Technology Tool Box for Beginning Teachers (Actually… all teachers!)  

The 4 Culprits of Weak Online Courses: Why All Online Courses Are Not Created Equal You deserve better. You pay big bucks to take an online course so why shouldn’t you expect quality? Having designed a very successful template for a provider of Additional Qualifications courses in Ontario - it’s time for you to be more discerning about where you take your AQ’s. There is no shortage of teachers taking online courses and one can easily argue that the teaching profession has adopted the online format for continuing education at a respectable pace.  The online course however is another matter. Laborious content, multiple clicks, poor navigation, broken links and outdated information plague most online content out there.  Now don’t get me wrong, the MOOCs are intensely groomed by their curators and I have nothing but positive reviews for most but when it comes to professional development provided by colleges and universities, I have seen little evidence of an online course format that has evolved with the times. Unfortunately you cannot climb a pay grid with a MOOC period. Culprit #1 - PDF’s and Word Docs If your online course content is based on PDF’s or Word docs then you’ve already paid too much.  The diversity of the web is lost in such format not because you cannot hyperlink and embed within such formats (which of course you can), but because the course writer’s imagination is still linked to the limits of document files instead of a dynamic engagement with everything the web can offer - from external links, to video conferencing, to embed codes, to interactive objects, to sounds, to engaging discussion boards, to blogs and even simply making the course accessible to the blind/low vision or deaf and hard of hearing. Culprit #2 - Too Much Navigation! If your online course requires you to read content then navigate via the top menu to another area of the course to submit work or participate in a discussion, then precious time and mental energy is wasted on navigation. ALL LMS’s are capable of delivering every aspect of a course topic or unit on one simple page - with all links embedded within the content.  Culprit #3 - Gangly Discussions Whether you want to admit it or not, the elephant in the room is actually sitting on top of 537 unread discussion posts. You know it, I know it and the entire online world knows it - so why do we continue to produce forums where deep thoughts go to die? Fewer discussions that are more thought provoking and allow for meaningful feedback are crucial. Culprit #4 - Instructor Non-Presence As a professional learning community we should be well aware that online courses are not correspondence/distance learning courses. Instructor presence is the first differentiating feature for a well run and well written online course. The advent of online meeting software and recording software allow for both instructor presence and flexibility to provide anyone who misses out with some form of contact with the instructor. Online courses worth the money have constant instructor presence throughout with plenty of time built in for flexibility to meet. Anthony Carabache is a course writer and instructor for the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association. He is a consultant for the OECTA PD Department for all online course material. OECTA PD has embraced the evolution of online courses, their delivery and quality of material to better the online experience for its registrants. http://www.oecta.on.ca/wps/portal/courses  

Let’s Talk Discussions…c’mon don’t be afraid.. Much of what we do for the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association’s Professional Development Dept. is now centred upon online instructor training and development. As a team we have come to understand that knowing the environment constitutes about 20% of what it takes to deliver a good course experience. We estimate that 20%-30% then resides in the instructor’s knowledge of the content and 50% lies within what we have come to call ‘The BIG 3’ of online learning. This post will discuss the first of the Big 3 - Gangly Discussions. GANGLY Discussions If your course is designed to have meaningful discussions then by all means - let’s make them meaningful. Begin by removing any and all discussion expectations that have participants respond to a minimum # of posts. Go on - trust me on this one - just do it! Make those discussions meaningful and then have a great read! I promise that only good things will come of this! Once you’ve taken that courageous first step, it’s time to look at real issues that flatten our discussions and here they are: A. The Discussion Bandit We all know that participant whose voice is so strong that they become the de facto course instructor. Keep in mind that this participant wants to share and should never be penalized for their zeal, however many often zoom through the entire course posting initial thoughts on every subject matter available. To make the field a fair one try some of these strategies: 1.Opening up discussions as per restrictions; 2.Ask a question that is particular to the course material at the time; 3.Leaving the Discussion visible and not available - this allows participants to view the topic to reflect; 4.Should you implement a rule like: "Please read before your post" or "Post before you read". 5.What really resonated with you? Just one thought - a sentence to break into the subject matter; B. The Gleeful Respondent Most course instructors will have also had a brush with what we endearingly call the ‘Gleeful Respondent’ - a participant who is always too happy to agree with everyone else’s opinions. With either a ‘Ditto’ or ‘Jamie pretty much said what I wanted to say’ response, an instructor is usually challenged to draw some meaningful opinions out of this type of participant. Try some of the strategies below and see if they help: 1.Once in while pipe in - Have you considered? (Use of your expertise); 2.Establishing the expectations at the onset; 3.Make the discussion an opportunity to make a decision not necessarily an opinion; 4.Pose a question that directly relates to their own personal experience. C. The Reflective Thinker The reflective thinker glides in that magical space between the harried march of content consumption and the gangly forest of discussions where someone shares a truly inspiring and thought provoking idea. In such a case, it is absolutely critical that the instructor not only acknowledges the reflection but to also - with permission - expose it to as many of the other participants as possible. Finally - as a course instructor, consider whether or not you accept discussion posts using the full fury of the world wide web. Why on earth do we continue to accept typed responses in an editor capable of so much more? Why not video interviews, Prezi’s, Podcasts etc? There is no reason for an instructor not to open these options up to their participants unless the instructors themselves need support to rekindle their imagination.  That’s what we are here for! To be continued… (Grouping, Voice Responses and Featuring Great Posts in Your Course)

