Shahrzad Zahedi's Blog

Hi all. Here’s a link to all my posts this semester. I am sorry that I am always late on posts and comments. I hope that I am finally all caught up.

I think that this semester was a much better learning experience than the first time I took this course. I like the new format and the fact that we have to comment as much as post in the course. The presentation week was especially interesting with all the beautiful and helpful presentations.

The things I remember are the tools for making my course interactive, the ways to create a community online, the sketches I should make before starting to design my course. I learned that it will take many trials and errors to finally get it right. At first, I was reluctant and afraid to teach online. Now, I actually enjoy it and want to dedicate more time to my course online than to my current f2f course.

Week 1: About Me

Week 2: Getting Started Already!

Week 3: The Design and Development of My Course

Week 4: What Did I Dive Into?

Week 5: Can Students Get a Course GPS App?

Week 6: HTML, and Other WWW Tools

Week 7: To Loop Try and Err?

Week 8: Teaching French Online

Week 9: La Chasse au Trésor

Week 10: We Need a Copyright Police Officer

Week 11: Creating a Syllabus Online

Here is my presentation on how to create an online syllabus:

Usually, when I drive over the speed limit and police officer stops me, he/she asks if I know how fast I was going. I then have the option of answering the rhetorical question or saying that I didn’t know there was a speed limit because I didn’t see the sign. If I can argue my way and prove that the sign was not visible, I can avoid the very expensive ticket and traffic school.

I feel as though copyright laws are similar to going over the speed limit. The sign is there, but who really respects it all the time? And if the driver fails to respect the law, is she/he just going with the flow or is she/he really speeding? Besides, is the driver correct to argue that the sign was not visible? In the same light, I feel as though copyright laws should always be stated clearly on each website where the creator wants his/her products to be used according to the copyright laws. Educators have quite a bit on their plate and always have deadlines and will do things at the last minute. Providing them with easy access to these laws helps the creator better protect their property.

I have presented one side of the argument, the driver’s side. The officer is also right to give the driver a ticket because one should be conscious of when one is driving too fast, no matter how vague too fast may be. We also have the responsibility to teach our students that it is not good to cheat or lie, so we should not be borrowing without permission and using materials in our class that do not rightfully belong to us.

As Lessig argues in his presentation, the internet is giving us and our students a new platform for being creative with our ideas and talents. Yet, at the same time, this creativity is being lost in the web of multiple copies of the same work and the lack of recognition for creativity and originality.

I really liked this week’s topic. I personally do not know enough about copyright laws and I am sure that I am using materials without permission. This chapter gives me enough resources to become better informed and be more respectful of materials posted online and at my disposal.

From this week’s reading and other links and materials, I am learning that blogging is the most efficient way to communicate when teaching online. Like Jim Sullivan says, blogging can take different shapes and forms, but it opens communication between blogger(s) and commentator(s).

I am a visual person so my favorite form of blogging is through videos. I love YouTube and could spend hours there looking for teaching materials and even for news and old, forgotten, interviews, movies, and songs. There is a wealth of materials for learning French on YouTube and TeacherTube and I would be a much less effective instructor without these tools even in my face-to-face class.

This Spring, I will experience online teaching for the first time, but I think that I will soon become a very big fan of discussion boards. I think they are also a form of blog, a micro-blog, and can have almost the same function as Twitter and Facebook in Blackboard.

Learning French requires frequent interaction and communication in the target language. Students will have little opportunity to reflect on the course content, and they will be using their time to put into practice what they are learning. However, I think it will be important for them to keep a blog or journal and write a little at a time about themselves in French. This way, by the end of the course, they can look back and see that they are able to talk about basic topics in French.

I liked Ko and Rossen’s use of the expression treasure hunt. Even though they recommend that we not send students on a treasure hunt, I am going to use this title to design activities where students will indeed go on treasure hunts and get points for whoever can find the answers first. This will be a great team group activity.

Language teachers have a hard time teaching online courses because it is near impossible to learn a language without interaction. Therefore, building an online community and making the course interactive online is essential to language learning.

Ideally, I would love the idea of having a virtual classroom online that is 3-D and where students can learn a language in the same way that they can play video games online. I have always imagined that the ideal online French language class should be created in an environment similar to Second Life where the character, or avatar, visits Paris in a 3-d world and learns French during his visit.

In reality, it is near impossible for me to create such a setting so I have to settle for the tools that will allow me to make my course as welcoming and interactive as possible. The tools I plan on using are the Wimba Voice Board and Vimba Presentation, VoiceThread, Discussion boards.

