Design Experiment 4: PBworks

PBworks is essentially a “wiki,” in fact PBworks started out as a wiki (a “wiki” is a website that enables editing of content by its users, think Wikipedia).

PBworks specifically is a “work space” that allows for collaborative editing of pages and files. Businesses, corporations and legal firms mostly use the platform to facilitate tech support, however as educators let’s think about the possibilities wikis could afford in the classroom.

Wikis have the ability to offer educational affordances that are unique in that that they can truly be a collaborative educational experience, allowing the students to not only discuss content but to PROVIDE content.
Different than how wikis used to be work, it appears PBworks has significantly reduced the learning curve needed to create and/or use a wiki. With a simple click a user is able to share, tag, and contribute to the page in addition to inviting others to view the page. I am always advocating for simplicity with technology and I appreciate how PBworks has incorporated this concept into their design. 

I think my effectiveness as an educator would absolutely be enhanced by using a wiki (side note: this experience has most definitely persuaded me to incorporate the use of a wiki in my courses). However, I think getting students to engage in the online environment would be a bit tricky. Learning a new website, researching and providing their own ideas on topics is a different pedegological approach than most students are used to (or maybe ready for). As much research that exists promoting alternative teaching styles that contrast the traditional lecture and as much as students claim to hate the lecture teaching style, I believe they have been trained in this style of teaching and educators would experience a bit of resistance in students engaging in this pedegological approach. I however truly believe that for students to be successful and effective in life after school, a life that literally buzzes with online technology, they need to experience this teaching style and classroom experience.

Concerning my own courses? I could easily incorporate facilitation of learning objectives from an Animal Rights/Animal Welfare lesson (among many others I teach) into a wiki page. A primary learning outcome would be for the students to be able to identify major veins of thought in the movements, compare and contrast the movements, identify major political legislation pertaining to the ideas, and persuasively defend one or the other.

The students would be able to accomplish these learning outcomes with the use of a wiki by sharing information they believe and information they find concerning the movements. They would be exposed to differing opinions and have the opportunity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and sensationalism.

Secondary objectives (objectives they meet simply by participating) would include the ability to effectively contribute to collaborative online platforms, identify credible websites, and learn how to reference material.

Using a wiki to accompany a course allows the instructor to make positive and effective use of distributed cognition and distributed learning by using the power of the group's collective cognition in order for them to learn from and with each other and allowing the students to use whatever resource(s) they deem appropriate to facilitate their contribution to the lesson.

Design Experiment 3: Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, & YouTube

Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, & YouTube

Does Khan Academy have content for my grade level and subject?
A quick look at the aesthetics of the online learning platform, Khan Academy, reveals that Khan Academy is set up as an online community where you can choose an avatar and a unique username to represent yourself, where you can keep tabs on your progress, visit with the community at large with questions, comments, and answers, and create projects. However, it does not appear very user friendly without a learning curve.
In a previous career, I taught Ag Science to secondary students. Kahn Academy does not have anything specifically set up for agriculture students however, because agriculture encompasses so many other disciplines it is easy to supplement your lesson with curriculum from Kahn Academy. For example, Kahn Academy offers curriculum in Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Economics, Finance, and Entrepreneurship, all concepts that are covered in Agriculture Science curriculum.

Are the resources through Kahn Academy helpful to college students in some capacity, as primary or secondary sources for a course?
As an lecturer of Ag Sciences at the post secondary level; I find Kahn Academey provides resources that are just as useful for the same reasons as above. Kahn Academy can supplement post secondary education in agriculture science as a secondary source of curriculum.

What does MIT Open Courseware offer for my subject and level?
MIT Open Courseware is very similar to Kahn Academy in material offered for instructors of Agriculture Sciences, while agriculture is not a subject specifically offered in it's curriculum, there are many courses taught with curriculum to accompany the courses that complement an agriculture science curriculum in post secondary education, in addition to a large amount of information for each secondary resource. In addition to the subjects offered in the Kahn Academy that compliment ag science curriculum, MIT Open Courseware also offers Business, Energy, Engineering, Fine Arts, Social Science, society,Teaching and Education.
I find MIT Open Courseware much easier to navigate with many more resources to choose from. I like the platform's organization and aesthetics to be much more appealing than that of Kahn Academy, in addition to the ease of use. A user does not even need to set up an account to access the resources, for already over extended instructors this is much more beneficial than a non educator might understand.
I will personally be using MIT Open Courseware in my courses, starting this Fall.

What does YouTube offer for subject and level?
YouTube offers everything for everyone.
I use YouTube for almost every course I teach, sometimes to enhance the curriculum concepts, sometimes as an icebreaker at the beginning of a course, and even sometimes I use it to provide a bit of related or even un-related humor to the course.
In my personal time, with a personal social media account, I run across a myriad of YouTube videos relevant to courses that I teach.
And not only is YouTube a great resource to accompany your more traditional resources but YouTube can also serve to deliver your own material in an online course by videoing and posting your lectures and/or having students posting their own videoed assignments, or researching on their own; videos that would compliment a lesson and sharing it with the class.

Design Experiment 2: The Edmodo Experience

The aesthetics and organization of Edmodo are great because they resemble the popular social media platforms, making the unfamiliarity of the platform less of a barrier because the learner would find themselves in a familiar feeling environment and has an idea of how to navigate the platform without resorting to alternative sources to begin working on a course or, as a student, in the course. There are tabs to access quizzes, assignments, and notes from the instructor and/or other students in the course, making the navigation of the platform self-evident. For example, if the instructor informs the students there is a Week 2 quiz due on a set date, the students can simply click the “quizzes” tab to access the quiz.

