EDLD 5364 Week 5 Reflection

This week was a good week as we wrapped up this course and completed our team project. Each member contributed to the project and it is great to work with the group of professional in my team. This week’s videos were very enlightening. This week I watched a video from Professor James Paul Gee about gaming as a form of assessment. I never really looked at games as a form of assessing a student’s knowledge or looking at it as a form of higher-level thinking and problem solving. However, after listening to his talk I have a better appreciation of those that use games. He stated that gaming is a process of problem solving where the student gets immediate feedback to their game experience. If they fail at a level it takes them back to their last known place marker and lets them try again. The student experiments with the game until they figure out the problem and can solve it to pass to the next level. Education should be the same. Students should use gaming to solve problems. As Professor Gee stated, “chemistry class is a game where the students learn the game of chemistry”. It would be great if we could make all classes run in this manner. All the other videos were taking about how gaming is becoming a new way of learning. Teaching should be about learning how to solve complex problems using a game based format. I now have a great appreciation of those students that game. I also let my students use a program called Study Island that has a gaming section that once their daily and weekly work has been completed, they are allowed to play on the game side. I think that they students are learning more because it is making them think in the way they look at life in the gaming world.

EDLD 5364 Week 4 Reflection

This week there was no web conference with Dr. Borel. However, my team and I had a web conference for almost an hour as we summed up the projects we are each going to do for this week’s assignment. I am going to make a video about the natural resources of Canada for the social studies/geography for my part of t he project. I have already found the pictures to use and will use iMovie to make the movie with voice over on the pictures. The reading were interesting this week about how schools are able use technology to enhance their students learning. Through the use of UDL, Universal Design for Learning, educators are able to develop a comprehensive learning strategy that takes students from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This is both an awesome thing to look at and at the same time, depressing because I am unable to do the same things. The reason that it can’t be done is because as a teacher I am required to teach the students what they need to know to pass the state mandated performance exam. I have to teach the test rather than teach the students what they need to know to succeed in this changing world. Even if I could find away around teaching the test, I would not be able to do so due to the filters in place on the computers. WE are unable to even do the basics of learning using the blogs, wikis, and document sharing for collaboration. That is the frustrating part is that I could do so much but the “system” will not let us because we have to “teach the test” instead of teaching the children. Link to my video for this weeks project. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0Nuhm25sY

EDLD 5364 Week 3 Reflection

This week was a good week albeit a very busy week. The web conference was very good and informative. The bugs and issues from last week were worked out and Dr. Borel was able to get the message about this week’s lesson and secrets to success out. The assignments this week is complex and involves much more thought and work to complete. We are continuing to work on our group project and finalizing most of the work. There is some confusion about exactly what we are supposed to submit and on what but after our team web conference we have figured out the requirements. The major issue and drawback with the course assignment to date is the website for the project. The site is difficult to work with in setting up and formatting the pages. Once that is complete then submitting our work next week will be easy. The most interesting part of this week is the electronic book we had to create and share. I completed mine in about 3 hours and found that I actually had a good time doing it. This will be an excellent tool to have the students do and to also show to our students. I could see where this tool could be used for the lower grade levels since it has the interaction of the character as the students learn and read along. file:///Users/RTC/Downloads/Water_Cycle_Dude/start.html

WDLD 5364 Week 2 Reflection

This week’s web conference was an utter disaster. Something was wrong with someone’s microphone that caused a feedback loop. My sound was similar to the Emergency Broadcast System message alerts. I was unable to hear anything that was said by Dr. Borel. The best part of this week’s assignment was from the Google® Hangout with my team. We spent nearly 90 minutes going over strategies for the group project. We decided that we would use a cross-curricular approach to the assignment using the book “Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen. I will be doing the Social Studies part of the lesson for 4th grade. In our readings, we continued to discuss and work on UDL to develop technology in our lessons. I have found that this approach is very similar to military strategy planning. In my military service, we used backward planning and forward execution for all mission planning. This is basically the same approach that UDL uses. Now that I understand this, the lessons are much easier. I have done this for many years, it just was not explained in this current context or verbiage.