K-12 Online Learning

When it comes to online learning in a K-12 setting there are going to be a number of pluses and minuses to deal with. There are going to be a number on how to’s to figure out. Then if this is going to help and hurt students in your district since it could be pulling students from your district and have them going to a neighboring district for either type of class delivery, online or face to face. These are things an administrator is going to have to research before make the commitment to online learning.

When it comes to online learning some students will excel at this type of delivery model. These students are the ones that can work on their own, plan, are self driven, and can stay focused on the course. If a students has these type of soft skills they should be able to handle a self guided online course. If a student is missing any of these skills then they are going to have to learn them and demonstrate them before they are allowed to take an online course. If students can demonstrate that they have mastered these soft skills then online learning would be good for them.

One thing an administrator has to think about is staffing in both their building and in their online courses. If a district sets up online learning courses how is it going to affect the buildings FTE’s. Will staff cuts have to be done if students are working from home? What would be the case load for the facilitator? Most union contracts have a set number of students per teacher, so is an online teacher going to have the same number of students or can they have more, maybe double or triple the contract amount. If the later is possible and with the district money being so tight it make perfect sense to cut staff for online learning. The district is going to save by only having 1 teacher as opposed to three. Then less money will be spent on running a classroom and cleaning a classroom, which means cutting the support staff as well, meaning more savings. So from an administrations standpoint online learning will make more money available to be used on other things.

I think offering online learning is going to happen in each district, as it should, but it is not going to be a replacement for face to face learning. It is going to be a tool in a district's toolbox which can be used to help support education. These are just some of my thoughts, what are some of yours?

Online Myths

The 10 myths on on-line course work reading this week was not very earth moving for myself. I have had more than 20 on-line course just in my post secondary experience plus 50 more in my automotive training. I have been using on-line course work in my CTE classes each year that I have been teaching, 8 years now. What I have found out is the students learn more theory, more on how a system works, and can learn from their mistake by redoing problems till they correctly answer to the question. The on-line programs that I use are designed in a manner that moving forward cannot had till a student has answered a question correctly. The other benefits of using these courses is that in my CTE classes students are learning not just automotive systems they are learning trigonometry, calculus, and science. They are learning these academic by being able to apply it in a real world setting. One student’s comment I will never forget was from one of my special education students. He told me “ I cannot do this because I am stupid” I told him that he wasn’t not stupid, you just learn in a different way. So that student keep trying and doing on the problem till he got it. Once he got the correct answer I told him that he just did trigonometry. He said “NO I did not”. I told him to take the problem to his math teacher and ask her. He did and as soon as she told him that he did trigonometry he came back to my class to tell me he did it and that he was not stupid. This was something I could have never done on my own so for that reason online coursework is a great tool to use with your curriculum. I am using it more in my classes but I am only using it as an addition to my curriculum not as a replacement for it.

K-12 and On-line Learning

I know just a little about online learning in K-12, but a lot about it when it comes to college on-line courses. In my CTE automotive classes have to use on-line course work to meet the national program certification. The things that I have found out about using this is that 1. it delivers the theory curriculum better then I can 2. it is self passing for the students and 3. it can be worked on 24/7 by all students. I do feel that on-line courses have a place in K-12 education, but they cannot be a replacement for K-12 school setting. Students still need to be around other students and learn basic people skills. These are my thoughts on on-line education in K-12, what are yours?

Credibility of Wikipedia and YouTube

When it comes to using the internet as a credible resource credibly is going to have to be proven. These resources are go for finding information fast, but they have to be checked since anyone can post anything on any subject. I do use Wikipedia and YouTube in my class and I do let the my students use them as well. The thing I do is I research these resources with two other sources. I make my students do the same, plus they have to site the other sources. I do feel that if three sources all state the same thing it most like can be used as a credible reference.

Using RSS and Twitter in my Classroom

I added this week a number for blogs to my RSS reader. Since this is still something new for me I am learning what to do with this reader and how to find things that interest me. Since I teach in an area that doesn’t have allot of these type of resource I am focusing on personal links now till I because more familiar with the reader to find i blog on CTE and teaching automotive. The three blogs that I have chose for this blog are;

1. Dr. Oz at http://www.drozfans.com
2. Edutopia at http://www.edutopia.org/
3. Educational Technology and Moblie Learning at http://www.educatorstechnology.com/

The reason I choose these three to follow is mainly I found that the information they are putting out is relevant to my personal and professional interest. Starting with Dr. Oz, what more can I say, he has allot of good information on keeping healthy. Since his show is something I cannot watch all the time I needed a way that was fast to see what topics had been cover on the show and what information I could use in my daily life to help in keeping myself healthy. Then I found Edutopia, which is a education site addressing allot of current things going on in education. It is a place to see and find new things and ideas that will help me become a better teacher by change my teaching strategies and designing lessons.Then I found Educational Technology and Mobile learning. I found this site and I am still exploring it, but it has allot of good information on resources which can be used in the classroom. One of the resources that caught my eye was the one titled; The Comprehensive Guide to Using Google Drive for Teachers and Students. There is allot of information there and since my district just bought Chromebooks for all the teacher I will now have something to use to teach myself on how to use G-Drive in my classroom.

