The week two course experience I think will be much like the rest of my weeks back in Canada.
There is far too much to do around the house in the five short weeks we are back and not enough time to do everything I would like to do. So the coursework pays the price. I find myself reading less and doing less research than I should which in turn leads to having to draw solely from personal experiences rather than also adding the experience, thoughts or research of others.
I am working with a conscientious group of people and I can see from their responses that I need to work a but more on the research/citation end of work in my discussion participation.
I keep looking at this course from a blended classroom experience so my main focus is what am I getting from this weeks work and what I can bring back to teaching in a blended classroom.
This week we looked at two main topics:
- Netiquette
- Diigo
The netiquette component dealt with looking at creating a safe online environment. I talk to my students about this when looking at blog based commenting. Students create a set of blogging rules for their individual blogs. This school year, however, I plan on reusing more forum type discussions in my course. I plan on using some of the ideas from this weeks readings to have students create a set of safe online discussion rules. Small group brainstorming with Mindmeister then from the mind maps create a map of discussion rules.
The web page we read by Groski was interesting. Particularly the section on the use of a fishbowl. It brought to my mind conversations with Karen on research/blogs/backchannel discussions as a fishbowl activity that uses online components. Also the section on “Circles of My Multicultural Self“. How could this be translated to an online activity? Create a Google Doc graphic template for the first part of the activity found on the handout? What storytelling tools could the kids use Prezi, Storify? Could this be used as part of their identity unit?
Diigo is something I have used for a several years and I have used Diigo with my students for a a few years as well.
I need to look at how I can make the use of Diigo more specific to a research process related to the fishbowl activity.