CEP 812 Reflection

This course has really provided some amazing resources and opportunities to explore new technologies that I was unaware that existed.  It's amazing how broad one small topic can cover when you say "Multimedia" in the classrooms.  As our SIG project expanded we found so many more categories that it could cover and we felt it was best to focus on areas where each of us could grow as learners.  I was always aware of a couple of the applications that were mentioned in the blog posting, but discovered so many more while doing so. Even though it wasn't a major part of our activity, the web site "delicious.com" has a really unique functionality that I've seen others post links to in blogs and social networking sites but never really understood why.  It wasn't until I used it for our SIG assignment did the real benefit come to life and show some amazing capabilities.  Just being able to find a site and then share it with someone else makes the site not only very functional but also a nice collaborative experience.  I've learned a lot over these past three classes more than I would have ever expected to being in my position, but that also makes me more excited to continue my education and see what else is out there I've not discovered.

I've by far passed by my expectations and personal goals for learning about technology integration.  I don't think a day at work doesn't go by where I see a use for something I've learned already or thought about using for future projects.  Even though I'm not a "teacher of a classroom" I see my role expanding and growing to help others in our college see some of these technology integration opportunities in their classrooms.

My newest goal is really a promise to myself, I guess.  I'm already anxious to start the fall semester in the MAET program so that is one high goal that I never thought was possible to myself, but always to others.  My promise is to spend a little time each day looking for something new and wonderful to learn about and try to integrate it into my own work even if not possible for others.  I've got a brand new look on technology in the classroom and feel I need to be in fore-front exploring and pushing the limits.  So, if I had to say if I had a new long term goal, I would say that once I complete the MAET program, I'm really considering staying with the teaching possibility and will look into teaching a course or two at the university with others and making my part more technology integrated instead of the same old lecture and paper type classroom.  I really see a long-term goal for me doing it, and now I have the tools and ambition to make it happen.  It's been an amazing certificate program and can't wait for the next step in my education to start.

Project Evaluation

I don't know if I can truly say that the project has been implemented enough, so I'm going to address this blog as if it was a 50% implemented and 50% not implemented and answer all the questions outlined in the rubrics and by instructor's note.

If I were to evaluate the project's success, it would be based on purely the commitment and collaboration from all involved but would also be based on personal conversations held with faculty and students.  I already have a positive response from the faculty that I've met with and our administrative team but we won't have a true PLC implemented until we get our students back in session and we get our community involved together.  Once the students are back, by having our bi-weekly meetings we will be able to provide a better feel for what faculty are seeing in their students and feedback from our advisors who deal directly with students and their course issues.  I'm hopeful that the feedback will be positive from students and that there is a more open door policy between students and faculty and we have very open discussions in our discussion boards and blogs.

The only change I think that would have made a bigger impact was the time frame when the initial project idea and implementation started.  Due to the summer session and when I could take our course, I would have preferred to have started something of this nature in the middle of Spring semester when students and alumni would have been around to provide crucial feedback and suggestions.  As it stands, a summer course means no students around and limited faculty available to meet and discuss such a project of this magnitude.  A middle of a semester would have given us 8 weeks of working with faculty and students to get the ball rolling and then given us a summer to revise and evaluate what worked and what hasn't and alter our direction to make sure things are moving in the right direction.   Starting it over the summer just means that not only will faculty need to set aside more time for our meetings to discuss the PLC but that time will take away from them getting their own courses ready, which isn't a good situation either.

Not sure if I learned any lessons that others might benefit from but one thing that really stands out in the whole process is having SUPPORT for the project.  I just don't mean a co-worker or another teacher thinking it's a wonderful idea, but in order to do it and do it successfully it needs to be from the very top down.  In my case, I have support from the college's Dean, Assistant Dean, and Associate Deans to plan and implement the PLC within the college.  They are aware of the benefits and success that come from such communities and anything that involved education, especially the concern of students learning the materials, it becomes a top priority from everyone.  So, the lesson would be, make sure you have the support from top down first and things will move along more smoothly than just trying to do it by yourself.

If I was to approach another project of this type, I would do one thing differently.  I understand that there are tons of resources out on the Internet as my previous blog postings show, but to get a real life example and get a hands-on opinion of how it really worked or failed, I would look internally.  By this I mean, I have lots of colleagues across campus that are faculty, administrators, staff, etc. and at least one of them have implemented something of this nature before.  I would want to have the time to meet with them, sit down and possibly sit in on a meeting or at least be able to read their electronic records on their implementation.  Being able to meet and discuss with someone who has been involved in such a project provides insights, details and a "candid assessment" of the project that aren't always provided in the resources found on the Internet.  With MSU being such a large university, I'm sure I would be able to find someone will to meet and discuss their implementation.  This I believe would be very beneficial to our implementation.  I may consider doing this anyhow as ours is just beginning to form and we haven't finalized any decisions yet.