Just in time, just right and just for you! Take control of your own learning and sign up for an OECTA module for the spring! Experience professional development for teachers unlike any other. Click any button below for information or to register.

Unbundled Learning for Education Professionals Below are excerpts of an article that will appear in the @OECTA Magazine that will be published in January 2015. More and more, consumers are demanding the unbundling of preset product packages so why shouldn’t teachers have unbundled professional learning opportunities? Modular AQ’s unbundle full courses and offers them as ‘Just Right, Just in Time and Just for You" packets to all teachers. The Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association has always been committed to professional development and in the face of an ever evolving profession, module offerings demonstrate just how incredibly passionate the Association is about respecting its members time, it’s members’ workload, and importantly its members’ professional development needs.  Take a module with OECTA! Feel the difference and learn at your own pace!   Join us: Register or Learn More about OECTA Modules

How a Teacher’s Union is Changing the Game of Online Learning in Ontario These are busy times… and the speed of new technologies, access to information and split-second decision making only make things busier and busier. Whether you are a teacher of 25 years or just newly hired, a young parent with children or an empty-nester, time is a premium and many say the most valuable currency. Despite these demands, when it comes to professional development, some way, somehow teachers always find a way to fit it into an already full day. The drive to continue to learn and apply new information to the classroom has always made teachers life-long learners in every sense of the word, yet Additional Qualifications providers rarely acknowledge the need to mitigate stress and promote the well-being of their teachers… until now. OECTA always seeks to improve the teacher experience which has led us to disrupt the typical AQ pathway by offering Modular AQ’s.  Introducing OECTA Modules for Additional Qualifications or Professional Learning In a world that’s continuously accelerating and pulling us in different directions, teachers in Ontario and all over the world, have been given an option to take full courses in smaller, manageable bites. Understanding that life-balance and well-being are integral to all teachers, OECTA Modules respect time constraints, budgetary concerns and most importantly the need to balance personal and professional life. The teacher can take one fifth of the course, at a time, over a six-week period. Unbundled Learning More and more, consumers are demanding the unbundling of preset product packages so why shouldn’t teachers have unbundled professional learning opportunities? Modular AQ’s unbundle full courses and offers them as ‘Just Right, Just in Time and Just for You" packets to all teachers. In the United States and to a lesser degree in Canada, there is a growing movement towards Massively Open Online Courses or MOOC’s. In fact, MOOC’s have garnered so much attention that studies are being conducted globally to determine how they have disrupted traditional tertiary education. Though the mechanics of the module and the massively open online course are similar, at their core they are very different. Your Needs, Your Choice Modules come accredited by the Ontario College of Teachers. If you take five modules in the same course you will receive accreditation for that one course. In essence, a teacher can choose to complete a course in one session or break the course up over 2 years. Imagine how that releases stress and anxiety on those who wish to continuously develop! OECTA also offers modules that have no bearing on additional qualification status. In fact we have embraced the idea that teachers would like to take professional development courses out of interest and desire for their own learning. In these cases teachers can take a module without worrying about completing the assigned tasks in order be officially credited, rather a certificate of completion would be issued. The Association has always been committed to professional and in the face of an ever evolving profession, and in light of ever changing tides module offerings demonstrate just how incredibly passionate the Association is about respecting its members, it’s members’ workload, and importantly its members’ professional development needs. Take a module with OECTA and feel the difference and learn at your own pace! Join us: http://www.oecta.on.ca/wps/portal/courses