Students will create their own content by contributing to discussion boards, recording their voice, and presenting on a cultural topic related to French and Francophone countries. Even though my current class is face-to-face, I have asked students to join discussion board on Blackboard and tell me which French songs or movies they have seen and write a short description. I have really enjoyed my students’ input, I learn a lot about them in this way.

I am just learning to record my own voice and to use screencast websites. It will be a good idea for online instructors to have a resource page so that we can easily find tools and also see which tool worked for which instructor.

I really like the concept of teaching by trial and error. Since I will be teaching online for the first time in Spring, I truly welcome the idea of erring and trying as I go. I feel as though I will be learning to play a new game and will have to keep at it until I am an expert. I will do my best not to become obsessed with perfecting my course.

Teaching in a face-t0-face setting does not compare to this new online pool of open web spaces and technologies. I really like playing video games, and I have always owned an XBOX or Wii, or Nintendo. In college, I even explored the world of computer programming with Visual Basics and C++ classes. I remember being in the computer lab until four in the morning with my peers to finish up projects. The online course is reminiscent of those classes and projects. I feel as though I have to be talented at teaching, computer programming, and design. Lisa is correct to say that “If you’re not creating the content pathway and facilitating the learning at every step, you’re not a teacher.” Unfortunately, teaching online takes more than just a teacher. An online instructor is 3 people in one.

I am near completion with my online course for the Spring of 2014, but there is too much text, not enough links, images, videos, and my pages are not pretty enough. On the one hand, the gamer in me enjoys tweaking my page and learning about new tools and new ways to design. However, the teacher in me is wondering how talented I can really be at designing, knowing that I have never had a grain of artistic talent in me.

This is why one may become obsessed with online teaching. It is teaching, designing, and programming all in one. The field is constantly changing and we have to stay in tune with new technologies. I believe that the “online classroom design junkie” will eventually be present in all of us whether we like it or not.

This blog entry will be short. I am lucky to have taken a few CS courses during my undergraduate years. There was a time when HTML and DreamWeaver, and other internet languages and tools were fun to me. Now, the Web brings new things every day and I feel like I have a hard time keeping up with the pace of technology. I am glad that we still have the basic HTML language to hold on to.

In Blackboard, embedding a video is really not as easy as it seems. I listened to Pilar Hernandez’ advice and tried to add a table and then put an image in the right column and the text in the left column. Unfortunately, the image fell below the text and the table became unmanageable. I then resorted back to just telling Blackbord to insert the image on the top right of the page and that seemed to take care of the problem.

The advantage of HTML, if you are familiar with it, is that you can always see the code behind a written text online and you can tweak the HTML code to make small adjustments. Sometimes, Word Processor programs like those in WordPress and Blackboard are not programmed well enough to be more user-friendly than just simple code. That’s when HTML can come in handy.

I have chosen to embed a video for children. I use this video in my class to teach professions to my students of the French language. You don’t really need to know French to get what they are talking about. I hope that you will enjoy it.

I have also included an image of my test score. I did better this year than last year. Yeay!

The syllabus and teacher availability:

Schedules and reminders:

This week’s reading was crucial for designing an online or even hybrid course. It is always easy to tell what one should do, but much harder to tell how it should be done. Rachèle Démeo and Pilar Hernandez both showed us some pieces of the online puzzle. I had struggled with aligning a picture with text, and now, thanks to Pilar, I know that creating a table is the way to resolve this problem.

In addition to the course organization and making the syllabus interactive, it is really important to remind students of due dates. Ko and Rossen discuss this issue as well in chapter 5. I agree that too much text or images can overwhelm students, but it is crucial to send at least one reminder a few days before an assignment or test is due. Students are usually taking more than one course, and they can get lost among all the due dates. My homework due dates are always either on Saturdays or Fridays. My students all know this information because I have reminded them a few times. However, some still ask me or forget. They have now asked me to send them an email reminder 2 days before the due date. Experience has thus taught me that sending or posting reminders for due dates is crucial.

Teacher availability:

How often should I be available to my students? Should I set time slots for responding to students’ inquiries? Experience has taught me that it is essential to respond to all of students’ questions as promptly as possible. Students tend to get discouraged very easily and they are seeking someone to help them or guide them, so it is important to be there when they run into trouble. When students do not have the opportunity to interact with the instructor in the classroom, they may get discouraged or shy away from the class even more easily. Ideally, I do my best to answer students’ questions and concerns within 24 hours, but I think that 48 hours is acceptable as well.

