Have you ever been tasked with reinventing the wheel? Certainly most teachers have felt this at some time or another. Do I find a totally new novel and build an amazing but life-absorbing unit on it, or do I teach The Outsiders, as my teachers and my parents' teachers have before me? Compiling a Non-LMS toolkit feels a bit like reinventing the wheel, but in a good way. The cynic in me blanches at the thought of reinventing my teaching practice to totally exclude the comfort of a Learning Management System. Would this pass FOIPPA? Would I really have time to do a super-cool and invigorating course overhaul when I'm currently teaching 33 different courses? Let's ignore the cynic and take a look at what I really do think could be an ideal learning environment for many of our students. Please take a look at the infographic I created using piktochart, and feel welcome to read my more detailed rationale that follows.
The following questions are the organizational backbone of my infographic, and shaped my thinking around this topic:
How will you build community and inspire discourse? A visually pleasing homepage for the course, with links to collaborative applications such as Microsoft OneNote are key to how I would build community. Seeing the faces of your classmates and teachers is important, so a webcast app like Zoom or Hangouts would be an important part of initial community building. I also really enjoy the apps Padlet for posting on a topic, Flipgrid for asynchronous discussion with the added bonus of seeing the face and hearing the voice of the participant, and twitter for its ability to tag and reply, as well as connect to experts in the field of study. It's also important to ensure that course design supports and encourages community and discourse. I like to centre my courses around critical learning questions that students can work together to answer, and build as much discussion and reflection into the assignments and tasks as possible. OneNote allows the teacher to set up a Collaboration Space for students to work together, similarly to how students can work in Google Docs together asynchronously or in real-time. What are the Non-LMS tools that will help you and how? Microsoft 365: and the associated apps would be one major way I could organize content, interact with my students as a group and individually, and to gather and house information from the various apps we're using outside of the 365 realm. For example, Microsoft Flow allows you to set up different workflows for tasks like notifying the class when someone tweets with #bvecEnglish12 or something along those lines. We can use a calendar, link to email, contact students and parents, provide lesson content, resources, and collaborate on assignments all within the OneNote Class Notebook. It's kind of amazing. I think it really lends an authenticity and social presence to the class that is invaluable in inspiring discourse and building community. I also feel it is important to suit the nature of the discussion to the preferences of the group. If a class were more interested in posting discussions in Google+ or a private Facebook Group than in the chat areas of OneNote, I would support that, as long as the number of different apps involved did not become overwhelming (and the district and FOIPPA would allow it). How will you provide content, interactivity with content, and organization? As I become more fluent with Camtasia and screencasting, I intend to provide more video and audio instructions and content for my courses, via my course homepage and links to my YouTube channel. This is great for different learners, and one of the things I find students having difficulty with now is interpreting written instructions. Content can also be linked through the course homepage in Weebly or Google Sites, and housed within OneNote, which as I have said before, is incredibly versatile and user friendly. The OneNote Class Notebook allows me to set up a content area that allows student to interact with content, download assignments, etc. Students can interact with each other or with me through this same Notebook, or some of the other applications listed above as fits the learning task at hand. What are the Non-LMS tools that will help you and how? Any of the tools listed in my infographic or above are designed to help both me and the students create an engaging learning environment. To get us interacting with each other and the content, while reflecting and assessing as we go. The teacher is as much a part of the learning as the student are. I would use MyEducation BC for gradebook and further communciation, as it is both required by our Provincial Ministry of Education as well as a robust and useful application. I love that I can post grades to the student/parent portal, and that there are options for blogging as well. How will you handle assessment as, for and of learning? Speaking of blogging, reflecting on learning is crucial, and a blog is a great way for students to answer discussion questions and really formulate ideas around a topic, as well as reflecting on their own progress and learning journey. Students could use any number of blogging sites, such as Blogger or Weebly. As a humanities teacher, assessment for learning comes naturally through written feedback comments -- giving a student a "number" on an essay has rarely helped that student write a better essay the next time around. OneNote allows for me to give constructive feedback directly on the student work within the Notebook, and I always allow students to revise, as this is where some of the best learning occurs. OneNote also allows students to edit each others work, which can be incredibly powerful assessment of one's own learning as well. I like different quiz and test apps, such as Quizlet, Kahoot, and Google Forms, especially since this can inform me of student understanding in time for me to adjust content or timelines according to individual needs. I tend to test my students skills rather than their knowledge, since I think that how one uses and organizes knowledge is much more important than rote learning, so the flexibility of Google Forms, for example, is really rich and helpful.
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Leslie McCurrachEnthusiastic Learner. Avid Gardener. DL Teacher. Archives
March 2018
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