Pedagogy First!

My week two blog.

Apparently I need this program very much.  It seems I posted my week two blog on Type Pad but not where it belongs in the Pedagogy first Cohort 3 week two blog.  So here goes again. I must have put it in the wrong place - perhaps as a response to Michele's post as shown below?  I dunno. Jim, please reply to let me know if you are seeing this in the correct place if I have achieved success this time. I think I forgot to choose the category in week two.

« Michele's Pedagogy | Main | Week 2- Pedagogy Reflection »

09/15/2010

My Pedagogy... uh...

I've only been teaching formally in a college classroom for three years and as such, I don't know that I can answer this at the level of the other posts I've read.

Fortunately, my parents were gifted educators and I did a tremendous amount of mentoring and teaching in my industry before I moved into the college classroom first as a graduate student and then as an instructor.  So even though I have trouble finding scholarly words for what I think, feel and do, my students seem to be learning and engaged. Maybe you can help me speak about this more intelligently. That's why I choose this program for online teaching - I need to know more about pedagogy and on=line instruction.

Here goes.  I'm a big fan of the teachable moment. That moment when people want to know something is the moment when they are most likely to be open to actually learning that something. I try to create as many of those moments as I can.  Also, I try to be accessible and authentic, and I use the element of surprise - the most important element in entertainment - to keep their focus on the subject at hand.

I do lecture and I always try to provide a sound explanation for why the lesson I am offering matters.  I try to be empathetic and frequently mention that I am a student with professors so I understand, having walked a mile in their shoes.  I also have lots of hands-on activities because I am teaching a technical craft - video cinematography and editing. But I also try my best to demonstrate the skills they need to develop to be effective learners in my class.  When I lecture, I frequently take notes on the computer as I lecture so that they can learn how to take notes in class.  I project this on the computer and switch back and forth between my notes and the images/sounds we are discussing.

All of my students are called by their first name at least once during each class because I strongly believe that we need to be connected.  They know that I am personally interested in their success and when they are absent or tune out, I let them know that I'm aware of it.

Going the extra mile to remove any obstacles that come between them and their opportunity to learn lets them know how seriously I am invested in their participation. Most of the students who don't want to be "smothered" by me, and surprisingly there are very few of them, know that I am so serious about their commitment to learning that they drop after the first class if they are really only interested in goofing around in class.

I write to them several times during the week in between classes. I post supplemental reading on Blackboard, send them an email if they don't show up for class and all of this motherly love seems to pay off.  I also let them know that I want them to get from the course everything they expect and need.  In this way my classroom is really like a one-room schoolhouse.  They have a very wide range of skills and some students come with highly developed skills while others are rank beginners.  I always try to have a WIFM "What's In It For Me" for every level, extra help for the students working slowly and supplemental work for the ones who are working at a higher level.

I require my students to write and this is surprising to them. They write notes in class, they write in preparation for every assignment and I expect them to build their vocabulary. Our classes are spicy sometimes, given that we are analyzing and creating stories with pictures and sound. Sometimes the projects are racey and very entertaining.

I must be doing some things right but I hope to learn enough about pedagogy to make it much better - SDICCCA internship helped tremendously. One of my students won the CCC media competition in May so they are doing terrific things. Blackboard is just the beginning for us and I am longing to use more interesting things in the classroom and to be able to reach out to them in between classes to keep my favorite subject alive in their minds when we are not together in the classroom.

Dawn

I've only been teaching formally in a college classroom for three years and as such, I don't know that I can answer this at the level of the other posts I've read.

Fortunately, my parents were gifted educators and I did a tremendous amount of mentoring and teaching in my industry before I moved into the college classroom first as a graduate student and then as an instructor.  So even though I have trouble finding scholarly words for what I think, feel and do, my students seem to be learning and engaged. Maybe you can help me speak about this more intelligently. That's why I choose this program for online teaching - I need to know more about pedagogy and on=line instruction.

Here goes.  I'm a big fan of the teachable moment. That moment when people want to know something is the moment when they are most likely to be open to actually learning that something. I try to create as many of those moments as I can.  Also, I try to be accessible and authentic, and I use the element of surprise - the most important element in entertainment - to keep their focus on the subject at hand.

I do lecture and I always try to provide a sound explanation for why the lesson I am offering matters.  I try to be empathetic and frequently mention that I am a student with professors so I understand, having walked a mile in their shoes.  I also have lots of hands-on activities because I am teaching a technical craft - video cinematography and editing. But I also try my best to demonstrate the skills they need to develop to be effective learners in my class.  When I lecture, I frequently take notes on the computer as I lecture so that they can learn how to take notes in class.  I project this on the computer and switch back and forth between my notes and the images/sounds we are discussing.

