–-teaching outside the “box”

teaching outside the “box”

Alexandra M. Pickett, State University of New York (SUNY Learning Network and University at Albany), USA

What might it look like to teach and learn outside the “box”? In this demonstration we will jump out and take a look at the use of student-generated content, the social web, and web 2.0 to enhance your instruction and engage your students. Have you thought about using blogs in your course so that your students can reflect or make their thinking visible to you? How would you assess and give them feedback? Have you thought about empowering your students to peer evaluate each other? What might that look like? Have you thought about podcasting or screencasting to provide engaging online student feedback? Could video enhance how you present your content? What would that look like? Have you ever wanted to open your course and invite the world in? Would you dare? I teach a fully online master’s level course where the majority of the content, interaction, and feedback for the course take place outside the context of the course management system. This demonstration http://prezi.com/cjmoerciiegp/ will ask you to step outside your own “box” with me to consider possibilities for your own instruction. I will show you how I am exploring what it really means to be student-centered – how I design online interaction and online learning activities that make my students make their thinking visible to me by having them reflect, apply, report, explain, defend, refute, question, self-assess, peer-evaluate, summarize, synthesize, and analyze their engagement with course content and as a member of the online class community. I will show you what happens when several web 2.0 technologies (twitter, voicethread, diigo, edublogs, jing, meebome, seesmic, youtube, gcast, audacity, polldaddy) are stitched together into one fully online course in moodle. I will talk about how I did it and why, and what the students thought about it. And I will also invite you to explore selected tools for yourself, and to join my netoworks, so you can share with me what you know and what you learn. In this demonstration I will also discuss my criteria for the evaluation of instructional technology/tools. The technology must assist you to meet an instructional objective better, faster, safer, easier, or cheaper. I will share my lists of cooltools, videos, blogs and resources: http://etap687.edublogs.org/2010/01/22/114/

I will demonstrate why, how, and what happened when I took my instruction outside the walls of my course management system “box”:

  1. to be more effective at presenting engaging online course content ,
  2. to engage students by creating authentic opportunities for student-centered interaction/collaboration and building community,
  3. to provide more engaging student feedback and evaluation.
  4. to explore, test, and evaluate the instructional potential & use of web2.0 cooltools to enhance online instruction, interaction, & engagement.
  5. to explore the effects of peer and self-evaluation and the public and social representation of self .
  6. to enhance the fully online primarily text-based asynchronous teaching & learning environment .
  7. to provide student access to resources & content they generated & contributed to the class to persist beyond the end of the term.
  8. to blur the boundaries of my online course to expose my students to the world “outside” the walls of our online course, and to invite the world “in” to our course .

Examples from my online course

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