Using Technology in F2F is possible too

. Week 1 – Bienvenidos! Welcome to my Blog!
This introduction was fun to do since I got to show off my beatiful family. I talked about my personal circumstances and found out that I had very nice and caring classmates/ colleagues in this class.

. Week 2 – Getting Started
I remember I was a little frustrated here. The reading and the time I had put in this week was overwhelming. I posted a picture with flash animation and did not work, so Lisa helped me to clean my mess. Nevertheless, I think this was the most exiting week for me. After I read (too much) I realized all the posibilities that you have when you teach online. I remember I felt like a child with a new toy… could not wait to start!

. Week 3 – Designing a good class… not easy!
The exitement continued this week and all throughout the semester. I think the first three weeks were the most educational for me. I watch a lot of model courses of online instructors. I also opened a discussion this week in Fb about synchronous communication and got immediate feedback from many of classmates and mentors.

. Week 4 – Pedagogy and Course Desing II
This week I played with different design ideas for my future online class. I put together a list of elements I wanted to incorporate in my online classes. My teaching in general benefitted from the readings this week. I really enjoyed it!

. Week 5 – Creating an Effective Online Syllabus
This was a very productive week. It made me work and think in different ways to improve my current syllabi.

. Week 6 – Internet Skills
I have tried many times and even took classes on html. This week made me feel like I do not know anything about it 🙁
Eventhough I had a Google Reader account, I never looked at it. After that week I made the changes it needed to be more accesible to me and now I am “kind of” addicted to look for new stuff!

. Week 7 – Creating a nice learning environment
In this post I created a two column table with activities I do in my face to face class and checking those that could be used in an online environment. Colleagues who teach online responded to this post with very good comments that will help me decide in the future what to use.

. Week 8 – Playing and Experimenting with Tools
I had a lot of fun this week. I remember I dedicated almost all day Friday to it. I tried to find someone available in Google + and while I was waiting I starting to play with all the cool “toys” it has.

. Week 9 – Exploring Diigo and Second Life
Diigo is an online bookmarking that I use all the time since many years ago. I bookmarked Potcert group and now I receive the updates weekly. I experimented and played on Second Life but I did not like it at all. I do not think I will ever use it in my classes.

. Week 10 – Blog; Sites and Foreign Language
This week was very efective to me. I applied right away things I learned from here; for example, I made a welcome website I will definetely use next semester!
I loved to learn about Engrade; however I do not think it will be something I will use. I am too comfortable with blackboard!

. Week 11 – Copyright, Fair Use and Accessibility
This was the “curiosity” week. I researched and look in many many website and learned plenty about copyright and online teaching.

.Week 12 – Made it! Last post of the year
Looks like I was not sure I was going to make it. Same feeling I have today 🙂
I summarized my first 12 weeks here and I thanked Lisa and Pilar for their encouraging comments that helped me go through my busy days. I was a foot away from going to Brazil to visit my grandson. Very happy to have a vacation from it all!

. Week 13 – More Media Tools!
Back on our track this week I got to learn and experienced some new tools. And after playing with them and trying to find the use in my future online classes I asked here if our CMS does not have most of the tools we need. I use Blackboard a lot in my F2F classes, my students take the oral exams using Voice Board and they post their first composition on the Discussion Board to get to know each other.  Very interesting week.

. Week 14 – Eyejot and Slideshare
I remember this week working hard trying to embed my Eyejot video to my post. The video was easy to make and I like this new tool (new to me at least). Slideshare was not new; however adding audio was. A seven minutes slidecast with audio took me hour and hours to make, and I did not even like it! This is definitively a tool I will not use 🙁

. Week 15 – Trying new toys
Looks like even when I did not like Slideshare with audio I decided to give it another try. This week I made a Prezi presentation and I wrote about how  this presentations make me dizzy and I would prefer not to use them.
More productive this week was the Google form we have to make. I made one for evaluation of my course and I am happy to say that I post it in Blackboard and I ask my students to complete when they drop or at the end of the semester. I already had many very good feedback that will help me improve my future classes. Thank you POTCERT!

. Week 16 – FAQs for Online Students
Another very useful week. I made a Frequently Asked Questions with answers for my online students. With some modifications, those 6 questions and answers I wrote will go to my online class for sure!

. Week 17 – Managing my First Online Class
This week was one of my favorites. We were allowed to use any tool we wanted to post from this week on. I made two videos using Jing about the readings of the week. We received a number of very helpful tips for planning our online class. I will certainly have this week in my notes when I plan my online class.

