Learning Design

This week we were asked to familiarize ourselves with several learning design resources (listed under references). Wow, AVID strategies everywhere! Clearly the creators and contributors of AVID are learning design specialists! Being trained as an AVID teacher 6 years ago was possibly the best professional development I have ever had. The focus on goal setting, study skills and higher level thinking infiltrate my teaching everyday.

Another key experience was when switched from teaching math and science to work part time as a home economics teacher so I could be home with my three young children. I was incredibly focused and intense in my teaching practice, and truly believed that the content that I was teaching was of utmost importance to producing successful citizens. When I started teaching home economics I realized that the only way students were going to get anything out of foods and sewing was if they had fun and could see some application to these skills in ‘the real world’. This philosophy translated beautifully into my teaching of junior science, senior math and senior biology. I try my best to provide a fun, relevant and engaging learning environment for my students; something I don’t think I truly valued prior to my experience teaching home economics.

Web Accessibility

On Tuesday’s class this week we had Kim Ashbourne join our cohort to discuss Web and Digital Accessibility. (Web accessibility deals more with the infrastructure and content of the internet, whereas digital accessibility refers more specifically to the accessibility of a tool or file). A key takeaway for me was that accessibility should be considered prior to accommodation. Certainly, there will be times when we are unable to predict accessibility issues, however failure to make curriculum accessibility is an act of exclusion and should be avoided whenever possible.

Accessibility tools include:

  • Captioning on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meets
  • providing transcripts when captioning is unavailable
  • Open Sourced Content
  • Read and write chrome plug-ins
  • create content with titles, headings and links that are accessible
  • Alt-text for images

Truly, an amazing resource for educators is Kim’s blog, which also includes the Powerpoint presentation from our class on July 14.

Student Engagement

Alec Couros and Bryan Jackson joined us to discuss how to create engaging online content. A few take-aways include…

  • Keep all content in one space
  • Dave Cournier quote “Community is Curriculum”
  • Provide incentives for students to contribute online, for example “How would you rank your contribution to the learning of others this past week” or “Identify 3 students that supported or enhanced your learning through their interactions, visibility, contributions or other activities.” Such questions would be great to add to my Environmental Science weekly reflections!
  • Build play and relationship into online environment. Great suggestion to include online-ice breakers in our remote learning website.
  • Alec Couros quote “Social collaboration as a means to curriculum”
  • I especially love the example of a hockey player guest speaker that was invited to read a homework list. This would be fun with teacher guest speakers, kids or even an audio-overlay for your dog!

Resources

Learning Design:

Accessibility:

Student Engagement