All of my students are called by their first name at least once during each class because I strongly believe that we need to be connected.  They know that I am personally interested in their success and when they are absent or tune out, I let them know that I'm aware of it.

Going the extra mile to remove any obstacles that come between them and their opportunity to learn lets them know how seriously I am invested in their participation. Most of the students who don't want to be "smothered" by me, and surprisingly there are very few of them, know that I am so serious about their commitment to learning that they drop after the first class if they are really only interested in goofing around in class.

I write to them several times during the week in between classes. I post supplemental reading on Blackboard, send them an email if they don't show up for class and all of this motherly love seems to pay off.  I also let them know that I want them to get from the course everything they expect and need.  In this way my classroom is really like a one-room schoolhouse.  They have a very wide range of skills and some students come with highly developed skills while others are rank beginners.  I always try to have a WIFM "What's In It For Me" for every level, extra help for the students working slowly and supplemental work for the ones who are working at a higher level.

I require my students to write and this is surprising to them. They write notes in class, they write in preparation for every assignment and I expect them to build their vocabulary. Our classes are spicy sometimes, given that we are analyzing and creating stories with pictures and sound. Sometimes the projects are racey and very entertaining.

I must be doing some things right but I hope to learn enough about pedagogy to make it much better - SDICCCA internship helped tremendously. One of my students won the CCC media competition in May so they are doing terrific things. Blackboard is just the beginning for us and I am longing to use more interesting things in the classroom and to be able to reach out to them in between classes to keep my favorite subject alive in their minds when we are not together in the classroom.

Dawn

My Pedagogy

I think this is week two, or is it three and I have forgotten to check in?  Either way I have thought long and hard about my pedagogy in the classroom and how will I transfer this to an on-line environment?  Truthfully, I'm not sure.  I love the live classroom, interacting with the students, watching their light-bulbs turn on while some would call my style lecture I would call it storytelling.  By the time the nursing students get to me they are fairly well versed in health-care culture and the medical model.  Explaining disease process and medical intervention is straightforward and can be delivered with ease via either modality.  It's the "nursing" I am struggling with.  I typically tell a story of a situation where I was the nurse, where I did a great job (or not).  While telling the story I am usually very animated, using exaggerated body language to draw the student's attention to something they should be assessing as a nurse, I will lay down on a table or alter my gait to drive a point home.  How am I going to do that on-line? How am I going to deliver the passion?  How do you teach caring in an on-line environment.  Taking a step back further is can caring be taught?  This is a dilemma nurse educators are dealing with continually, now that nursing is becoming a financially rewarding career with significant job security are students still entering the profession because of a "call" or for the money?  With these questions looming over my head I have to think how can I deliver the content and develop competent and confident nurses who can critically think and "care" for their patients.  I have to continue to use my 25 years of experience as a nurse to tell the story.  While in the hospital with students by my side the story tells itself with me more as a guide that keeps them safe (the patient too).  While nursing theory can be boring and dry read out of a text or delivered in lecture it is the story telling that makes it come alive, with the tools I expect to learn about via POT I am hoping I can move some of my stories to the on-line environment and expect they can be augmented with the magic of learning objects and other bells and whistles the POT wizards will reveal. 

While mulling my pedagogy over I came across this website that provided this short, academic and theoretical synopsis of the pedagogical shift of nursing education. 

Like many other disciplines, nursing education has undergone a profound metamorphosis in recent decades. Traditionally, nursing students were educated using an apprenticeship model of instruction framed within a distinct biomedical, positivist, behaviourally-focused paradigm. As nursing education moved from an exclusive clinical setting into colleges and later university settings, a shift towards the humanities and a more holistic paradigm was adopted, though nursing education and culture still occurred within a deductive modernist framework. Remnants of this still exist, coupled with humanistic, critical social theory, and feminist-postcolonial lens to ultimately cultivate neophyte nurses who are empowered, engage in dialogue, reflection and praxis, and who provide care that is distinctly phenomenological, client-focused and salient to the individual client's health needs and situation

My Pedagogy: Student Centered Instruction

At the time of teaching, I consider that each one of my students have a different learning style. I have used a variety of student-centered teaching methods and modalities including: realia, the arts, media, the internet, literature, drama, and role playing. Also, I have integrated technology based projects in most of my ESL courses. By allowing students to participate in technology based projects, the students’ motivation and retention increase. I have observed that when students work on technology based projects they were also highly motivated to learn English and computer skills at the same time, because they were always on task. As a result of this, I was able to see an increase in student retention. I believe that this practice not only enhances the learners second language acquisition, but it also prepares them for the workforce.