. Week 18 – CMS, LMS and Class Management
The readings this week made me think about class environment again and participation. I wrote emails to two instructors asking them how do they do and grade student’s participation in their online classes. The answer were different but made me decide to keep my idea of using Facebook only in Spanish to make my students participate. I am currently working on the rubric.

. Week 19 – MOOCs, Web-enhanced and Blended Courses
While I was working on this week’s readings something happened on my F2F class that made me write what I wrote. I had a well educated older student in my class. He expressed me more than once that he was not fond to computers and that he was having problems with the online homework. To add to his problems, I take my class to the laboratory to do the oral exams, they record their presentation on the Voice Board. This simple task (even with my help there) frustrated him too much. He used to be a professor at USD and he did not like to not understand something. He ended up dropping the class. Thus, I wrote this week that community college instructors should be conscious of the limitations ANY or ONE student could have. We should consider this type of students same way we do with our disable ones. With a lot of respect.

. Week 20 – Bloom’s Taxonomy and Foreign Language Instruction
After a lot of research and thinking, this week I decided to talk about something that will be very useful for me and my online class design: Bloom’s Taxonomy for Foreign Language Instruction. I found two excellent resources and made a Power Point with the most important points. I also made an audio with Soundcloud that explains the PowerPoint. I got very good comments this week and I had fun learning more about this subject.

. Week 21 – I am a constructivist; but I am a teacher first
Another very interesting week that allowed me to write about my personal life and experience not only as a teacher, but as a mother. I explained why I consider myself a Piaget follower and I recognized that one cannot be “married” to only one theory. I thought nobody was going to be interested reading about my personal life; but I did get encouraging feedback and learned a lot!

. Week 22 – To Share or not to Share
I wrote this week about what I think about MOOCs. It happened to be the subject of the keynote presentation at a conference I attended that week. I expressed here my fears about the future of community colleges’ cheap “credit by exam” but Lisa responded very clearly to me. Thanks Lisa!

. Week 23
Presentation time!
My week was the 17 (my favorite!) I made a 6 minute video with Screencast-O-Matic.com and uploaded to YouTube.

Week 24!!!!

Here I am super happy that I finally made it! This is my second intent and I feel not only proud but very happy for all I learned and specially because now my department will give me an online class!!

THANK YOU LISA AND PILAR, YOU HELPED ME A LOT!

Laura

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmQW3CJIRiI

I am glad I did not post my week 22 before after all. It all comes for a reason, they say J

I must admit I did not have an opinion formed about “sharing” in general. But, something happened this weekend in San Francisco that made me learn and understand much more about open education and sharing knowledge.

As an associate faculty representative of my college I had the opportunity to attend the Spring Plenary Session of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. The keynote presentations were both about MOOCs, one given by the Co-founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller, and the other by the Academic Director of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education, Armando Fox. For about two hours I heard them explain passionately how MOOCs benefit education. Mr. Fox talked about how much more contact he can have with students on his large online classes. Large face to face classes never permitted him to detect and guide students with special talents or special needs. TAs did most of the job. Now, he says, he can see any work presented online, and the TAs have less pressure. According to Dr Fox, everyone has the opportunity to hear his lectures a lot “closer” than F2F and he has no problem sharing his knowledge with the entire world. Both speakers talked about wanting to make an impact in education and affirmed that that impact will be make in community colleges and public universities. I felt like I was living in the future.

I must admit that the idea of taking an art history class from the University of Florence, or a Roman architecture course imparted by a Roman professor right there in Rome sounds very attractive. However, wouldn’t my students prefer to take a class from a university in Spain or Mexico for free and then pay the cheap community college credit?  Should I be concerned since my college gives credit by exam for Spanish?

Like everything, I guess, these new classes are going to develop into something that society will regulate and control. So we’ll see what happens.

I am not sure if “sharing education” is a moral imperative, but sounds like it is the future. How we share and respect one another will be an education experience for all of us.

Twenty years ago, far away from here my children started elementary school and I started as a teaching assistant on a very prestigious private university in Buenos Aires. Everything was new to me; I was learning how to teach adults and at the same time I was learning how my children were learning.

