7+-+Future+Goals


 * 7. Future Goals **


 * **Weave together things you have learned in this class and your Mentor's class, talk about your experiences and how they have impacted you. **

Teaching an online course is still definitely a future goal for me, even though my current administration's vision of the future of education doesn't quite match up with mine. As this is the fifth Best Practices course I have taken, I've learned a lot in the past year - about education, about technology, about what I want my future online classes to look like and not look like, about how I can best help my students to become better prepared for the world they will inherit, and about myself as a learner and an educator.

In the weeks I was able to review and observe my Mentor's class, there was not much in the way of using technology tools, other than the "usual" - a word processing software to complete assignments, clicking on hyperlinks to read some articles online, using clipart in some of the postings, etc. However, I see my learning over the past five courses as such: in the first four courses, I learned a lot about the internet, about technology tools that lend themselves well to the field of education, and about how to fuse 21st century tools and learning with my teaching methods and teaching pedagogy. In this last, fifth class, I learned a lot about the "nuts and bolts" of an online course - the importance of quick, specific feedback and how to better provide students with feedback in an online forum; strategies for creating online discussion questions that delve into complex topics and require students to think critically and go beyond "yes" and "no" responses; and the importance of posting and referring (frequently) to class expectations and grading rubrics. All this learning I got to see "in action" through my Mentor's course, and I was able to start thinking, really thinking, about how I would organize my own online course and go about collecting resources, choosing the tools of technology to incorporate, and just the basics of how to transfer a F2F class into an online class.

Having said all this, I feel the courses and the time spent in my Master teacher's course were all invaluable learning environments and learning experiences for me. I have a better understanding of what online courses entail (or what they should entail), as well as a better grasp of the actual preparation and management time required of an online course. All of the information I have learned and all of the experiences I have observed will serve me well when I finally do get the opportunity to teach an online course.


 * **Discuss your futures goals and design ideas for an online class. **

As I mentioned in the Course Descriptions page, my design idea for an online class involves transferring my current f2f junior English class into a hybrid class which meets three times a week in the physical classroom and twice a week in the online classroom. I hope to eventually bring other teachers on board with me in my movement to incorporate online courses into our curriculum. As technology and the world around us changes, what we teach our students and how we teach our students need to change as well and keep up with the changing times.


 * **Discuss foreseeable challenges to your teaching online. **

My biggest challenge right now is, of course, getting my administration to make the leap from saying that providing online courses at our school would be nice, to getting them to make that desire a reality and to see the benefits and necessity of such an offering. Other challenges I foresee involve the teachers' union and having to change our contract language to include information about online courses/teaching - language to address such issues as class load, preparation time, and class size.


 * **Share the resources you have available or need to make available to teach online. **

In my f2f classes, I have made it a goal to include as much multi-media, technology, and alternative assessment tasks as possible, so I feel I have a good base of resources from which to pull and use when I eventually teach an online course. I think what's missing, the biggest resource I need to make available, is to decide upon an e-learning environment system such as Moodle or SharePoint. Since my school right now is a "student-only" VHS school, I would not be able to use the D2L platform on which to host my course(s). In addition to having an e-learning environment system, obviously I need to dedicate some time to learning the system and how to use it to its full advantage, and to //**my**// full advantage as well.

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