I consider myself as a constructivist. As I mentioned before, when presenting a lesson, I use student-centered teaching methods such as cooperative learning, inductive learning, and project based learning. I strongly believe that a student’s previous knowledge is very important when it comes to learning a new language. For instance, I might start a lesson by asking an open-ended question or by showing a picture or a video to activate my students’ schema. In addition, in most of my lessons I allow my students to work in small groups where they can practice the objectives of the lesson or discuss a question or issue. I believe that group work motivates the learner because they are exposed to a greater quantity and richer variety of language practice. It also allows the learner to build a sense of community in the classroom. Even better, it allows the students not only to express their own opinions, but adapt the goals of the lesson to a personal level.

Moreover, in order to acquire the language, language learners must engage in meaningful communication so that they can foster their second language attainment. Based on this thought, my role as a teacher is to facilitate students learning by promoting communicative language use.  Also, my role is to provide activities involving real communication; carrying out meaningful tasks; and using language that is meaningful to the learner as a way to promote learning. 

Finally, some of the challenges that I foresee in teaching an online course may include: finding effective online tools, copyright issues, and time management (both students and instructor).

Week 2 - My pedagogy

What works in my class? Well, my post will be focused on a language class, but I am sure that many concepts apply to other dicsiplines as well. One of the most important things I have found is that work in class should create an environment where students can enjoy the learning process and, as much as possible, should be stress-free. Although taking the stress out completely is almost impossible, because there will always be a grade at the end of the semester, at least in the micro-environment of one lesson or some activities I think this is one aspect that allows many students to improve a lot.

The activities I prefer are the ones that combine languge with culture and are able to recreate a little part of Italy, or of Italian culture and feeling, in the classroom. The use of real artifacts of objects from the country as well as analyzing pictures or movies can be some ways to reach this goal.

In my opinion, constructivism is the theory that works better in teaching foreign languages for many reasons. One of them is purely motivational: I believe students can apreciate much more that they are learning a language when they are using it. Instructors have to create the maximum amount of communication opportunities for students, especially in languages like Italian that don’t offer many chances outside of class (at least in Southern California). So a lecture based approach would not work, or it would work only in developing reading and writing skills, but it would absolutely neglect all the oral aspects. As an instructor, I find the challenge of creating new and interesting activities very exciting and rewarding because you can immediately see how much better the students use the target language.

Emphasizing oral use of the language will probably be the biggest challenge in the online environment. Creating platforms for communication (especially oral communication) among students. I think I have to accept a lower volume of communication but I will get more quality. I already tested voice discussion boards, in my on-ground classes, and even if they were just simple reading exercise, I can tell that the quality and precision of the students’ oral production is better. Also, in my opinion, Social Networks work very well too, even if I have had a bad experience with Ning (the support staff answered to my questions four weeks later!). I think that the challenges in the online environment will be more due to the technical process of learning new tools. Once I get used to the new tools, I am sure that there will be no difference between on-line and on-ground teaching.

Ciao!

Bears and Jellyfish, Oh My!

I think I am better at looking at what I don’t do well than what I do well, but that’s not the prompt for this week.  So based on previous comments from students, the most effective thing I do in a physical classroom is make meaningful connections with them.  That, of course, has nothing to do with classroom content though it certainly makes it easier to deliver content when students believe in what you say and respect the person who is saying it.  I recall way back a comment from my Classroom Methods and Management professor:  “If they [the students] don’t buy into you, you’re not going to sell them anything.”  I have often thought about what it takes to make connections.  Though there are no simple answers, and the paradigm shifts each year with a set of new students, there is one underlying component:  genuineness.  I truly believe this value sets instructors apart from the rest of the “real life” world:  we honestly believe in students and their abilities to achieve to high standards.  I should note that I have not taught in an on-ground class for nearly two years now since much of what I do in the library has taken me away from that structure to more one-shot library orientations.

As for being a lecturer/constructivist, I would say I’m a bit of both, but constructivism definitely dominates.  However, there are situations where I see a need to lecture (for less than 15 minutes at a time), to employ drill-and-kill activities, and to help students create and produce.  It really depends on the assignment and what needs to be accomplished with the course’s particular SLO, and I am not one who likes to subscribe to just a dominant   idea.  Flexibility is very important to me in my teaching.  For instance, in a recent online Library 108 course that I had taught, the first four units focused on lecture-based activities, where the class explored ideas related to evaluating information, information structure, and the purpose of information.  Part of this process had students evaluate web sites, and for the most, the activities were very prescribed. Do this.  Do that.  What do you think of this?  Blah.  Blah.  At the end of the four weeks, students had to create a web site that violated all of the elements of good evaluation and included faulty information.  Their product could be anything, and we used Google Sites as the editor since it was both free and easy to learn.  That was a very constructivist assignment, and here are two final products: <http://sites.google.com/site/bearsafetytips/home>

<https://sites.google.com/site/jellyfishedu/>.