On the first parent conference at my oldest daughter’s preschool, the teacher started to talk about learning theories and how our kids were going to “discover” the letters and end up writing soon. She was a passionate teacher; I remember that meeting very well. She went on and on about how these kids were going to “build” their knowledge based on what they saw and what they had around. She had tagged every object in the classroom with the first letter of the piece only; a huge “V” for ventana, for example, was glued on the window. She told us that children will follow their natural curiosity and soon they will figure the sound of those letters out and will want to “put together” letter by letter for their sound. A few months later, my daughter knew all the letters in the room and before I knew, she was able to write her name and most of our family’s names. She and the entire grade was writing before the end of the school year; but what is most important, is that they were very happy doing it.

Argentina was finishing a long decade of oppressive military coup that involved everything and more than anything education. We were not allowed to “think” or “discover”; we were supposed to follow directions and that was it. This teacher introduced me to a completely new way of thinking. I went back to talk to her about all this and she gave me a book. Small book I remember; but big words indeed. The book was “Psychology of the Child” by Jean Piaget. I devoured that book and a couple more about Piaget and then Maria Montesori and then Paulo Freire. They all talked about freedom and democracy in education; something completely new for me at that time. For more than twenty years, constructivism was more than a theory for me; it was a way of life. And it still is.

Well, if you got to here and you are still awake, I will tell you now why this introduction and what this has to do with week 21. When I watched Lisa and Jim’s video something similar to the story of the preschool teacher happened to me. Lisa and Jim constantly talked about the importance of not marry one theory, but use them all. In every workshop, conference or meeting I attended for foreign languages I have never heard this. It was always “this way” or you are a bad teacher. This always confused me because most of the instructors that affirmed this were not teaching us the same way. So whenever I give a wonderful presentation about a subject that is very difficult to my students I feel terribly guilty. I have to admit that I do not use 100% constructivism in my classes. I am a constructivist but I am a teacher first, so whatever technique I feel is better for my students I use it. This week made me a better teacher. I can’t wait to start putting together theories, practices and technology.

Even though I might have not “taught” anything on this posting, I feel great for writing it and sharing a very important part of my life.

Muchas gracias!

Laura

After reading and watching the presentations, I was a little lost this week. Everything was super interesting but I had no idea what to talk about. My colleagues had already done perfect synthesis and I did not want to do the same. I recently finished my second master’s in Education Administration and all this material was familiar to me. So, after a lot of research and thinking, I decided to talk about something that will be very useful for me and my online class design: Bloom’s Taxonomy for Foreign Language Instruction. I found two excellent resources and made a Power Point with the most important points.

I decided to make an audio describing the PP; you will have to listen to it if you want to know why 🙂

It is easier to read the words if you view it with fullscreen. Do not forget to click “play” first on the audio file.
http://www.slideshare.net/lauracarlsson/week20?utm_source=ss&utm_medium=upload&utm_campaign=quick-view

Here is the audio recording explaining the PowerPoint for week 20

https://soundcloud.com/lcarlsson/week20potcert

Thank you!

Laura Carlsson

I spent more than 6 hours this week reading, watching videos and exploring tools. Unfortunately, I did not find many connections with what I do or I will do. I enjoyed learning about MOOC and its possibilities; I loved the idea from the beginning; education should be more than a blackboard and a photocopy; more than a lecture and exercises. Sometimes, it feels like we are living already in the future. There is so much to do, to create, to develop, to give. Education is transforming itself into something completely new and I am glad I live to see it.

Regarding Web-enhanced and blended courses, I must say that I did not find anything new in the readings. I use web-enhanced material for all my classes all the time; I give interesting projects to my students with options for those who do not like to use technology and are not fond of it. I used to incorporate Wiki, Voicethread, Glogster and other fascinating tools in my F2F classes, but I got a lot of frustrated students who could not get a good grade in the project just because of glitches on the software or difficulties understanding them. I hear all the time that we are teaching digital native students; I feel that most of community college students are an exception to this. I have to say that a majority of my students do not feel comfortable using technology in the classes, not even posting on the Discussion board in Blackboard. This week, I had a student who did not get a grade in her composition because she did not post it right (she saved it as a draft and I did not see it).  I wish the book would have covered more about blended courses; how they are conducted and more examples of it. I am glad Rachele DeMeo published her video of her own blended course on her posting this week, Merci Rachele!

I loved Cris Crissman’s introduction to this week’s video and how she ends.. Pedagogy first… capture that!  Thank you Cris, your video was clear and easy to understand, just like a good photograph 🙂

 This week I thought a lot about participation, class management, and class “landscape” as Eric Robertson calls the online classroom. There was a lot to read and diverse; I enjoyed reading the articles and the book, even the Moodle Tool Guide which made me explore a little bit Moodle and its possibilities.

