Day 10

It was very interesting course that should be offered for all students at the beginning of their programs to help them with their course work, assignments, and work.  

Thank you for allowing me to help the students with their assignments. I felt challenged with some of their question and I had to search for answers which actually helped me acquire new Knowledge.  

I would like to have my A+ Jmark sent to this Email

victor.hilal@siksikaboardofeducation.com

Day 10

Understanding Our Learners

It’s very important to know our learners before attempting to design any teaching environment.

Learners today are different than the past, and one type of learning environment may not engage all learners or engage them to the capacity. Technology today has evolved and with it todays learners.  Learners of today are more engaged and more demanding they have access to media and the internet and the all tools that come with it. One teaching approach cannot offer the students the same level of engagement, and satisfy their demanding nature unless it’s designed to complement their demanding and changing nature with the tools, and designs that motivates them.  

Distributed learning environments that planned and designed carefully can offer the students the level of engagement that can satisfy their demanding nature and keep them motivated and satisfied.  But Before we can design and environment we need to know our students we need to know their “grade level” of learning and skills, their age, ethnicity, ways of living and culture, their history and background. We need to search around us within the schools and beyond to find more about them, we need to frequently observe the students, test them, look at their work and school records and ask other teachers to gather more information about them. We need to go beyond that and develop a relation with the parents, elders and the community to understand their backgrounds, culture and then their motivations and learning styles.  Once we build adequate information about our students then we could choose the best way of instructional methods, environment and begin on building the learning environment that focus on acquire the student’s motivation by activities and designs created for that reason.

Student’s motivation is the key for student’s engagement and for effective learning. Our job as educators is to insure that our students are interested challenged and motivated.

Day 8

Rational for building my course with Moodle

1.      Moodle is a free learning management system that I want to incorporate in our schools

At this Time I would like to test an online hosting for Moodle to see if it’s going to be successful before we spent the money on the Infrastructural to host it on the server.

I USED FREE MOODLE HOSTING

“At Key To School (KTS), we believe that Moodle is indeed a gift to all educators. However, it was observed that setting up and maintaining a Moodle server was an uphill task for many educators, not made easy by the restrictions imposed by many non-managed hosting providers. On the other end of the spectrum, the managed Moodle hosting was too costly for a first time Moodler who wanted to get acquainted for Moodle. We strive to ease both the learning curves well as provide the most affordable price - free, for all Moodlers.”

http://www.keytoschool.com/

2.      Creating the language and culture course consist with course theme and objectives

3.      Challenge myself with a project that can be helpful  and challenging for me and my  professional growth, and for my assignment at work

4.      The language course is going to be helpful for all the teachers and the students

5.      Moodle will enable teachers to build their own courses and utilize the benefits that come with it.

6.      Working from home allowed me to help my class mates with all their projects and technical skills.

7.       My project included all requirements for the EDER 669 and more such as videos, sound, animation, lessons and activities and more..

Day 7

Instead of using video software that I teach other teachers how to use challenged me self to use a new Animation software that work with the integration and learning of new language

GoAnimate.com: Blackfoot by victorhilal

http://goanimate.com/go/movie/00U_YtvoDXuE?utm_source=emailshare&uid=05j_TTYg_ZSg
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Day 6

Today, I help classmates with their projects and using IMovie interesting although using IMovie is a grate tools but I think we should have used other software to accommodate the students that don’t have a Mac at their schools that the can use with their students

Day 5

At the beginning of class, Dr. Larouche explained the (TPACK)  model where planning should come before Choosing Technology, he emphasizes that planning technology should be used as a tool to enforce the plans and the objectives of developed project.

Content< -------->pedagogy with the help of technology. 

“technology is the vehicle for online courses, that vehicle is driven by good pedagogy” a quote from the Henry & Meadows article that had explored the nine principles of creating and excellent online course environment by bringing the knowledge of experts in the field

(TPACK) reminded me off the ASSURE model (Basic Instructional Design Model for Online Instruction by Heinich, Molenda). The ASSURE model demonstrates that online learning has to go with a process before it could be implemented, this ISD process can be used by teachers to design and develop the best possible environment for their students, and could include the online course development process: –planning and design; development and implementation; and the course delivery and management.

I have seen many pilot projects that school board usually test a product like the I pad with the students before purchasing one for every one in the school, on the other hand I seen many Boards purchasing technology just because they want to spend their budget but do not bother to train the teachers and technology ends up collecting dust.  It’s very important to have teachers and other staff involved in the decisions of purchasing and implementing technology to be part of the process so technology end up used in the way it was intended to be used for students learning…

After Dr. Larouche's discuss the development of web tools from 1.0 to 4.0 and how they revolutionize the Internet we covered few web 2.0 applications that teachers can use to enhance their classes

Some examples are:

Wall wisher is an online notice board maker. Discussing a new idea? Taking notes? Giving feedback? Voicing opinion? Wishing a happy birthday?

Picnik - CachedPicnik lets you edit all your photos online, from one easy place.

Flipsnack is flipping book software that lets you convert PDF documents into Flash page flip digital publications that you can embed into your website.

 Prezi is the zooming presentation editor. ... Watch the Video. Browse products

Cool tools for school

Several high-quality web2.0 and tools sites like Wikispaces Cooltoolsforschools.
other:

Animoto

Blabberize

EduBlogs/KidBlogs

GoAnimate/XtraNormal

GoogleReader

Photos: Edit or Decorate

Prezi

PrimaryPad

TerraClues

ToonDo

Twitter

VoiceThread

WallWisher

Wordle

Yodio

Sitemap

Day 4

Dr. Larouche Start the class by explaining how news, technology and changes happening so rapidly then we watched a video that showed the integration of Skype in Facebook. It made me think that the giants are fighting again and who is going to when the battle this time

After that Dr. Larouche explained the use of Elluminate Live and he compared it to other similar software. Pros and cons

A good Idea would been to have groups in three create their own Elluminate using the free trial

In the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology article an absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching, authors Jim Henry and Jeff Meadows argue that: online excellent can be achieved through a list of nine principles that they have compiled, Principle 5: Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence. This enforces what Dr. Larouche explain in class that online teachers and students have to consider this aspect when using the online environment