Online Learning

For this next post I have to talk about how I could use one of the technologies that qualify as an online experience with my students.

I have to say that I've never designed a complete online course, but I have been a great fan of blended learning for three years now. I'm used to using Course Management Systems (CMS) or Learning Management Systems (LMS) as a fundamental part of my Computer Science classes and as repositories for different types of resources for EdTech integration for my teachers.


What content could this help you teach?

Online resources can be a great help for learning new concepts. You can rely on all the types of multimedia to aid student's understanding. In my particular subject, Computer Science, online learning helps me to teach the theoretical part of the course so I can focus on the practical part in class, where students apply the new concepts to solve actual problems in a creative way.

As Technology Coordinator, online learning has allowed me to create courses where I can put EdTech resources in an ordered manner for my teachers according to their subject and grade level. These online courses sometimes include forums, surveys and wikis which help me receive feedback from them and improve what I’m doing.

What type of pedagogical strategies might you use with your students?

Non-lingustic representations: Online learning can give you so many choices of how to represent different concepts! From charts, concept maps, animations, presentations, podcasts, timelines, etc.

Objectives and feedback: I really like to put my objectives, calendar and rubrics on my online courses. They can be a very good guide to help students in their learning process. I also like to include surveys and forums to get some feedback from my students and tell me if they are getting the class.

Cooperative learning: It is really easy to collaborate online with all the new Web applications available. Students really enjoy learning with others and I find it very interesting when it's with students from other schools or countries.

What technologies do you think would be harder to use with your students? Why?

When it comes to online learning the biggest problem is that there are still some teachers and students that don't have Internet access at home. Another disadvantage is that we aren't a 1:1 school for the moment, in some cases all of the computers are being used so Real-time Online learning would not be as effective because many would be left out.

I also think that making podcasts or videocasts would be harder to implement, mostly because culturally we are not used to broadcasting ourselves. Also many don't want to participate in these kinds of media because of security reasons.

Educational gaming could also become a challenge for my Elementary School students, since most of the good games are in English and they still don't feel that comfortable with the second language as the older kids do.