You are probably tired of read on my blog that I do not teach online but I am eager to start. And here I go again; exited to be close to the day I have my own online class. The instructors on my department are constantly helping me and giving me ideas. They showed me their classes and that helped immensely.

I am very comfortable with Blackboard 9. I am the kind of person who likes to try new things all the time and in the times when Blackboard was not mandatory to use for the F2F classes I had my class set and used it every semester since. I participated in lots of workshops and conferences about Blackboard and other technologies. Now that I “played” a lot I think I know what is comfortable for me and what is better for the students of Spanish. I would not dare to create a class from scratch; I would use Blackboard for sure (Voice Board, Voice Email, Discussion Board, and syllabus). I will also use Google (Google Voice, Drive, Sites, and Forms), Skype, and Facebook.

 I read Ko and Rossen suggestions for participation points and also consulted my colleagues about what they do for participation. I am thinking and I am almost convinced that I would like to use Facebook for participation. I have to design a rubric that specifies what students need to do to get the points and make sure I do participate also in it. I use Facebook personally all the time to be informed about what my kids and grandkids do. I also like to stay in touch with my friends in Argentina. My Facebook is all bilingual; I write half in English and half in Spanish; I read half English and half Spanish. That is what gave me the idea of a group Facebook page where students post information about them, videos in Spanish they like and etc. I believe it is going to create a sense of community and will allow me to get to know my students. I love to hear from my classmates in POTCERT about this 🙂

I leave you with a phrase I really liked from Rebuilding the LMS for the 21st Century:

“A phrase we use a lot on our campus is that we feel it is our responsibility to train our students for the world they’re going to inherit, not the world they live in now, and certainly not the world we grew up in.”

Thank you POTCERT for allow us to post our comments with our most comfortable way. To me, speaking is a lot easier than writing. I made two videos talking about the readings of this week. I hope you do not fall asleep watching them. 🙂

Of course, I could not embed the videos in WordPress. Hopefully, we have a tutorial somewere!

Enjoy!

AND NUMBER 2:

Preguntas más frecuentes en la clase de español en línea:

  I know how difficult could be your first online class! I hope you can find the answers you are looking for here. If not, please send me an email and I will make sure you get an answer ASAP.

Profesora Laura Carlsson

1. Where do I start?
Start here. MiraCosta Online Education’s webpage  responds all the questions you might have from  technical assistance to tips for online students (do not miss this one).

2. How many hours per week do I need to spend in this class?
Your on ground  classes required you to attend 5 hours a week on campus. That is the minimum mandatory time you will spend in this class. Like any class you will need an extra hour per day to do homework and study. To get organized, I suggest you to set aside 2:30 hs per week day and see if that time works for you.

3. I am not a very organized person, what should I do to do well in this class?
First, make sure you keep your inbox clean. You will be receiving important emails from me. If you do not have Google account I suggest you to get one;  due dates are going to be posted there and you can copy them to your own calendar. And the most important part of being organized is time management. Here is an article that will help you with that.

4. Where do I call for help if the online workbook is not working well?
The publisher. I cannot help you with any problems related to the book.

5. How can I make sure I do not disrespect my classmates or my teacher?
Like in any environment, we follow the corresponding etiquette. For the web, is is called Netiquette. Read “The Core Rules of Netiquette” an excerpted from the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea.

6. What are the most important links I will need to use during this semester?
a. Blackboard; b. Online textbook; c. Instructor’s email; MCC’ Help Desk

Google Form in Drive:

Since the embedding did not work at all (and trust me, I tried) here is the link to the Google form I made. I have made other forms, but I liked this assignment since it forced me to do one I always wanted to do: A course evaluation for my students to complete at the end of the semester. It needs work, but at least I am closer than before!

Prezi presentation:

For this week’s assignment I made this presentation in Prezi. I do not really like Prezi and I do not think I will use it in my classes. Buy it was a very good exercise, after a couple of hours 🙁 I was getting very good at it 🙂
What I liked in Prezi was the ability of getting the Google images online in seconds. What I didn’t like was that I could not find the way to delete frames at all 🙁   These presentations in general make me dizzy. Maybe one day I will make one that I really like 🙂

Sreencast Video of the week!

Jing Pictures