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE # SIGN? This article originally appears in OECTA’s publication @OECTA which can be found here. Have you heard of Rip Van Winkle Syndrome? It gets its name from a short story called "Rip Van Winkle," written by American author Washington Irving and published in 1819. It tells the story of a man who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains of New York, only to wake up 20 years later. Essentially, the man slept through the entire American Revolutionary War and then found himself in a world that was quite alien. Sound familiar? The Hashtag Fast forward to 2015 and consider Twitter - a revolution of sorts, and the most popular social media network on earth. It is hard to believe it has only been around for nine years, and particularly popular in the last five. It was during this incredibly short time that we began losing touch with the # sign, or pound sign, the hardest working of all telephone buttons. This # sign has now evolved into something called the hashtag. Simply put, the hashtag is a breadcrumb for the explorer, a signal for the curious, and a beacon for anyone who is lost in the river of information that is Twitter. Its origins are actually highly technical in the world of programming code, but in our world our beloved # acts as a guide toward shore, a dock or even a fireside chat that gives a breath of calm and focus in an otherwise distracted medium. At OECTA, we decided to create our own breath of calm just for teachers, one that talks about the intangibles we often forget about in the world of teaching. We have started the hashtag #WhatTeachersDo and we invite you to share the warmth of this unique fireside chat with us. What is #WhatTeachersDo? #WhatTeachersDo is meant to be about the little things we do that make a difference in our school communities. It is meant to be a place of sharing where we can show each other that news doesn’t always have to be negative. It is meant to bring to light just how beautifully we touch the lives of students. It is a small opportunity to demonstrate our passion for what we do.   Clearing up misunderstandings at recess. It’s just #WhatTeachersDo Whether it’s a Band-Aid on a skinned knee or taking a phone call from a teary parent - these are the stories that drive our passion. It’s the little things that matter to our students; it’s the little things that keep us up at night thinking about them; and it’s the little things that bring our students back to our classroom doors years later. Putting themselves out there to connect with their students. It’s just #WhatTeachersDo #WhatTeachersDo celebrates the little things that make teaching unlike any other profession on Earth. Check out the feed  below - it truly is inspiring! #WhatTeachersDo Tweets How to #WhatTeachersDo? Twitter is a wonderful source of self-directed professional development. If you have never used it before, it is worth the five minutes to sign up. There is a short tutorial on YouTube that is available by searching the following terms in Google: How To #WhatTeachersDo. There, you will find a five-minute lesson showing you how to participate. Anthony Carabache is a secretariat member in the Professional Development Department at OECTA Provincial Office.

Greetings all! Following hard on the heels of the Biology Interactives Edition, here’s an edition devoted to students and teachers of Chemistry! The resources listed below are a sampling of the over 50 chemistry focused sites in my resource archive and do not include more generic STEM/science related sites of which there are hundreds more. Nope. For this edition it’s all about chemistry. Here goes… Chemical Elements, and ChemReference are both interactive periodic tables with oodles of features. While the interface on ChemReference is more fluid and easy to use, with both simply click on an element in the Periodic Table and voila… just about everything you wanted to know about it pops up: and thorough list of properties, orbitals, and visualizations. A third similar site, ChemiCool offers much the same features as the above two but with the added bonus of video experiments involving the element, and a historical perspective on its discovery. Very cool, ChemiCool! If you’re looking for lesson plans and teaching resources here are a few sites that might suit your tastes: SciFun’s HomeExperiments, General Chemistry Online!, and Chemistry Lecture Notes. SciFun’s HomeExperiments contains a variety of clever engaging experiments such as exploring Acids and Bases with Red Cabbage, investigating Density with Layered Liquids and many more. General Chemistry Online! contains everything you need to run an intro course in chemistry. Here you’ll find a compound library, companion notes, trivia quizzes, a searchable glossary of terms, flash based interactives and simulations, and a wide range of tutorials. Chemistry Lecture Notes is exactly what the title suggests, a thorough set of lecture notes developed by a teacher over several years of teaching chemistry. The notes are designed to prepare students for all the types of problem found on   high school or college chemistry tests and exams as well as on the SAT II Chemistry Subject Test and the AP Chemistry Exam. On the video front, here are two sites with a wide range of videos to support learning in Chemistry classes. First, from LearnersTV, a division of Annenberg Media, comes an large set of video lectures, on topics ranging from the discover of the nucleus to valence bond theory to chemical kinetics and acid-base equilibrium. The US National Science Foundation sponsors a series entitled Chemistry NOW, an online video series that uncovers and explains the science of common, physical objects in our world and the changes they undergo every day. In the chemical database department, here are two very useful finds: ChemSynthesis, and ChemSpider. ChemSynthesis is a free searchable chemical database containing over 40,000 compounds. In addition you can browse through references in a number of scholarly journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Journal of Organic Chemistry to name just a couple. ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast text and structure search access to over 30 million structures from hundreds of data sources. To close out our chemistry edition, here is a fun site that might come in handy in a pinch. Chemistry Crossword Index is a quick visit where you find printable crossword puzzles using chemical terms. A fun quick drill/review for the content section of a chem test. That’s it for this Chemistry Edition of Web 2.0 Weekly. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is only a sampling of the wide variety of chem resources you can find in my archive. I hope you find the sites referenced here useful and share them with colleagues and students. Til next time… peace and love Paul The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Chemistry Edition appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings! Pi Day comes but once a year and is just over a week away. March 14th to be precise or rather 3.14 to be more precise. Regrettably, Pi Day here in Ontario usually falls during March Break so our festivities will have to take place at home. Whether you’re in school or out, here are a bunch of resources to help you celebrate Pi Day! LessonPlanet (a great source for lesson plans on many subjects) is a good starting point for your PI Day celebration. Here you’ll find 336 different teacher resources all celebrating the original irrational number. Lesson plan and activities clearinghouse EdHelper has a whole raft load of PI Day activities divided up by grade level, subject (we’re talkin’ PI Day across the curriculum!), and language (need PI Day in German or French… you’ll find it here). WikiHow is a great source for how to’s, and they’ve even got a How to Celebrate Pi Day tutorial! Cute. Clever. Creative! PI Day even has an Official Site! There you’ll find all sorts of stuff from PI Day paraphernalia such as T-Shirts, and Gifts, to videos, to lessons, and activities. The PI Day Challenge was created by a teacher in Massachusetts and consists of a series of logic based Pi oriented puzzles. Fun brain teasers these. I’ve loved WolframAlpha since the day I ran across it a few years back. The folks at Wolfram keep adding features that make it more attractive to teachers and students alike. Indeed, all sorts of ancilliary sites have sprung up on different aspects of the computational world of WolframAlpha. One in particular is called MathWorld, and wouldn’t you know it MathWorld has 33 separate resources all devoted to PI! If you happen to live in San Francisco, the Exploratorium goes all out in its celebration of PI Day. If you don’t live there you can join in the festivities with the activities and resources at their site or join in virtually on Second Life. I hope that’s enough to get your PI Day celebrations rolling. Here’s a couple of PI funnies to help you remember maths are fun.     Til next time… peace and love Paul The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Pi Day Edition appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.

