This week in my CEP 811 class we learned about online learning. There was a reading that was assigned: Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline Companion Document. This PDF explained the core principles of online learning as well as the different types of online experiences, their quality characteristics and specific resources for each experience such as webquests, electronic portfolio, online field trips and simulations, etc. I don't have my own classroom but one that interested me that I have been hearing in my CEP classes was moodle. Many schools are looking into blended learning and there are many cyber schools. I have worked with learning management software such as blackboard while I was an undergrad at Duquesne and while I was student teaching at Chartiers Valley High School. Through looking at the moodle website and examples on the site, I was able to learn about the capabilities of moodle for online learning. The quality characteristics that most learning management software have are integration, sustainability life-long skills and teacher involvement. With moodle, there is also collaboration through forums and wikis. The website gave a very clean appearance and I think that it is more user-friendly than Blackboard.
When looking at and evaluating moodle, there are a few key topics that should be addressed.
1. What content could this help you teach? Moodle could help me teach most Spanish classes. For me personally, I would want to use online learning in high school classes, when the students have a foundation for the language. In particular, I would like to teach more about culture through moodle. There are 21 Spanish-speaking countries and they all have different cultures and are located in different regions of the world. I would not be able to teach things about the culture of each country during the year due to curriculum. Through moodle, I would be able to have a page for each country which would have links to videos on youtube, pictures and information about the country's culture.
2. What type of pedagogical strategies might you use with your students? I would want to use direct instruction to teach the information. I would want to be able to relate grammar concepts and vocabulary to the information that I would be teaching in conjunction with the culture. Since learning is not face to face, students would need structured practice, guided practice and independent practice with the new concepts. The students would need to be able to differentiate between the different cultures and I would want to scaffold the learning by building upon previous concepts. I would also want the students to keep a journal and/or blog about the interesting information that they are learning so they could share it with me and their classmates.
3.What technologies do you think would be harder to use with your students? Why? As a world language teacher I think the hardest technology to use with the students would be online gaming. I have not been able to find many "games" except for ones on quia. They are not really games and I don't think they are very engaging unless the learner has a love for the content. They are good practice for the students, but after a while they can become boring. I would love to be able to find good games for world language learners since many students enjoy playing games on their phones, video games and computer games.
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