The takeaway...

There have been so many new and exciting things I have learned in the Online and Blended Learning course. I had already taught a two-way course and done the planning for teaching an online course, but the tools I have found through this course and the ideas on how to use them will help me to improve my face-to-face courses.

I have in the past created technology-based activities for my students, especially in the French courses I teach. I have been teaching French for many more years than I have been teaching English, so I have been looking for activities and ideas much longer for French. I have learned from experience and had the idea reinforced in this course that just because it involves technology, it does not make it better or more interesting (for the teacher or the student). I confess to spending hours online playing with French-oriented websites and rejecting them because I found them boring or pedagogically unhelpful. There are also sites that I skimmed over or outright dismissed as possibilities in the past that I would now consider as of possible use in my classroom. That opening of possibility is one of the most important takeaways from this course. The course readings and the ideas of my classmates/colleagues (who are also exploring new ideas) have led me to think about different ways of considering some of the tools presented. The class discussions and the links to others' projects have been especially helpful in demonstrating the usefulness of many tools. Beyond those specific tools, they have encouraged me to be more open to looking at others' lessons in many subjects and to consider how new tools or ideas used in those lessons might be used in engaging new ways for my students. For my English classes, I have found new resources and different ways to present some of the literature and grammar we will cover.

I will continue to look to my colleagues for ideas and to push myself to think just a little further about what I could do with tools presented and used in this course, and about how I can make my current classes more engaging with tools I have seen and have yet to find. I will continue to work toward an online version of my French courses, although there is no current plan in my district for implementing an online foreign language. Should an opportunity or need arise for such a course, I can have it ready to go. Meanwhile, the online course can be a way for me to play with the ideas in this course.

Social media in the classroom

I must admit that my first reaction to considering Facebook and Twitter in the classroom was not at all positive. First of all, my school blocks Facebook during school hours, presumably so that teachers and students do not waste computer time at school finding out who did what last weekend. My visions of what would happen if Facebook became available on the classroom computers involved the digital version of drawing pictures on desks. I can see students messaging each other rather than staying on task. We already know that students try to  text surreptitiously during class even though they risk losing their phones to the office for a week, so what would happen if we opened social media to them on the school computers?

For online courses, there is not the same concern as for a classroom with computer. I think that the teacher in the traditional classroom combats talking and passing notes while attempting to keep students on-task, and the same behavior would be an issue when using computers in the classroom - only in the form of IM and posting on Facebook, which would be less obvious. Because the LanSchool software was disabled, we have no way of knowing what is on the screen of any given student. It takes less than a second for a student to switch to the screen they are supposed to be working on rather than the one they are really looking at if they are off-task. Other than screen monitoring software, one solution to this would be to rearrange the labs to the configuration used by the school that hosted the technology conference earlier this summer. The computers were arranged with the students facing the walls of the classroom and the screens facing the center, where they would be clearly visible to the teacher at all times.

If, on the other hand, it is a more open idea of using Facebook and Twitter FOR the classroom, I can think of several possibilities. For a class, Facebook could be set up as a closed group and used for many different aspects of managing the class. The most basic function would be sending announcements - what was covered in class, what homework is assigned, etc. The teacher could also post links to helpful websites for further exploration. The messaging could be used to answer questions outside of class time for those who need clarification. Chat could be used between students, or between student and teacher. For student-teacher chat, the teacher could announce a time for "office hours" and be available for chat homework help (or language practice for a foreign language classroom). Students could be required to check the FB page on specific days and respond to a post as a graded assignment. One question I have with this is how to get students to the class page without being Facebook friends with them on a personal side. I have set up a page for French classes in my Facebook account, but have not yet invited any current students to the site. I am still working this out for myself.

In my opinion,Twitter is more limited by its very nature, but it could be useful for posting announcements and assignments for a class. Posting links to other sites could also be done, as could reposting appropriate tweets. For example, I already follow several French news reporting sites on Twitter, and I retweet selected posts about French news, culture, and sports. The intended audience right now is other French teachers, but once school starts, I plan to have students follow my Twitter feed and ask them to respond in class the next day. We could follow just the news about a specific topic, or have a variety of topics up for discussion. Once I have my students following, I plan to try to sort tweets through Hootsuite.

I believe that there are many ways to use social media in an educational setting, but I am still cautious about the way in which they would be used. I think that I need more time to consider the challenges of using social media during class time, but I do think that social media tools could be interesting and helpful for getting information to students and for selected activities.

I find it fascinating that the tools I rejected at the beginning of this module are now looking like fun and useful ways to curate resources! I skimmed past Pinterest because of my own prejudices as to its usefulness, but my colleagues have shown me some really useful ways to use it as a classroom tool. Now, I will have to go back to my classroom computer and find out if the site is blocked on our school's system!

As I mentioned in the discussion section, I had only considered Pinterest as a "fluff" site where people collected pretty pictures of food or decorating ideas. The fact that it might have some use in a classroom had not entered my mind, but then I followed the links to the Pinterest boards for Spanish tapas and The Great Gatsby, and my brain started producing its own visions of boards to use in my classes.