Greetings all! Lesson planning is a necessary fact of life for teachers and trainers. Back in the dawn of time when I started teaching, lesson plans were something we kept in binders, and collected over the course of years. My old Computer Science department head had shelf after shelf of lesson plan binders organized by course… a veritable library collected over 20 years of teaching the subject. An invaluable resource for a starting teacher as I was at the time. Teacher attitude towards their lesson plans tends to fall into two camps. Those who feel proprietary towards the plans they’ve created and those willing (and often enthusiastically) to share the wealth. This distinction is maintained when looking for lesson planning sites, and resources on the Internet but increasingly it seems that the egalitarian sharers have the upper hand. This is due, in no small part, to three factors. First, the wide array of lesson plan sharing sites out there. Second, the increasing role open courseware (lead by MIT, Stanford, and others) is playing in tertiary education - not to mention MOOCs. Third, the number of non-governmental organizations, teaching associations, publishers, museums, etc., who view the development and sharing lesson plans and teaching resources as part and parcel of the added value of their services. What follows here, and in several subsequent posts, is sampling of significant lesson plan sharing sites (in no particular order) available for free to teachers, trainers, and education workers gleaned from my archive of over 5000 educational resources. Here we go… The Curriculum Corner by teachers Jill McEldowney and Cathy Henry provides a variety of tips, advice, and lesson plans all geared toward integrating the US’ Common Core Curriculum into you classroom practice. An Australian counterpart to the above site is Australian Curriculum Lessons developed by teacher Scott McGlynn. A teacher driven site housing lesson plans in most disciplines all developed by teachers to be shared with other teachers. The US National Education Association (NEA) has a seachable data base of literally thousands of lesson plans. You can refine your search by both subject and grade level. TaughtIt! is a straightforward lesson plan sharing site with only one purpose in mind: sharing lesson plans. The stie associates you with your school board such that when you search for lesson plans ones from your home province or state are prioritized on the results list. LessonPlanCentral is just that, a central location for scads of lesson plans, worksheets, web links, and more. Lots of good stuff. At LessonCorner you’ll find not only lesson plans (over 200,000 of them) by subject but also apps such as a crossword puzzle maker, and lots of worksheets. TeachFirst is a rich collection of lessons, units, and web resources. Other features include a monthly calendar listing up coming events in the education world, weekly polls, featured sites, and other useful items, Finally, for this edition is EducationWorld magazine web portal. Here you’ll find a repository of lesson plans, professional development articles and opportunities, technology reviews, and lots of other useful features. Stay tuned for the Lesson Plan Edition Part 2 later this week.       The post Web 2.0 Weekly: Lesson Plan Edition Part 1 appeared first on Many Pebbles, One Pond.