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​Week 5 Assignment

What benefits do you see in educators knowing how to design and implement online learning? As far as benefits for knowing how to design and implement online learning the greatest benefit that I see is the opportunity for everyone to educate themselves. People have busy lives and schedules; the biggest complain from everyone is that there is not enough time. With online learning people can have access 24/7, they can work at their pace and in their time slot. For a student enrolled in any type of learning (high school, college, university, technical school, etc.) online learning provides them with the opportunity to work and attend classes. Students with families can attend their family and then do their online work. What I am trying to say is that online learning is for the people with busy schedules and lives. Being able to design an online course is beneficial to teachers or instructors because they can free up some face to face time with students. By creating online learning the students can work by themselves and the teacher or instructor only has to be available to answer questions. With all the new technology the questions can be answered from virtually anywhere.

How will you professionally use your course that you designed? Course designing is fairly new to me. I have attended online courses before but designing is different. Let me just tell you I didn’t know it was this easy. Schoology makes it simple and easy to create an online course. As per the discussions there are other programs and they all simplify the process. The course that I created still needs some tweaking, but when I am done I want to use it in my classroom. I feel very confident about creating and designing an online course. I will talk it over with my colleagues and even show them how simple and easy it is to create. I will show them the benefits and hopefully get them to create an online course and use it in their classrooms. Once we are using it maybe some more colleagues can join and eventually the whole school will be able to incorporate online learning in their classroom.

Will you integrate online learning in your role as a teacher/staff developer? As a teacher I do plan to integrate online learning in my classroom. I plan to create small tasks that my students can work on independently and on their individual time. I can start by testing it and eventually using it to pick up an actual grade. I can use online learning as another means to engage students. They feel it is exciting to learn in different ways and different settings. I am a 1st grade teacher, my students love for me to send them to practice a skill on the computer. Online learning will be another way of them reinforcing what they have learned or will be learning. I can even have them complete an assignment for what they missed on a day that they were out. Right now I have a web page that parents can visit to find information like: the story of the week, spelling list, math lesson, science lesson, social studies lesson, and useful websites for their child to practice on. With online learning I can have assignments that are aligned with the curriculum and they can be more meaningful.

What questions do you still have about inline learning? Online learning is a very broad topic. I don’t think I have any questions as of now. I know I don’t know it all, but when I come to a question I think I know how to look for the answer. It is like with everything that is new you have lots of questions in the beginning and eventually you see that it’s not that difficult. I would like to see how my online course works and the end outcome. Then I will probably have some questions and like I said I will know where to look for the answers. With my colleagues I hope that I can answer all of their questions. The questions that I don’t have a response for, I will look for the appropriate response. I hope that I can learn to simplify the steps so that everyone can feel confident in using online learning in my campus.

What will you do with this new learning? I hope to implement this new learning in my professional job as a teacher. I hope to share my knowledge with my colleagues and also have them implement online learning in their classrooms. I hope to share my experiences with my principal and maybe she can encourage the teachers that have a mind set that what they are doing works. We all have to become digital natives rather than digital immigrants. I hope to open many doors for my students and have them embrace technology, rather than fear it. They have to be prepared to succeed in this fast paced world of technology. As I mentioned before in order to reach every student in our classroom we have to find different ways or methods to reach them. All students don’t learn in the same way, but all students in my opinion can learn with technology. Technology addresses the needs of all different types of learners.

References:

Davis, Niki & Rose, Ray (2009). NACOL: //Professional Development for Virtual Schooling and Online Learning//. Retrieved May 13, 2010

Prensky, M. (2001). //Digital natives, digital immigrants//. Retrieved on May 15, 2010