Online Learning

The Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline Companion Document provides several examples that help teachers meet Michigan's Online Experience Requirements. I've worked with most of the technologies listed at some point over the last few years and lists like this remind me of things I've forgotten about.  For me, the most valuable tool is a Learning Management System (LMS).


Unfortunately, I've haven't worked on the administrator side of Blackboard for a couple of years.  When I had the opportunity to do so I was amazed with what I could do in the environment.  The LMS is an organizational force that allows a teacher to aggregate the much of the learning experience into a single location. Every online learning experience listed in the companion document could be linked to the LMS. If used to its fullest potential the LMS can organize the day, store resources like pdf files or presentations, link external sites, embed objects, provide online discussion, and even do some grading.  Here are a few more things the LMS can do:

• Facilitate parental communication
• Supports differentiation and student choice
• Supports flipping the classroom
• Provides assignments to absent students 
• creates the potential for anywhere/anytime learning

Using the LMS to its fullest potential requires quite a bit up front work,  but after that it's more about modifying and tweaking.     

XML and RSS give us the technical ability to do the things we do like sharing and collaborating with web 2.0 technologies.  They are the engines for the online experiences and environments we want to create so it is valuable to learn about them for background knowledge and technical proficiency but there not really an online experience.  It's a few years old now, but this is my favorite video about XML and RSS are and what they do.

This entry may be referring to the use of RSS feeds to create Personal Learning Networks which aggregate several continuously updated websites (blogs, news, video, etc) at a single location. If that's the case then, for example, an ELA teacher could encourage students to create blogs and  then RSS readers for sharing and commenting.      

Wikis

For our wiki lab in CEP 811 we've been asked to do a couple of tasks. The first task involved finding our place of work on Wikipedia and changing some of the information.
I work for Sloan*Longway in the Flint Cultural Center.

Here is the original wiki posting.

Over the last year our Board and Director has stressed the importance of our Mission Statements so I added those to the Wikipedia page.

I've been using PBWiki and WikiSpaces for several years. WikiSpaces, in particular, was very helpful to me and would up being a big help for my employment at the Cultural Center. Unfortunately, I edited out quite a bit a while back. These are 3 of my active wikis.

http://daleehrhart.wikispaces.com/Resume
http://daleehrhart.wikispaces.com/VideoResume


I've been wanting to make a wiki for my favorite iOS apps and web apps for a while so I decided to begin doing that.on PBWiki. Here is the start of that feel free to edit it yourself.

A Few of My Favorite Apps

UDL Lesson Plan Evaluation

After studying the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) I evaluated the lesson plan for Solar Wars that I submitted to Merlot.  Click on the link below to see the evaluation.

UDL Guidelines: Solar Wars

I wrote this lesson plan to enable other Sloan*Longway educators to teach the Solar Wars economic simulations with older model Palm handhelds at camp-ins.  It's a duplicate of what I do with upper elementary students.  I enjoy teaching this and UDL has helped me see several ways I can improve it.