As we come to the end of this course, I must say that I have gained a wealth of information! I must say that going in I was really nervous about taking an online course because I had never taken one before. However as I come to the close of this one I have to admit that it will be hard to go back into a F2F class as a student after having this experience. While the class as whole was a valuable learning experience, I really felt that with my background in the area of Education, a lot of the information in part 1 was somewhat of a refresher for me. The second half of the course on the other hand gave me a chance to go a little deeper and learn some new things to put under my belt. While I was familiar with some of the terms in part 2, I had not had the opportunity to learn the content as a whole. Taking part 2 of this class gave me a chance to accomplish that.
One of the first things we talked about were the learning theories. I was very familiar with constructivism and behaviorism and in fact have even implemented them to a certain extent in my own classroom. Cognitivism on the other hand was a little less familiar to me. The one idea that stood out to me concerning cognitivism was the fact that you have to understand how that brain processes information and that active participation has to be present in order for learning to occur. I really think that this theory complements the constructivism theory and that the two together could maximize the learning experience for anyone. In fact my goal is to learn more about both theories and put them into action in my own classroom!
The next thing we talked about was the teaching models. As I mentioned before it took me a few bumps on the head to understand that while teacher centered instruction is acceptable sometimes, a more student centered style of instruction is what is going to provide the maximum benefit for students. Going forward in my teaching career I will be trying to find that balance between teacher centered and student centered so that the learning experience occurs at full capacity. After all it really is about the student. Hopefully if you have made it to the point of teaching you have already mastered the material you are teaching so it should be all about your students.
Next we talked about the different technologies. I must say I was overwhelmed to see all the things that were available. In fact, during that unit I spent a lot of extra time looking at the resources out there and I was still not able to get through them all. Although I use many different multimedia sources in my classroom, creating the rubric to rate them was a wonderful experience for me. Before that assignment I never really thought of rating them but I must admit it will save time to just do a quick mental evaluation using the rubric as you look at different multimedia resources. Also I learned what an annotated bibliography was.
Finally I learned about digital portfolios. Prior to this course I had been working on a digital portfolio in livetext. However because of the nature of my portfolio I did not realize how valuable a digital portfolio could be. As I continue to develop my portfolio for this course I will keep my audience in mind and the purpose for the portfolio.
As the second part of this course comes to a close I must admit that I am definitely still interested in teaching an online course. I'm still a little intimidated about actually designing one but I'm sure that after taking the third class, I will be well prepared for it!
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