The End?

Well, as I finish my coursework for my education technology degree, I have an opportunity to look back over the entire program as well as this final class and make some observations. Regarding the current class, I have particularly enjoyed the assignments, activities and discussions. Our final artifact, consisting of a lesson plan which implements some emerging technology as well as a rationale for the implementation of that technology were a great exercise. I would have to be one of the people who could say with great ease "sure, implementing technology is a GREAT idea." However when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of how you will introduce the technology to your students, get them familiar with it and then let them run, well along with most folks I expect I have a bit more trouble. That's why I enjoyed all the exercises where I actually made lesson plans showing how I would actually incorporate technology. This final assignment had the added bonus of also including a rationale component which required me to prepare a defense, if you will, for the various questions and even attacks of other staff and administrators who may be less eager to incorporate new technologies into a school.
I'm eager to use the various philosophies, practices, techniques and knowledge I have gathered through this course and the program at large. As most of you know I am not currenty teaching. I am working for an exceptional software company in Montana, however part of my duties do include training of clients in various technology based tools and specifications. I have already begun incorporating some of our experiences into my training curriculum and plans and I will continue to expand and improve my programs with further research into emerging technologies that can help me and my students.
Speaking of the entire program in general, I had a great experience with Walden for the most part. I would heartily recommend Walden to anybody seeking a degree who could not physically attend a school with regularity. In many ways this program served as an excellent "proof of concept". What better way to help us accept and appreciate the power of online learning than through a remote course. Even the weaknesses of the program were instructive as it helps me to recognize aspects of technology incorporation into education that I find frustrating. If I were to make any suggestions for course improvement, I would recommend that some kind of 'live chat' opportunities be incorporated into the courses. I understand that different time-zones and schedules make this difficult, but often live chatting with other students can lead to greater comfort and more organic and fluid conversation. I also have to admit that by the end of the courses, the general grind of the format was wearing. Scheduling makes for a difficult partner with these courses but I would be dishonest if I didn't admit to some degree of burnout in the last couple of courses. This was helped substantially however by the fact that the content of those final two courses was very interesting and engaging. If course format could be changed now and then between classes, that may help to alleviate some "grind" however.
I would like to thank all my classmates and professors. This has been a great journey and as I said, despite some very minor recommendations for change I found the program to be a perfect fit for my schedule and needs. I would also like to thank Walden University, the advisors and even the recruiters for making my entire experience from initial researching of online schools to graduation a smooth and fulfilling one.

Please, do keep in touch. I am quite interested in visiting with you and seeing how things go in the future. I have some things I'm working on with a few of you in terms of exercises and collaborative learning opportunities so I hope we call all maintain communication. (Say, Walden, what are the chances of you putting together an "Alumni" message board so we can put some threads together and stay in touch through that?)

Gregg Wigen,
Wig@bresnan.net

The Advent of Online Learning

I've just put together a new voice thread discussing online learning and how it may help improve the learning opportunities for many of our students. I'd be pleased if you took a look at it and provided any comments or feedback.

Have a great weekend. I'm off to Dallas next week for work, but I'll be sure and keep in touch.

Voice thread: The Advent of Online Learning!
http://voicethread.com/share/1255360/

End GAME

Throughout the last 5 weeks I have been trying to put the GAME strategy into practice. I have set goals for myself to improve in several areas of my professional life. While the components and strategies of the GAME plan process are not particularly revolutionary, the plan itself does create a framework that allows a person to plan out a strategy of improvement, attempt to execute that plan and come up with improvements and adjustments to continually push forward in an effort to learn and move forward.
The particular goals that I felt I made some good progress on throughout my GAME plan were my ability to use the APA format more consistently. I researched some books and resources and purchased on and have read it. I am also updating my Word application to utilize some APA formatting templates so I can more easily and consistently follow the spec.
Another goal I set for myself was to attempt to communicate more regularly with my classmates through message boards, chat and email. I see that this will continue to be an area I need to really focus my effort on, but I have made strides this term.
I also wanted to increase my comfort and facility with new educational technologies. Through the exercises of the course, I have generated a series of lesson plans that I'm comfortable with and I feel really make good and contextual use of technology.
The things I like about the GAME plan, the mapping out of goals and steps to achieve them, the monitoring of your progress throughout the process an ultimately the review of the entire exercise to find improvements or hangups can be easily taught to students and hopefully incorporated into their learning and lifestyles. I can see framing unit syllabi such that students are allowed to utilize the GAME plan throughout the class, defining goals and exercising activities to meet those goals and ideally over time, they'll learn how best to work so they can learn more quickly and efficiently in a style that works best with their experiences and personalities.

Getting my students into the GAME!

The question has been asked, how would I go about helping my students develop thier own GAME plans for improving their technology skills, specifically as addressed by the NETS-S standards. Obviously, I think the first step is to make sure the students understand the GAME process.

• [G] setting Goals
• [A] planning and performing Actions to meet those goals
• [M]constantly monitoring thier progress toward their goals
• [E]evaluating the effectiveness of thier actions toward meeting the goals and updating their plans accordingly

Once the students understand the GAME plan process then I think the next logical step would be to provide them with a template game-planner that allows them to identify goals in technology and NETS-S skills that they'd like to improve upon. Once the students have identified goals and actions, they can begin monitoring their progress toward those goals and updating their status through a blog, video-diary or some other evolving record of their progress.

