CEDO 550 - Week 3 Reflection

This week has been an interesting experience, switching my focus from student to teacher. Although I'm a teacher every day, I've been a student throughout this cohort, and I've had to really think about how to turn around and be the online teacher. I think the greatest challenge for online teachers/facilitators would be keeping up with students in such a wide area. It seems very overwhelming to me when I think of our online facilitators for this course and how they keep up with each person's blog, discussion submissions, assignment submissions, etc. I know blogs can be kept track of with RSS, but I'd love to see Ken's side of Brainhoney to see what he sees when he logs in. Is there a spreadsheet that pops up to say what each person's submitted and how many responses, or does he have to read them all and count them up as he goes? It seems like it would be really hard to keep up with, but I'd definitely like to learn more about it.

As I've been working on my threaded and web conference discussions, there are a few things I feel are really important to consider. First, it's important to consider the audience, especially when creating the rubric. I would obviously grade a third grade online class completely differently than I would a tenth grade online class. Second, I think it's really important to be prepared and have things ready ahead of time. Third, I think that first initial contact is really important in order to develop positive student rapport and classroom climate right off the bat.

I chose my topic, "Competency Based Education" because I've done a lot of work in my district this year with standards-based grading, which goes hand-in-hand with competency based education. Every day in my own classroom, I see students who are struggling to keep up because we need to move on with our curriculum before they fully understand what they've just learned. Then I see the other end of the spectrum, which is my students who are "held back" from achieving as much as they can because they already know what I'm teaching. It's up to me to create enrichment opportunities for them so they can move ahead a little faster than everyone else and not get bored. Technology would be very helpful in implementing competency based education. That way, they could move ahead at their own pace as they master each topic.

One thing I thought about when developing rubrics for the two different discussions is what I thought was important for the students to know. I tried to reflect things that we learned about when discussing synchronous and asynchronous discussion, and chose the most important things to include on the rubric. Being a teacher who likes simplicity, I also decided to grade on 5 things at 2 points each in order to simplify grading. With as many papers as I have to grade, my motto is the quicker and simpler the better!