Reflection #2

I've learned how to use so many new online tools and to not be intimidated by new technology.  I really have enjoyed using Voice Thread and finding out all the simple ways to control and adapt it.  I would love to experiment and see if I could use Prezi and Voice Thread together. I've also learned a lot from my classmates’ work, especially about the different authors analyzed and new, interesting educational technology concepts currently out there and on the horizon.  For instance, as a whole the class focused more on 21^st century learning.  I enjoyed reading about the alternate views and implementations.  

The things that I have learned this semester were actually from my own author analysis. I first learned about the concept of innovation diffusion, which was really interesting, and I plan to use in my future research. Additionally, I learned a lot about the techniques and aspects of Pecha Kuchas.  I hope to use the important feedback I received about timing. to make me think more about how much time I use when I speak and how to be more concise. 

Based on my final project I hope to propose an online public speaking course to my college administrators. At the community college where I work,  we have a lot of online students and I would love for them to be able to experience my public speaking course online as well.  Additionally, I plan to use a wiki in my future courses in order to let students collaborate and brainstorm on different ideas. 

Blog Post #3

Original Blog Post from the "Innovative Educator":

SUNDAY, JULY 1, 2012

A virtual classroom that’s more intimate than face to face

...In this case, it meant that the instructor had planned for a way for all of the students contribute virtually face-to-face. It also meant that students were focused.  It was as though they were all in the front of the class.  The author who wrote about this experience explained that though it may be hard to believe, there was closer intimacy in this virtual classroom than many of those he’d experienced in the classroom. He attributes that to being the case possibly because of the close-up of each person’s face and he got a sense that each student knew they were expected to contribute which raised the bar for all. ...

My Response:

The virtual classroom seems to be taking on new meaning as programs are generated to allow more interaction and less down time.  Within the realm of producing 21^st century learners, this type of instruction is an excellent way to engage students in a setting where they will most likely find themselves at some point in their careers.  With this classroom, we are strengthening the notion of cooperation and collaboration and allowing students to take on responsibility in the classroom outside of just their grades.  Students are being held responsible for interacting and contributing to the setting as opposed to only listening and regurgitating information.  This post has interested me in looking further into Google Hangout, and finding different ways to incorporate these ideas into my own virtual classroom.

http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2012/07/virtual-classroom-thats-more-intimate.html#comment-form

Blog Post #2

Portion of Initial Post: 

June 3, 2012

Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech

By Jeffrey R. Young

Easy A's may be even easier to score these days, with the growing popularity of online courses. Tech-savvy students are finding ways to cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort, in ways that are difficult to detect.

Take Bob Smith, a student at a public university in the United States. This past semester, he spent just 25 to 30 minutes each week on an online science course, the time it took him to take the weekly test. He never read the online materials for the course and never cracked open a textbook. He learned almost nothing. He got an A.

His secret was to cheat, and he's proud of the method he came up with—though he asked that his real name and college not be used, because he doesn't want to get caught. It involved four friends and a shared Google Doc, an online word-processing file that all five of them could read and add to at the same time during the test.

More on his method in a minute. You've probably already heard of plenty of clever ways students cheat, and this might simply add one more to the list. But the issue of online cheating may rise in prominence, as more and more institutions embrace online courses, and as reformers try new systems of educational badges, certifying skills and abilities learned online. The promise of such systems is that education can be delivered cheaply and conveniently online. Yet as access improves, so will the number of people gaming the system, unless courses are designed carefully.

This prediction has not escaped many of those leading new online efforts, or researchers who specialize in testing. As students find new ways to cheat, course designers are anticipating them and devising new ways to catch folks like Mr. Smith.

In the case of that student, the professor in the course had tried to prevent cheating by using a testing system that pulled questions at random from a bank of possibilities. The online tests could be taken anywhere and were open-book, but students had only a short window each week in which to take them, which was not long enough for most people to look up the answers on the fly. As the students proceeded, they were told whether each answer was right or wrong.

Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice, with the two results averaged into a final score.

"So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but we're all guaranteed an A in the end," Mr. Smith told me. "We're playing the system, and we're playing the system pretty well."

He is a first-generation college student who says he works hard, and honestly, in the rest of his courses, which are held in-person rather than online. But he is juggling a job and classes, and he wanted to find a way to add an easy A to his transcript each semester.

Although the syllabus clearly forbids academic dishonesty, Mr. Smith argues that the university has put so little into the security of the course that it can't be very serious about whether the online students are learning anything. Hundreds of students took the course with him, and he never communicated with the professor directly. It all felt sterile, impersonal, he told me. "If they didn't think students would do this, then they didn't think it through."