I like the idea of video-diaries because the students can create and then later refer to a clear visual multi-media presentation of their progress. I think that can help them stay motivated and also help them organize their thoughts for presentation. The very process of organizing their thoughts to video-diary their progress helps them with the maintenance part of the GAME process and assuming that inital goal and action planning template helps them to clearly identify their end-state goals they will be able to evaluate objectively how they are progressing.

I think one important factor is that the students realize they aren't necessarily being graded on how quickly or efficiently the progress toward their goals so much as how well they document the process and present some valid reflection on how they've learned and not learned along the way. The real goal of the GAME plan is not so much to quickly conquer a topic but rather to create a personalized process of self-directed learning that the student can apply to practically any task or goal throughout thier life. For this reason, the video-diary (or voice-diary if the student is truly uncomfortable with video media) can be a tremendous artifact throughout the process as it helps the student see where he or she struggled and where they found their successes.

Wig is LOST, He Has to Go Back!

Ok, so what happened is that I completely missed the week 5 blog posting. I let myself get distracted with work and Easter and I flat out failed to see that I was supposed to post another entry on my GAME plan.

So, despite the fact that this post is late and now out of sequence, I'm going to post one anyway. What I should have done originally for this post was to update the activities I was doing to achieve my game plan and discuss whether or not I felt my planned activities were effective. As far as things I was trying to do, I had set a goal for improving my comfort and facility with APA format. I spent week 5 looking for decent APA format books on Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well as some local book retailers here. I did find a good resource book and ordered it. Having researched a bit to find a good book for my needs that was a practical guide I was happy with my order. I had also found some social networking applications, Elgg and Mahara which I began playing with and asking questions about. By the end of week 5 I wasn't terribly well versed with them, but I had made something of a start. While I'm not convinced that either of those tools would make particularly good classroom applications, I was excited with the technology and the influx of ideas. I am starting to think that customized educational portals may be really useful tools for teachers. As an English teacher for example, if I can put together a first-stop resource site for my students that provides them with safe chat areas, moderated message boards, content-appropriate wiki's and user added content that helps them learn and enhance their understanding of core area concepts I may be on the right track for really incentivizing students to start taking more and more responsibility for their own learning.

At any rate, while my current dabbles in social networking tools have given me some real interest in that area, I realize I need to learn a good deal more about creating and managing social and academic portals that can be truly useful to my students. So, like anything else, for every few steps forward, you realize that the journey seems to keep farther and farther.

On Fonts, Forms and Networking...

Looking over my original goals in order to get a feel for where I'm at with them, I am somewhat encouraged by my progress. One of my primary goals was to improve my usage of APA format. To that end, I have purchased a book on APA format and I've been reading through it and improving my knowledge. I have also played with a couple of social networking frameworks, Elgg and Mahara in order to determine whether or not they would be beneficial in a classroom setting. I also have an account set up with SiteGround to host a personal website using Joomla, which is a particulalry powerful and flexible web-site management framework. Through Joomla and it's various plugins a person can incorporate blogs, wiki's databases and any number of minor "canned" applications into his or her website. I intend to use these features to create my own modest web-portal which will present my own information as well as provide embedded and external links to other resources (like you good folks' blog-sites) for my visitors.
As for my goal of improving my online communication and collaboration, I have sadly continued to struggle in this area. Work has been particularly grueling the last few weeks, which is ironic since my travel schedule has actually lightened up. I've been working on some software coding for a demo that my clients require in two weeks so unfortunately my online collaboration time has suffered. The irony of the situation is not lost on my as I have recently commented on the discussion threads that I'd like to schedule some kind of organized chat time so several of us can get together and have a real-time conversation. Nonetheless, despite my lack of progress in this area, I suppose a positive I can take from the situation is the knowledge that often, technology does not necessarily equate with convenience and ease. At the end of the day, good old fashioned organization and time-management are as critical in the new world as they were in the old days of pen and paper.

Progress Ho!

Those of you who have been following this series of posts know that I am currently working on a plan to improve some aspects of my personal and professional technology life. Specifically I have set down some goals to improve in various areas including my proficiency with APA formatting as well as social and collaborative networking competencies. I've also committed to creating some kind of professional learning environment wherein other educators can hopefully glean some insight or find some useful information from my endless wanderings.

Fortunately, I have found several excellent resources that can help me toward my goals in a general sense. A simply search of Amazon for good APA reference guides along with some review of the contents of those books has lead me to a purchase that I feel will help me greatly in finally using APA format consistently and correctly. I have also researched several social networking tools and I've found two that greatly interest me. I don't know quite enough about them yet to give them a full recommendation but I intend to play with both of them over the next few weeks and see if they pass muster.

Elgg (http://community.elgg.org/) is a social networking open-source software toolset that essentially allows a user to create a social networking portal. The Elgg manager can create a site that contains a broad number of widgets and plugin tools that will allow him to add features and richness for his visitors and members. At the heart of Elgg is the ability to create and moderate blogs, chat boards, V-logs and collaborative file-sharing complete with source and version management. I haven't played with Elgg enough to know if it's a perfect fit, but certainly it may turn out to be an excellent tool for creating a social, collaborative network that other professionals can access and contribute to. This could be an excellent tool for both my current software position needs as well as my future teaching requirements.

Another tool Mahara, (http://mahara.org/) is a social networking tool geared toward learning and e-portfolio presentation. Mahara also allows a user to create online-learning communities. One of my goals is to create a source of information for other teachers to access and Mahara may be an excellent choice. There is some significant similarity between Mahara and Elgg, but clearly Mahara is more closely geared toward e-portfolio presentation and career learning. As I play with it more, I'll be better able to determine it's strengths compared to Elgg.