Technology in Education: Notes from the Closet

This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning: Quality Matter's  Teaching Online Certificate . This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition. This post is 4 of 8. This week the focus shifted to learning theories. Often, learning theories are covered in preservice education and then not touched on regularly once 'in the field.' It was nice to revisit and reflect on these. In a Behaviorism-based classroom information is transferred from the teacher to the student. Students learn through positive reinforcement if a desired response elicits a reward or a punishment and tend to act accordingly. This occurs through observations and the motivation is extrinsic, relying on verbal praise and rewards. In a Cognitive Constructivism classroom  (also referred to as Cognitivism) ...

This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning: Quality Matter's  Teaching Online Certificate . This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition. This post is 3 of 8.  In this workshop I spent time thinking about how I create presence for students in my online graduate courses. We expect our students to make a commitment to engage in our courses- we need to make a commitment to them, as well, to be present even when we aren't face-to-face.  The overarching theme of this workshop centers on the Community of Inquiry framework which states that effective online courses contain three types of entangled interactions: Social Presence- how students connect with the class community. Cognitive Presence- how students are able to construct and infer meaning from course content t...

This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning: Quality Matter's  Teaching Online Certificate . This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition. This post is 1 of 8.  The second workshop I participated in was EYCD- Evaluating Your Course Design. This workshop was a two-day synchronous session (the first workshop was an asynchronous weeklong commitment). The audience was very small- only three participants. This was both slightly awkward but also an advantage. Having such a small group meant we had the opportunity to ask detailed questions of the facilitator. It also forced me to pay attention the entire time! Often, its very easy to become distracted when there is a larger crowd and your camera can be off.  An additional bonus was the use of a new video conferencing p...