A professor familiar with the course, who also asked not to be named, said that it is not unique in this regard, and that other students probably cheat in online introductory courses as well. To them, the courses are just hoops to jump through to get a credential, and the students are happy to pay the tuition, learn little, and add an A.

"This is the gamification of education, and students are winning," the professor told me.

Of course, plenty of students cheat in introductory courses taught the old-fashioned way as well. John Sener, a consultant who has long worked in online learning, says the incident involving Mr. Smith sounds similar to students' sharing of old tests or bringing in cheat sheets. "There is no shortage of weak assessments," he says.

My Response: 

One solution to prevent online cheating could be the avoidance of offering online courses for general education classes, or keeping the courses smaller in order to assist teachers in keeping tabs on students.  Additionally, 21^st century skills call for students to be able to collaborate and work effectively in groups.  Instead of consistently having students participate in passive learning, calling for collaboration on exams and quizzes may assist students in better grasping the material and applying it pragmatically.  By allowing students to collaborate, teachers are taking away the fun/risk of breaking the rules.  Furthermore, in upper level classes, where students are asked to synthesize and look deeper into material, the search for the answer is often a more important process than the answer itself.  Ultimately, cheating is only going to hurt the student in the future, and hopefully incent them to embrace learning rather than avoid it. 

http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-High-Tech/132093/

Reflection #1

My attitude toward social networking/blogging sites has changed for the better in that I always thought of Twitter as more of an advertising gimmick or a place for teens to share their day-to-day minutiae.  Now I realize how beneficial it can be for sharing your ideas and gaining new ideas from fellow educators.  Additionally, I have learned to use many new applications, such as Diigolet.  Since acquiring this skill, I have utilized Diigolet in my other courses and even in my personal research. 

One thing I have learned about that I will not forget is the value of PLNs.  I have found numerous fellow educators in the same area of teaching as myself.  We have shared ideas and discussed different approaches and teaching styles, as well as worked out new and different ways to adapt mandatory assignments.  

I will apply what I have learned by sharing all the amazing online resources I have discovered with my students.  I hope to teach them to utilize technology so it works for them, not against them.  Technology can be simple, if you allow it.  As a speech communication teacher at the college level, I will have students start their own blogs. I will have them journal about any nervousness, concerns or excitement they have prior to speeches and then also, reflect on their speeches afterward.  I am also considering starting a wiki for each class so students can collaborate and help each other as they work through developing their speeches.  Additionally, I will recommend “Diigolet” for them to use during their research (can you tell that I am loving that application??). I am looking forward to discovering even more new and helpful technological advancements to improve my capabilities and share them with others. 

Blog Post # 1

Initial Post:

‘Free-Range Learners’: Study Opens Window Into How Students Hunt for Educational Content Online

April 25, 2012, 1:18 pm

By Marc Parry

Milwaukee — Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class.

Not quite. The preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.

“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,” Ms. Morgan said in an interview after her talk, which took place in a packed room at the 9th Annual Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference & Workshop.

It’s nothing new to hear that students supplement their studies with other universities’ online lecture videos. But Ms. Morgan’s research—backed by the National Science Foundation, based on 14 focus-group interviews at a range of colleges, and buttressed by a large online survey going on now—paints a broader picture of how they’re finding content, where they’re getting it, and why they’re using it.

Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says. If they’re on a pre-med or health-science track, they prefer recognized “brands” like the Mayo Clinic. Students often seek this outside content due to dissatisfaction with their own professors, Ms. Morgan says.

The study should be welcome news for government agencies, universities, and others in the business of publishing online libraries of educational content—although students tend to access these sources from the “side door,” like via a Google search for a very specific piece of information.

But the study also highlights the challenge facing professors and librarians. Students report relying on friends to get help and share resources, Ms. Morgan says, whereas their responses suggest “much less of a role” for “conventional authority figures.”

They “don’t want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,” she says. “It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”

Ms. Morgan confesses to some concerns about her own data. She wonders how much students are “telling me what I want to hear.” She also worries that she’s tapping into a disproportionate slice of successful students.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-range-learners-study-opens-window-into-how-students-hunt-for-educational-content-online/36137

My Response: 

Morgan says “Free-Range Learning” is a “challenge facing librarians
and professors” because students choose to confer with fellow students rather
than “authority figures”. Students prefer the ease and informality of asking
peers or solving the problem on their own. If professors feel threatened by “Free-Range Learning”, a solution could be locating and suggesting websites themselves for students that could be helpful.  Good educators recognize that not all students learn exactly the same way and at the same pace.  No matter how hard teachers may try to adapt to students, sometimes students just don’t understand the material.  By being comfortable enough to provide additional outside resources, teachers display openness; this may also encourage students to ask teachers their questions, as opposed to peers or Google, because students see the teacher recognizes that they may not understand the material based solely on the lesson provided.

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