Team Awesome Sauce are: Bobbi Donnison, Krista Frate, Marshall Hartlen, Steve Minten, and Nicolette Young
After much discussion and mind changing, Team Awesome Sauce has decided to explore edX, both as a massive open online course (MOOC) provider, and as an educational app for Android or IOS. We will outline the beginning of our journey by using a classic k-12 learning modality: the know, wonder, learn (KWL)) chart. A KWL chart is a way to guide inquiry. It assesses what you already know, (in this case our collective knowledge of learning modalities) what we wonder/want to know about our topic, and finally what we hope to learn in pursuing the inquiry further. For the purposes of this post, we applied this inquiry organising strategy to three guiding questions:
- What type of modality did we choose?
- What question(s) would you like to pursue as you examine or experience the modality?
- What background reading did you do to learn more about the modality? (Blogs, websites, library journal articles). Write a summary of what you learned.
In each instance a degree of expansion and explanation is included, which, it is hoped, will help keep all of us on track as we individually and collectively delve deeper into specific issues and aspects of our modality, and the instance of edX in particular.
Continue reading Exploring Modalities: A Reflection by Team Awesome Sauce
In secondary education these days there is a big push to incorporate educational technology in the classroom. Economic reality dictates creative solution for any school managing this, particularly large schools catering to more than 1000 students. Operating budgets cannot keep up with the cost and rapid change of devices required for classroom use. Smaller schools have been able to manage this change better, when the school board that serves the pieces of operational pie capital is adequately managed and funded. To deal with spiralling operating overhead, operating costs get outsourced to parents who now are expected to purchase devices for their children in the same way they are expected to purchase stationery (the politics of this can be discussed on Facebook or Twitter as it will detract from the purpose of this post!)
The digital age is changing the way life is conducted. We learn differently. We access information differently. We work differently. We exist, differently. All of these realities, and we are still changing, so, how to manage this? Are we hanging on to the organisational structurees of work-life-education as a last vestige, a sentinel against the great digital unknown? The various mediums for life in the 21st century are constantly moving forward like a Space X rocket, but we are in many ways being guided through this journey by a gasoline powered engine because it is familiar. The rocket will carry us into unknown and potentially dnagerous new realms, but what marvels we will experience on the journey! The trusty old engine will get us somewhere reliable familiar and safe, but we will never reach the depths of untapped potential of the rocket. This is the challenge of managing and leading in the digital age. 
As an educator who has bought in to e-learning, and modern teaching practice, I feel somewhat vindicated in self-assessing my own teaching practice to date. Much of what has been reported in Thomas’ (2010) writing has been an affirmation of what I am already doing in my classroom. That said, I have in various stages of my career been faced with great opposition for applying some of these strategies. No one likes change, yet it is the only constant of life. When I started teaching I employed traditional instructional/behaviourist teaching methods as this is what I knew as a student, and the university I completed my undergrad in was only just beginning to look at these alternative teaching methods. I majored in social studies, a profession (in Alberta and New Zealand at least) that is dominated by “more experienced” teachers, generally male, in the twilight of their careers and not always the most responsive to change. (possibly the only faculty more regressive to the new way of teaching is mathematics). Still, there I was young (‘er than I am now now, but especially young) new teacher with bright shiny ideas ready to re-invent the system and “make a real difference”. The cynicism I faced from the more established teachers nearly crushed my enthusiasm as I was met with comments like “Oh yeah, I remember that idea when it was called _____, and ten years it will be re-packaged and called something new. Me, I am going to stick to what I have been doing for forty years. I get results” But as I walked past classrooms of such teachers, I couldn’t help but notice the number of semi-conscious students idly siting in their desks zoned out on their phone or asleep completely, and I thought: there has to be a better way? But I feel I am digressing.