Unit reflections

I think I was less critical than some of the unit creators because I was impressed with all of them. Last year, there were fewer students in the class with teaching/classroom experience, so there were a lot of units that didn't look like they could be taught. This year, the pairs seemed to work much better. And I learned about new tools, although if I use them in the future, I need to keep in mind the issue that kids have with too many tools being thrown at them at once.

Weeks 5 and 6

The last two weeks were on teachers and students, and particularly on communication. The one thing that was reinforced for me was how little you can really learn from the websites for each school, or even from looking at classes (particularly demo classes). You really have to dig into a class, and I wonder if you don't have to actually teach it to get a feel for what you can do and what you can't. This reinforces the importance of student teaching for this type of classroom, just as you need it for any other classrooom--even if you don't call it student teaching, at least you can't assume that taking a PD course will be enough, so mentoring for sure, but I actually think you need to follow someone else's course before you teach your own.

I was glad to see that the assignments led some students to move their schools on the Google doc. It is amazing how these schools manage to convince people about what they are going without any evidence whatsoever that they are doing it--the power of a good website.

Charter/For profit school Wordle

Here is the Wordle from this year's Wallwisher words. I couldn't find the one from last year.

Charter/For profit school Wordle Spring 2011

State School Wordles

Here are Wordles made from the word lists created in Wallwisher (this year) and in a discussion forum (last year).

STATE SCHOOL WORDLE SPRING 2011

STATE SCHOOL WORDLE SPRING 2010

If you have never made a Wordle, go to http://www.wordle.net/ and see how it works.

Week 4: Instructional Design

A couple of things struck me about the reviews of different courses in terms of instructional design. The first was that there are now far more courses up there to look at than there used to be. The second is that a single provider might have both good and bad courses--it seems very hit and miss, but it may be that they are gradually upgrading, so the newer courses are better. Another was that K12, Inc. courses were pretty universally criticized--this is a surprise because they do a huge job of self-promotion. It also seems that all of the schools do better at laying out the course expectations, content, etc., than they do in actually delivering the course. I was also struck by how much the need to have multimedia has infused these courses. I think next time it would be good to go deeper on this one, to see if the multimedia is really used well or is just there to engage students (not that that's bad, but as an example, I don't think simulations work without really good scaffolding and structuring). And last, it was interesting how few of the examples were from state schools, which takes us back to the need to sell--state schools have less need to do this.

Weeks 2 and 3

It's interesting to read student reflections on how schools appear to outsiders. Overall, the schools seem to be either doing a poor job playing to their strengths or are great job obscuring their weaknesses with nice words. Hopefully some things will be clarified as we look further into what is actually going on in the schools and in the courses. But the lack of consistency in what information they present, and particularly in how they present their concrete achievements, makes it really hard to determine whether or not an individual school works for students, and also what the entire field looks like.

I am surprised at where some of the schools are placed on the spreadsheet and it will be very interesting to see if the spreadsheet changes when we revisit at the end of the semester. It occurs to me that it may not, because it may require a depth of knowing about a school that you can't get without actually talking to people who teach there, reviewing the courses, etc. and generally schools are not open to that. They clearly want to control the message.

Week 1: Getting organized

The first week seems to have gone relatively smoothly, although the students coming in and out still makes it hard to create a week that is interesting for students who start on time but not so heavy that late comers can't catch up. The lack of interconnectivity between Moodle and the registration systems makes for constant checking on my part but that should go away once the updated Moodle is in use by everyone.

The class has an interesting mix--more students from other programs at TC than last year but fewer students from outside the country, more classroom teachers than last year and fewer instructional designers. This may mean we avoid some of the problems that CCTE students had last year when we came to curriculum-creation unit.

I did not expect that the K12, Inc. schools would look so much like state schools to those not in the know. I am sure that is their intent but I will need to clarify that next time.