The tapas board in particular made me wonder why I had dismissed Pinterest so quickly. French = food, n'est-ce pas? The fact that my French 1 class just had a food day last week made it all the more ridiculous that I had dismissed Pinterest so quickly. We had discussed what is and is not French (francophone) food, and each student was responsible for bringing a specific dish to the food day. A Pinterest board would have made the discussion and the organization so much easier! This summer, I plan to begin experimenting with Pinterest and creating collections of food ideas by country/region - France (possibly broken down into regions of France), French-speaking Europe, North Africa, Caribbean, Polynesia, etc.

There are so many ideas that I can use for French and for English classes. Thanks to my colleagues for getting my past my dismissive attitude toward Pinterest!

There have been so many concepts shared in this course that I hardly know where to begin. I will choose a few of the ideas to show how the course will be brought into my classrooms.

Because I teach both French and English, I will apply the concepts mainly in my teaching. The tools I will use for each of my courses may differ, but the ideas behind the tools are similar. As noted in some of the readings, videos, and discussions, technology cannot be used with the idea that students will love it just because it is technology. In fact, I have found that some of my students resist technology and seem to be tired of teachers trying to incorporate its use into classrooms. The attitude goes back perhaps to the use of technology for technology's sake. Students are not impressed by using digital tools if they are not interesting. For example, one tool I can use with both French and English classes is Quizlet. I have started having my students do their vocabulary lists on Quizlet rather than as a handwritten list. Quizlet itself does not impress them (although some students do like playing the games to practice the vocabulary), but they do appreciate not being required to write out the words anymore. From my perspective, it is a trade-off. They do not get the "motor memory" of writing each word, but they do tend to use the flashcards and games to practice more than they would use the handwritten list for studying. Some of the tools we try work out and help the students, but some do not. The willingness to try new tools is important, but they must be carefully selected to fit the curriculum and to hold the students' interest long enough to make it an effective learning tool.

Another concept presented in the course which applies to my professional situation is Authentic Assessment, which we are now discussing. As a foreign language teacher, I want to have my students use the target language, not just memorize vocabulary lists and grammar rules. If you cannot put a sentence together and communicate, then you are not learning a language. Skill-based assessments are more time-consuming to grade, but they are a better indicator of whether the goals are being met. I will be re-evaluating my assessments and trying to find ways to incorporate more authentic assessments into my French courses. The use of a short video clip and a personal response (both in the target language), for example, will show whether the student understands the language and whether they can respond at a level appropriate to the course and/or lesson goals. The video can be shown to the whole class at once and played back more than once, but it is presently inconvenient to have the video available on individual computers. That fact will not rule out the use of authentic assessment, but it will require planning to use class time most efficiently without counting on one-to-one computers.

It will be harder for me to incorporate some of the concepts which involve whole-class participation on computers, at least for the time being. The use of student-response websites and online assessments is more difficult to include due to our limited computer capacity. Although I have a computer lab for my classroom, the server is currently unreliable for the volume needed to do many of the activities. The computers often freeze in the middle of online activities, so planning an assessment based on anything online is risky. With the limited time to teach and assess, it is difficult to give up class time to try a grade-based assessment activity which is likely to crash and be lost in the middle. We are scheduled to go to dual servers next year, though, so the risk of attempting an online assessment or whole-class response activity (such as Socrative) will decrease. I realize that the first few attempts to use any tool is time-consuming, with teacher and student learning curves, but the 50/50 chance of losing the activity/assessment is too much at this time. I look forward to trying some of the more "server-intensive" tools after the dual server is installed.

Overall, there are many concepts which will be useful in my class rooms. I would like to experiment with online language courses as well, although that project is in the future. For the present time, I will be applying many of the concepts from the course to my traditional classroom, using what tools are available and compatible with our current systems.

The Technology Integration Matrix is an interesting way to look at how involved I am in technology for my classrooms. While I fall solidly in the middle of the chart, the particular "box" I inhabit depends on the class and the setting I have at my disposal. My teaching has reached the "infusion" stage in some classes, but that was before I started teaching high school.

For my classes right now, the technology used depends on the class. While my French classes fall mostly into  some level of the "adaptation" column, the English classes that I teach are mostly in the "adoption" column. My students use technology actively and/or collaboratively in most cases.

My French classes, for example, have used technology for in-class projects dealing with vocabulary and culture. I have been told that many of my students do not have internet access at home, so I do not assign internet-based activities outside of the classroom. In the classroom, however, students have used technology to research countries for presentations. They have been directed to specific websites and given parameters for presentation software based on what would work on our classroom computers. This puts the 8th grade French class in the authentic/constructive - adoption/adaptation area. They were allowed to go beyond the given website to find more information once they had explored the selected sites, so they moved between adoption and adaptation in that sense. They were dealing with a world context, and the project was constructive in building meaning and understanding of the materials. They did move into collaboration, but only marginally aided by the technology available. The presentations were done as group projects, which one student in the group saved to their h-drive. I have access to each student's h-drive in order to be able to present it on a screen through my computer, but they do not have access to each other's h-drives. If they needed to collaborate outside of class, it had to be done by email. Some students did choose to do this, but most of the work was done in class. We need to have more collaborative tools available to our students for my classes to move to collaborative adoption/adaptation and beyond, which we are currently exploring.

