations of technology in an elementary environment. Maybe I am thinking that kids that young are more underdeveloped than they really are and that indeed they can accomplish great things. I am as a result trying to think of what elementary kids learn and how technology can be a supplement and an enhancer to the presentation of content in a classroom rather than the means through which students interact with the content.
As I type this I realize that all kids are not 'snotty nosed cry babies, who are only learning colors, but this also extends to the 5th grade, where apparently, you learn more than majority of the population, as proven by the show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" Anyway, I truly need to continue to take the time to carefully read over and understand the standards that are covered in ELE and predict and role-play, figuring out exactly how, why, and when certain instructional technology can be integrated successfully and helpfully into an ELE classroom.

Are you smarter than a 5th grader excerpt.

After today's meeting with Dr. Giddens I have learned a lot. I had the opportunity to bounce some ideas off him and actually get started on this project. What I am going to do, is to create a survey to ask the questions that I have been pondering. That is, what goals do you think are attainable for this age group, what content area do you feel instructional technology can be the most help in, what standards do you feel would benefit most from IT.

However, we also got to discuss what I have been currently working on, and that is the instructional videos and the youtube channel. He recommends that I type up and produce a video on why I am making instructional videos and how. I can definitely do this, since the means and medium which I create videos with and through are either free or highly inexpensive and serve as a viable alternative to interactive whiteboards. So, that is what I will be using as my project of choice the why's and how to's of instructional video making.
This is my developing youtube channel's first video.

http://youtu.be/5hq3CHxIXkc?hd=1

I will continue to create videos to share with teachers and hopefully, I can help them provide better content for their students.

Reflection to Instructor Interview

After reading the responses to the interview with my assigned professor, I was deeply touched and impressed, mostly/greatly by his humanitarianism and realistic approach to his role as a professor. I must say it was indeed eye-opening and encouraging to know just how much caring and consideration goes into his planning for a course. I truly believe that this is a wonderful way to be, and I am really thankful to be working with such an instructor.
After reading about the what would he do differently if starting over, I have learned html pretty well, but can definitely do more and be better. I wrote a website for my parents business years ago after studying and learning html over the summer. I literally worked 13 hours a day and/or six days a week and more some times, to get it just right. I made sure to use Notepad to actually learn the code rather than a program like Dreamweaver, because I wanted to be able to (like in the Matrix) see the manifestation, just by reading/viewing the code. So I will definitely revisit w3schools.com and learn as much as possible after I finish my Doctorate. Truthfully, I would suggest everyone start there, just as I did that summer. Literally begin reading everything (literally) and just like reading a paper book from cover to cover, read the html section from the intro and about us to the last “</P>”. They have an exhaustive list of programming languages there, and you can learn so much. It would be smart right now to just remember life before the internet and remember how blessed we are to literally be able to verify almost any fact in .3 seconds via Google.

Getting back to the topic, though he does recommend that we learn those other programming languages, right now, it is tough to try to gain different skills, because the effort needed to live everyday to the best of your ability requires so much. I am an over-achiever by nurture and nature and that makes for a crazy schedule, so knowing that there are people who understand and adjust for human nature is impressive and reassuring.
Speaking of which , one thing that I love is that he said, “we both know that you must master this.” Isn't that the truth. As a result, that acceptance is built into the design of the course in the form of providing students with multiple opportunities for recovery and actually wanting students to achieve mastery in a manner that is accessible and feasible for them. Honestly, part of the allure of online classwork is convenience, so it would be very unwise from a marketing stand point to take that away or erode it.
All and all, my impression of Dr. Giddens is wonderful and I look forward to learning a lot from him. I already have by just this simple interview. I am actually visiting the campus this Friday and am having lunch with him at Chick-Fil-A. My fiance has two psychology workshops to attend in Savannah, and I am traveling with her, so the extra hour drive won't be bad at all, considering the driving I would have done had I attended a brick and mortar graduate school.
Another random fact about me, I grow out and donate my hair to a charity called Children with Hairloss.  They provide hair pieces, wigs, toupees, etc for kids who cannot either grow a full head of hair or any at all because of medical conditions and/or complications, as well as accidents, free of charge, until 21 or 18.  I will be donating again in February 2013.  My fiance refuses to marry a curly puff ball.  The picture below was from April 2011.