However, the verbiage used on the platform needs to better accommodate and reflect the jargon of education. For example, I still don’t understand what a “group” is within the Edmodo platform. I would prefer the platform was set up as “Ms. Salem’s Online Classroom” with the “groups” being further specified into courses or classes i.e. “ANS 1319 Course/Class”. I would also enjoy the ability to further separate those courses or classes into sections.

So…to access Ms. Salem’s online material a student would log into Edmodo > Ms. Salem’s Online Classroom > ANS 1319 > ANS 1319.001, in order to access their course and/or section information.

In contrast, while the Pearson Learning platform we use for online learning at Texas A&M – Commerce University is familiar and effective; the platform is clumsy to operate and the appearance and usability is outdated.  

This technology supports the online teaching pedagogical approach in addition to open ended instruction, interdisciplinary learning, discovery learning, differentiated instruction, experiential learning, co-operative learning, peer teaching, case study, and locus of control, in addition to any pedagogical approach an instructor wanted to employ. I believe with a little ingenuity and thought most lessons that are effectively taught, with a specific learning outcome in mind, in a traditional classroom can also be effectively taught in an online course. The trick is that the pedagogical approach used in the classroom for a specified learning outcome might need to be altered or abandoned for a different approach in an online setting. For example, providing traditional lecture in conjunction with an experiential learning activity in a face-to-face course might need to be adjusted to a co-operative learning activity with a simulated experiential learning activity.

The affordances of Edmodo include the same affordances we have experienced with the Pearson Learning course platform. While authentic experience related to the lesson is the ideal learning activity, these experiential learning activities can also be experienced to a lesser degree through simulations and videos in many courses. However if the course required the experiential learning activity to include an online experience of some kind, say opening an account and developing a fictitious yet complete course, this experiential learning activity could be an authentic experiential learning experience for the learner.

Design Experiment 1: Google Apps

Google Classroom is an innovative, new, and effective way to teach (read: reach) a new generation of students. Google Classroom is easy to navigate, simple to use, and uses a social media type of interaction that billions of people across the globe have become familiar with, meaning there is a low degree of learning curve for students who are new to the Google platform and the associated applications.
I like the ease of use of Google Classroom, many people who are still in the business of teaching were originally trained in education before the boom of the internet and online learning began, meaning that even though they know they need to utilize other teaching methods such as online classrooms they need to "go back to the classroom" and learn how to use these programs themselves, creating a laggard effect in adopting new methods of teaching. Refreshingly, the platform seems to have been built around the idea of simplicity. In addition to a few other features, the home screen has two interactive tabs labeled "Announcements" and "Assignments." As a teacher, you simply click and post, as a student you only need to click and absorb.
It is easy to add students to the classroom by invitation with a pre assigned code or to invite the students through an email.
You can customize the course with some background graphics and with some creativity and organization you can create a more complex classroom with discussion boards or other course customizations to your liking, but essentially Google Classroom has decided to keep it simple.
I wasn't able to access the Google classroom but one of the YouTube video I watched described the simplicity of the platform as a possible limitation. I might agree with this statement if I didn't consider the learning curve technology limited instructors and they constancy barrage of new technologies being released and introduced every day, requiring us, that is all of us regardless of what field you might be involved in, to learn a new platform, new logins, new passwords, it can be exhausting which in turn makes the introduction of new technologies a limiting factor of new technologies. I appreciate the simplicity Google Classroom offers.
In addition to exploring what I could in Google Classroom, I also explored, with teaching in mind, a few other Google apps including Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Forms. I think these two apps could easily and seamlessly integrated into any face to face course making the course interactive on another level and/or could be utilized in an already existing online course.
To illustrate this I would like to take a course that I currently teach for the university and outline how I can use these two apps in my online course.
I teach ANS 1319 - Introduction to Animal Science online, the course is exactly what it states to be and is an introduction to basic concepts covered in animal science, of the many things covered in a semester animal rights and animal welfare concepts are covered in this course. Traditionally I would introduce the concepts and introduce the ideas of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare to the students with video, online curriculum, websites I encourage them to visit, and perspectives from both sides of the debate. I then have the students debate (in a face to face course) the concepts or discuss ideas on a discussion board (online course) and write a summary paper based on research and experience from the course. Losing the debate in the online forum is something I hated doing but couldn't figure out how to address, with Google Docs and Google slides I can assign groups and they can create an effective debate and research paper together, in real time if they organize it that way.
As the instructor I would be able to utilize Google Forms to organize test and quiz materials and distribute questionnaires to the students allowing them to take ownership of the course by voting on which concept to address the following week or what concept needs more attention.
It allows the teacher to use a student centered model of teaching that new students are comfortable with, it forces interaction of online students past the simple discussion portion of most online classrooms, and it facilitates the experiential learning component that is so hard to facilitate in online forums.
In addition to the course and topic learning outcomes designated by the instructor the students also learn how to interact with people in an online environment, the learn how to navigate technologies they may be unfamiliar with, they learn how to collaborate with their peers, and how to present material electronically.
The friendliness of Google to education is outstanding. I have spent many years avoiding Google because of the comfort and east I have with the traditional face to face teaching model. However this lesson has left me with some questions I would like to address concerning Google educational materials and how to better utilize them in my courses.