I think that the instructor should make himself/herself available via Skype at different times during the week and for a 2 hour time slot each time. This will give students the opportunity to check and talk with the instructor if they prefer to communicate in this way.

Diving into the online lake

Before I begin my blog, I wanted to say thank you Jim for the video that has made you think. The comments were very useful and they made me think as well. I agree with Tom that my own blog entries should be posted earlier and that I should contribute more to discussions. I have therefore decided to finish my blogs by Thursday mornings and dedicate Thursday and Friday to adding and respond to comments.

          When I was 10 years old, my brother dared me to jump off a 10 meter diving board into Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. Since my brother was older and cooler than me, I had to impress him, so I climbed the ladder, went to the edge of the board, closed my eyes, and just jumped. In midair, I opened my eyes, looked down, and saw rocks below me. I screamed and tried to climb back up, as though there was a cord hanging from the board. I ended up falling into the water, and I did not get hurt, but I decided not to make the same mistake again.

This year, having volunteered to teach a French 101 course online is starting to feel a lot like when I jumped off the diving board in Geneva, Switzerland. At first, it seemed easy enough, but it is now starting to seem more and more difficult. The biggest difference is the fact that almost everything needs to be planned and designed before the semester begins. I am beginning to understand how important it is to start organizing the course, the syllabus, the objectives, assessments, etc. very early and to seek help from whoever is willing to help.

I am now reading the Teaching Online book from a different perspective. I pay more attention to what I should watch out for, or what they suggest I should not do. As teachers, we are all quite aware of what it takes to define course objectives, design activities or assessments, or to assess student progress. But how do we do all of this online? Or, better yet, how do we NOT do all of this online?

Here are a few things I have learned from my first week of course design:

1)      Videos, Screen-casting, or Powerpoint presentations with audio, are not a very good idea. I like to show rather than tell, or to speak rather than write. This doesn’t work very well online. It is better to have just audio by itself, just PowerPoints, or just text by itself. Videos will appear in one browser but not in another browser, and it is extremely difficult to situate them exactly where you want.

2)      In the “Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever” site, I took away the fact that prompt feedback is essential in an online course. It is not a good idea to provide time-delayed responses to students’ contributions because these responses are the only way that students can get to know the instructor.

3)      In my French 101, I will cover 1 chapter section per week. I will therefore have weekly folders for each chapter section. I will be following Pilar Hernandez and Janeen Apalatea’s presentations.

4)      If you are using Blackboard to design your course, I recommend going through the Blackboard tutorials. You will learn a lot about designing a course in Blackboard.

5)      Creating an online quiz is a very fun but tedious task.

Finally, I struggled a lot with the online aspect of online teaching. I have finally rationalized and resolved this struggle by looking at technology as the cool thing kids do these days. Students love texting, chatting, being on social networks. Let’s take advantage of this and make them use their skills and virtual selves to learn something online. We will learn a lot from our students who wake up and go to sleep with the online world.

Hello all. I am currently working on a French 101 course for Spring 2014, so I will use this course as an example to talk about my pedagogical goals and objectives.

In French 101, students have a set SLO objective, which is to read, write, speak, and understand the French language at the basic level. Students will learn to conjugate the essential French verbs in the present tense, they will learn to write and talk about themselves, their education, their family, their leisure, and the places they go to in town.

I will follow a text, Espaces, and students will be doing homework on the Espaces website. We will be covering the first 5 chapters of Espaces.

I will refer to the Weekly Column Design to organize my class. Each week will have a title as well, so that students know what will be covered.

I am very big on checking students’ progress on a permanent basis and immediately after we cover a topic or grammar point. This will be the challenge for me online, but I think that with the help of Wimba Voice board, I will feel more comfortable about this. I am going to get constant feedback from students through quizzes and voice recordings, and this might put my mind more at ease in terms of their progress. I have learned that it is never a good idea to put off checking in with students to see where they are, as it will be too late by mid-semester to have to go back to the beginning and get tutoring help to catch up.

I have two big questions that I still need to resolve and will probably do so by the end of this course:

1)      How do we test students? I am used to writing my own tests and I am not sure how to implement them online.

2)      How many synchronous sessions should I include in my class?

Since we are asked to share a link, I would like to share the University of Texas interactive French website, which is made to be used by all educators. It is also another example of a course that is organized online.

I enjoyed reading Ko and Rosen’s Chapter 3, and plan on checking out the websites they have suggested for getting help when creating an online course.