In the future, I would like to be able to move my classes toward the collaborative infusion levels, as I have done in the past with my college teaching. For example, I would like to have an ongoing Wiki for assigned groups, with assignments geared toward language building and cultural competence. This is only one goal for the future, but I intend to keep adding technology to my classes in ways that will enhance student learning as I continue to learn new ways to apply technological tools.

Overcoming Barriers to Learning - Online vs. Traditional Classroom

In today's increasingly technologically sophisticated world, the online environment has become ubiquitous for the younger generation in particular. Teens and college-age students alike expect to be able to access information quickly and to have more visual and more engaging content at their disposal. This can lead to new barriers to learning in a traditional classroom, in addition to those that already may have existed. Some barriers to learning in a traditional classroom which may be addressed by a virtual classroom are personal - students who learn at different paces, students who are too shy to ask questions in front of others, or the distractions posed by being surrounded by other students. In a brick-and-mortar classroom, a student's personality may prevent him or her from learning, but this may also be the case in a virtual classroom. How the issues are addressed may be more important than the actual learning environment.

 Students often have questions that they are unwilling to ask in class because they assume that the others already know the answer. This feeling of being behind is important in differentiation. In a traditional classroom, it is more difficult to address the needs of students who learn at different paces. A student who needs constant attention and extra help with a topic often means that the rest of the class is neglected while the teacher helps the slower learner catch up, or that the student stays behind while the rest of the class goes on. Asynchronous communication can help overcome this barrier on different levels. First, it can overcome the unwillingness to pose a question - emailing the teacher keeps the interaction private, eliminating the feeling of being the only one who doesn't understand and by extension, the feeling of being judged by other students. The extra interaction with the teacher can also lead to a better management of differentiation for the teacher. If the teacher regularly monitors student responses to activities and reaches out to those who are struggling (based on responses or a failure to respond at all), s/he can minimize the possibility of the "lost" student without taking away from the learning experiences of the faster learners. Additional teacher explanation or online practice for the slower student can be provided as needed to keep him or her on track.

Being unable or unwilling to focus when seated next to another student sometimes interferes with a student's ability to learn. While this issue cannot be completely solved with online learning, it can help with one issue while creating another. There may not be a best friend or a disruptive student to distract the learner, but the mobility of a virtual classroom presents other possible distractions. When the learning environment changes from a traditional classroom with other students to a virtual one, it also changes from the traditional model of a teacher-monitored environment. The teacher can no longer direct a student's focus or eliminate distractions, so I think there is more possibility of procrastination and distracted learning. Especially for entirely online courses, setting specific and regular due dates for activities AND having alternate contact methods for high school students and their parents would be rather important. If a student is not keeping up with deadlines, there must be a way to contact him or her (or the parents in extreme cases) outside of the virtual classroom.

Course completion is difficult if a student has not been kept on task, whether face-to-face or online. It may be more important and  more difficult to monitor online students to keep them on-task in order to ensure course completion. As a personal note to this point, my daughter had to finish her senior year of high school entirely online due to health issues. She is normally a very bright, motivated student, but there were no set deadlines for her work, and no teacher follow-up to ensure that she was progressing. Consequently, the five courses to complete her diploma have dragged on over two years. While this is perhaps an extreme case, I do know that getting behind due to  a lack of contact can lead to bigger problems with completing coursework. My daughter will finish online high school within the next month and has been accepted to college for next fall despite the two-year senior year, but no thanks to any help from the online high school faculty or program. The importance of deadlines for keeping students on task and on track cannot be overemphasized in online learning. There are probably more distractions in a student's environment while s/he is taking an online course than there are in the traditional face-to-face classroom, and the online instructor must be aware of the difficulty and importance of directing a student's focus when there is no in-person contact.

In this age of emphasis on differentiated learning, educators should be particularly aware of the importance of asking how a student's personality affects his or her learning before deciding on a brick-and-mortar classroom or an online environment. If  the choice is an online or blended course, the instructor should be aware of the barriers to learning which may exist for individual students (just as a teacher is aware of barriers in a brick-and-mortar classroom) and should be sure to have tools available to monitor student progress in such a way as to identify at-risk students and to follow through on providing differentiated instruction for those who need extra help, or motivation to participate and learn for those who need help in focusing on the assigned activities.

After reading the posts on the discussion board, I am excited to begin the course and have discussions with my new colleagues. I can see that the experiences and the goals of the other teachers in the course will give me many ideas to point me in new and interesting directions. I look forward to finding more ways to engage my students in learning!