Project Implementation (PodCast)

You can listen my to my podcast on how my implementation on my project went.

Internet Research for TechQuest Project

Professional Learning Communities have been around for several years now in the K12 environments  and have expanded into higher education.  The benefits from PLCs outweighs the cost, time and commitment to have a successful one.  What other secondary educations have implemented and had success? The Vermont Department of Education has revamped it's entire teaching strategies from K12 through most major universities.  

Many of my findings for higher educations implementing PLCs are all showing improved learning and more collaborative relationships are being established.  A commitment of time is a resource that must be reallocated within the structure seems to be one of the biggest factors among most that is crucial when implementing something new into a established system.  Research has also shown that the time being committed by students, faculty, administrators and alumni is most effective if the participants value the work that is being done is worthwhile.

As I performed my searches, I found that there were a lot of K12 PLCs that were showing up but I wasn't finding too many higher education examples.  Instead of just using Google, I decided to give SearchCredible.com a try that provides an quick and easy search for 26 search engines.  I didn't use them all since some wouldn't pertain to the information I was searching for.  I did however end up using Bing, Google, Google Scholar, Library of Congress, and used Wikipedia (used only to reference a couple schools for more information)

As I also found out that by changing my search topics from PLCs to include Faculty Learning Communities, I was able to get a larger pool of data.  It wasn't until I was at a site that they used the terms back and forth did I realize it was another option to check into.

As I performed my searches I found lots of information on Professional Learning Communities but was limited on Higher Education and actual reports and analysis.  Below were just a few of the ones that stood out as good resources to help dig deeper into my project:

SEDL - Advancing Research, Improving Education

A website dedicated to professional learning communities to help focus on improving school performance, strengthening teaching and learning in content areas, integrating technology into teaching and learning, involving family and community in student learning, and connecting disability research to practice.

Sam Houston State University:

The Sam Houston State University Freshman Learning Community (FLC) cohorts are an enhanced non-residential educational experience specifically designed to foster the intellectual development of students through increased interaction with fellow students, faculty and staff. The FLC cohorts offer first-year college students a unique opportunity to become intimately familiar with the necessary academic and social skills that will be a first step toward not only a dynamic undergraduate experience.

Kingsborough Community College

A website at a community college who has been using learning communities since 1995 and have expanded to various communities within the college.

Experimental Learning in Higher Education: Linking Classroom and Community

A review on experiential learning in higher education. While the literature suggests that experiential learning is a necessary and vital component of formal instruction in colleges and universities, controversy never-the-less exists among scholars and educators about its place and use. 

Faculty Focus

A website featuring innovative strategies, best practices and fresh perspectives on what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to teaching, learning, and leading in higher education today.

Bringing it All Together

Wow, I can't believe another course is under my belt.  The course started off introducing us to some more tools that we briefly touched upon in CEP810.  Being an IT person and not a teacher in the K-12 environment I really struggled in the beginning of the course with teaching technologies and integrating them into the assignments.  I spend my days developing web applications for faculty and staff which is pretty straight forward in thinking methods - collect the data, display the data and generate reports.  So, to have to think of what other ways could someone learn this material was indeed very difficult and made me think about things differently.  Talk about training an old dog new tricks.  The plus side is that it made me a better educator in the long run.  I did learn that there is more than one way of doing things and sometimes the 'easiest' isn't always the best way.  The WebQuest and webpage assignments were easy to complete since doing web sites isn't anything for me, but the WebQuest pushed my knowledge again on the teaching technologies.  It wasn't until the Stair project that I really learned what those pedagogical strategies are and how to use several of them to get information out to the students.  In a way, the Stair was a wake up call for me.  One knows they are in trouble when the instructor makes it obvious that I need to add more strategies.  In the end, I came out successful and much more knowledgable on strategies and how to incorporate them.

The completion of this course has by far passed my personal goals about technology integration.  Initially I thought it was just a course to create website and web site, but it became much more.  I never thought of myself as someone being a 'digital immigrant' with my background, but from all the additional resources and techniques on integrating with technology, I find myself to be in that category from the beginning.  Not only did the course provide some wonderful opportunities to learn something new, but those final projects are actually going to be used on regular basis.

New goals now?  With CEP812 starting up in a week, my goals are that the course will be as challenging as this course was and it provides new opportunities and resources that I can take back and use.  I've achieved one of my goals a few months ago by completing CEP810 after being away from school for over 12 years.  Now, my next big goal is to move forward, complete the Certificate Program and start on the Masters degree.  One of my smaller goals is to use the information gained from this course and to build on them.  I see several uses out of Stairs for our college and WebQuests.  I plan on meeting several of the faculty to discuss the possibilities of integrating them into things they teach and to hopefully creating a library of resources for Lyman Briggs College students and faculty.

