I am focusing on lessons that I have personally been a part of
One of my favorite English Professors at UMB, Alex Mueller, makes blogging a part of his courses. Students are required to post and comment in the persona of a character from the literature they have read. For example I spent the entire semester posting as the churlish MIller from the Canterbury Tales, rhyming in Old English even! http://quittingyourclassmates.blogspot.com/
Sure it was at times forced but the concept extended the shelf life of Cnaterbury Tales for me and really helped when I had to write a paper about Miller's character. To be honest about half the class fell behind or made clearly slapped together posts just to save their grade but that's any class assignment.
Last Summer in order to get the sci/math requirements knocked out I took Intro to Biological Anthropology online with Prof.Todd , easily the best online course I've taken. We posted, we commented, we linked, we watched videos, powerpoints, online quizzes, pretty much everything you can do in an online class. Prof.Todd's constant involvement kept the discussion relevant and on task. The only bomb was the WIMBA session, you know, the headphones and mic session which is sorta like a chatroom? Most students couldn't manage the hook up and nothing useful was accomplished. Take it if you need it, it's a great course and you'll learn a lot about how use tech effectively!
Now for something that didn't work so well - High stakes online testing! In Latin! (Disclaimer - I did pass this course with a B+ so it wasn't a total flame out but it was the closest I ever came to dropping a course.) I took Latin II online (it makes senses because you don't speak it) and most of the course was fairly dry; submit your homework to blackboard, read this chapter and so on. When it came to the weekly quizzes, OMG, they were hard as hell and became my unending nightmare. The Prof gave you 2 hours to take them which seems generous til you understand it was like a midterm each week, I usually submitted with seconds on the clock. He also made a lot of posts about catching cheaters and getting them kicked out of UMB and into Hades or something, this made me hyper paranoid that he would suspect me of cheating if I had a bad week and then rebounded or whatever. Don't even ask about the 3 hour final, home alone with too much coffee, scarfing gummi bears, alarm clock ticking, me freaking out... Seriously, I would have rather taken the exam in person, on campus, naked, sitting on a block of ice.
Yes I know, I'm drifting off topic. Its really more of a review of classes I've taken than actual lesson plan examples, but there's value in talking about what you know instead of blindly endorsing ideas you've never seen in action. Don't think I haven't got a tech based lesson plan up my sleeve, oh no, I've been busy -
Well there you go.
Lastly this quiet lil' blog has a few thoughts about tech ed the class might find interesting
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