When it comes to using Twitter I am not sure if I like this idea or not. I am under the mindset that I don’t have to tell the world my business. That being said, I did find and am following some other twitter accounts. The ones I found to follow are Ford Motor Company, SkilsUSA, and Overhaulin. I chose these since they all have something to do with my subject area. Will I use it? I do not know, but I will keep an open mind about it.

I can see that using these different Web2.0 tools might be helpful in my classroom, but the biggest problem is finding the time to incorporate them into my lessons. We as teacher just don’t have the time to do all this with everything else we have to do. We hear all the time that we are in education for the kids, but we, as a industry keep loading more paperwork onto yourself and it is the kid that are losing out. If I had more time I would use technology to better reinforce my lessons and communication with students and parents. I am thinking at this point in time that I will start using these things to better communicate information between student, parent, and myself. If this helps in freeing up sometime for me then I will start looking how I can change my lesson plans. I will start out small and work my why up from there. If time was not a factor I would do all my lectures and lessons online out of school thus leaving me the time in school to do lab work. Great idea, but just no time.

CTE Automotive and SAMR (Working Together)

In my classroom I have been using this form of education for a number of years. I am a CTE Automotive instructor and we are not just your schools dumping ground for thoughts students that do not want to do the pen to paper work. In CTE we have to follow a national curriculum and auto has been doing that since the mid 80’s. The reasoning for this is because we supply industry with willing and able entry level workers.  The curriculum and national certification that auto follows is NATEF, which is the same curriculum being taught from high school all the way through university. My high school students, right now, are using and being taught automotive online at a college level curriculum. These students are those students other instructors do not want in their classes and in my class they are working on and at a university level. Why?

The reason my students are working at this level has to do with the online programs that I use. It follows SAMR at each level and in each area to the letter.

Level	Definition	Examples
Substitution	Computer technology is used to perform the same task as was done before the use of computers.	Students print out worksheet, finish it, pass it in. My students do, print out and hand in their NATEF Task list for grading when they have done the task.
Augmentation	Computer Technology offers an effective tool to perform common tasks.	Students take a quiz using a Google Form in stead of using pencil and paper. My final exam is their online program and I do not have to do the grading the program does that for me and it shows the students their score before I see it.
Modification	This is the first step over the line between enhancing the traditional goings-on of the classroom and transforming the classroom. Common classroom tasks are being accomplished through the use of computer technology.	Students are asked to write an essay around the theme "And This I Believe...". An audio recording of the essay is made along with an original musical soundtrack.  The recording will be played in front of an authentic audience such as parents, or college admission. In my classroom it is work at your own pace and redo a Modula if you did poorly on it and keep doing it till you understand the system.
Redefintion	Computer technology allows for new tasks that were previously	A classroom is asked to create a documentary video answering an essential question related to important concepts. Teams of students take on different subtopics and collaborate to create one final product.  Teams are expected to contact outside sources for information. This level of curriculum was never taught at this high of a standard till technology stepped in.

Generation X, Millennium, and the Edge are going to though a generation conflict when it comes to education. What I mean is we as educators where taught to teach the old factory assembly-line way and for the most part that is how we teach. The problem is that is not how our students learn, they learn by using digital tools and in short lectures. So how are we going to reach our students? It is going to be though teaching ourselves new ways to educate our students. We need to learn first how to use these new tools before we can teach our students, not new ways to learn, but our curriculum. We are reinventing the wheel when it comes to our area of study, being the four core areas or the electives, we need to teach students how they learn and not how we where taught. We are the Digital Immigrants not our students.

The problem that I see is that of time management and finding time to learn how to teach a different way, or but yet deliver our curriculum in a new way. Then we need to find the time to convert our curriculum to the new formats and lastly make sure we have the skills to be effective in teaching in this new educational delivery format. We are all educators and we need to make sure we keep learning new things and new ways to teach to better server our students.

At this point, in time, the K-12 systems is changing over from the millennium generation to the edge generation. In anyone class there are going to be students that not wired into technology with nothing more then a flip phone to the others that have more technology on their person then we have in our classroom. So how do we teach using technology when we have these two generations mixing together? We start now to teach ourselves new ways to teach, but still use the old techniques. We start by introducing new technology delivery systems to deliver our curriculum. Then we start by switching over our curriculum to the new delivery methods. It is not going to happen over night, nor should it, we need to start with small changes to learn and teach both ourselves and our students. Then build on those skills no differently then we teach any lesson in our curriculum now, we start out with the basic theory and move up to the mastery level.

These are my thoughts, what our yours?