On a personal note, thanks to Debbie and Julie for keeping their comments sincere and nice about my blog posts.  I sure hope you both continue to blog because I enjoyed reading them.

Teaching and Learning in Internet-based environments

After reading both articles, I felt a little bit more informed on some of the technologies that are available.  I'm not saying I didn't know what all of them were but the quality characteristics was something that I hadn't thought completely about until viewing the table of information.  With so many choices to decide and pick which would be the used for an online experience is rough.  Of course, choosing the easy pick of WebQuest wouldn't be the right thing for this blog.  The one that caught my eye of course was the educational gaming, which the only reason it did because of the word 'gaming' is in the title.  Although after visiting most of the resources links it's clearly a good choice.  

I finally decided on a technology that I could see being very valuable to my current position, and help out many others in the college.  The Career Planning Tools experience would be something that many of our students, faculty and staff could benefit from.  How wonderful it would be to have a site where our students could access career opportunities, house information to employers, and with the collaboration tool the students could interact with even our alumni who may have potential career position openings.  By having a central application that students and faculty can interact and post resources it could be a wonderful tool for many of our students.

As for a technology that would be harder to use, I'm leaning toward Online resource validation.  To be honest, it wasn't what I was thinking it was all about and still not 100% sure even after going to the links provided.  I'm assuming that it's purpose is to have students confirm that the data that they are using is correct and the quality of the content is high.  By enforcing that not one site has all the answers and to many the one source is all they will need and use.  So, having to dig into an item and validate the information at several resources will be tough but really needed.  I can see this extremely important for papers and how the teacher's role would play a major part in helping the student.  I can only imagine a student giving a presentation on his topic to only find out that his information that he presented to the class was incorrect.  That would be extremely embarrassing and upsetting for the student.  But as mentioned above, to avoid this from happening it will take extra time and work to validate the data which in long run is well worth the time.

Zoho Sheets Evaluation

I broke up my learning excursion on the new application up over several days of exploring. Trying to learn a new application in one day just leads to frustration or just coming to the conclusion of "it's just like this other product" which I didn't want to do.  Zoho applications were a completely new experience for me.  I've never heard of it or had any idea what other applications were available.

Day 1:  Once my account was created (murray@zoho.com) I spent the first few minutes exploring the top navigation/function buttons.  Obvious there were several buttons that are universal (bold, italics, line justification, sum, etc) but there were ones that were familiar but normally on the display of buttons.  Several of these buttons were for the formatting of the cells, but are so commonly used that it made sense to put on the list (dollar sign, date format, text wrap, and others).  I found myself trying out various of the buttons and playing with some test data.

Day 2:  I spent the next day playing with the purpose of spreadsheets and decided to manipulate some data and do some calculations.  Having some experience with Microsoft Excel I felt pretty confident with formulas and not to my surprise many of the formulas are exactly the same.  I added some numbers and used the 'drag-down' technique to populate cells.  I added text (Monday, Tuesday) and tried the drag technique and the other days of the week were populated, this really didn't surprise me.  I tried a few more basic calculations and then proceeded to try other formulas.  I like 'randbetween' so created a list of values which worked and of course was written same formula as in Excel.  I ended the second day of playing with some values created so explored another feature of spreadsheet is the charts.  I created a simple bar chart with a few values.  There are clearly very limited features that can be applied to the charts.  The amount of chart choices are wonderful but there isn't that granular details that Excel allows you to manipulate but for a simple chart it was perfect.

Day 3: My intentions were to explore a few of the buttons that focus on sharing and publishing, which I'm assuming throughout all the Zoho applications.  The publish button gave many options especially the one I found interesting was the ability to embed in website/blog.  This option gives the code to display the sheet directly within the page.  The other item I explored was the 'share' button.  This gave the options to invite other users to share the file with.  Since Julie had already created a group for us, I simply added that group to the permissions.  Very easy and straightforward to create an file and share it.  Not being able to have any group members on-line at same time prevented a test to see if simultaneous edits were possible, which I'm thinking it may.  This will be one item I will continue to test and explore with more.

Overall, I was very impressed with such an on-line "free" application that has so many features.  Even though Google Docs are very similar it's nice to know that other options are available. For those that don't have the money to spend on a Microsoft product or even want to use up disk space on their computers, this is a excellent choice.  Having the ability to export files as Excel file, comma separated values, and even PDF  makes it very compatible with any other software applications that people have.  I plan to use Zoho apps for a period of time to see if I'm able to remove my installed Office suite, the only draw-back is I need to be connected to the Internet to use Zoho Sheets.  There is no 'off-line' option like there are for other Zoho apps.