My biggest challenge in the online environment is to find ways to continue establish meaningful connections, which is another reason why I am very interested in learning the “cheap” tricks and tips and  substantive pedagogical strategies in being able to create a more vibrant online presence and community for my courses.  I have heard that Lisa Lane and Jim Sullivan do a good job, so as we progress, I am very interested in exploring their methods and ideas.  

Another big challenge is finding the time to create online content and translate content intended for an on-ground course to the online environment.  For instance, I’m interested in creating short Camtasia-based tutorials for all of our online databases to allow students who remotely access our library page to engage in the resource and to also allow online instructors to link to them in a menu-like fashion.  A typical 3-5 minute project that includes planning, screen capture, script and narration, ADA compliance, production, and export takes about 4-7 hours (there are a lot of other steps involved which I have not listed).  It always floors me whenever I hear people say a short video or tutorial doesn’t take that much time.

Pedagogy and the Power of “And”

I don’t like either/or things. It’s not that I don’t like making choices, it’s just that the black/white, gay/straight, with us/against us paradigm is not usually useful for me.

My pedagogy combines everything I think would be useful for student learning, not in a Mulligan Stew way but as part of considering what I want them to experience. I had to pare down from my original goal, which had to do with content absorption.

At first, I wanted them to know what I know, see what I see. I figured they had to start by “knowing” all the facts. When I realized they couldn’t or wouldn’t remember enough of them to be useful, I began to add more types of things to reach them: visuals, video clips, texts with better pictures. Then I’d test on factual retention and the ability to construct an argument based on, well, my arguments.

Then I realized this wasn’t doing history, it was reading (and viewing and hearing) history, which may have been OK for medieval students sitting at the feet of the chair, but was starting to bore me. I got an award for my work in 1992, which meant essentially an award for producing and performing very good lectures. I was therefore an actor. In college I had missed a BA in Theatre by two units, because I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to do design, creating experiences for an audience that involved them. That lecturing award started me in a pattern of combining experiences for students, becoming experimental, getting messy, and considering the lecture as only one possible tool.

I like “and”. Lecture and discussion and visuals and groupwork and self-directed research. When I discovered the theory of learning styles, I tied my pedagogy to that theoretical model, but when people began using learning styles as an excuse for not acquiring proper skills, I abandoned the model and continued my method. So my approach is based on deciding what I want the students to experience, and then seeking the methods that can make that happen effectively. I’m instructivist when that seems necessary, but it has a high failure rate (like just happened yesterday -- I’ll test them but I’m not sure how much they learned, though they enjoyed the show). Sometimes constructivism works, sometimes it doesn’t. Directed exploration is something I want to try, but I need smaller groups of students to try it with. And thus my pedagogy turns...

Week 2

Thanks for a fun first week on the blog. I especially appreciated all the new tools and toys I could add to my explore list. Although, like many of you, I feel a little bit of anxiety about how and when I will get to all of this cool stuff, I try to remind myself that this process is organic: I don't have to get to everything--just learn a few new things each week. And then I can stop hyperventilating :)

I also want to encourage everyone to join our POT Diigo and share the links and resources you are providing there. The Diigo makes it easier for us all to find things later--much easier to search there than to scour this blog conversation--which will grow dramatically in coming weeks.

Okay, onward! Our responses to this week's prompt are due by next Wednesday.

Cohort #3

Week 2: Your Pedagogy

• Blog about what you do effectively in class, including your favorite activities or lectures.
• Define your teaching style: are your a lecturer? a constructivist?
• Discuss what challenges you think you will have teaching in the online environment.

For those of you who wish to work ahead, you can always see where we are going next at  your cohort requirements page on the POT site. If you do work ahead, please label your posts clearly so that your readers know where you are going and you can find your posts later.

 Cohort #2

Week 2 Prompt:

• Please give us a Week 2 update on how the process of implementing what you learned last semester is going.
• Continute to lend a hand offering advice, reactions, and feedback to our new community members from Cohort 3.

Louisa's Pedagogical Ideology vs. Praxis

[This post is a bit late, but I was mostly out-of-touch with the internet during our extended weekend, so I'm posting now]

I cut my pedagogical teeth on Paolo Freire in graduate school at a seminar that featured the great man himself, and afterwards joined participatory teaching and research groups.  Since that time I've participated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed/Theater of the Oppressed conferences.  I was also influenced by Nel Noddings' book Caring  and Care-based ethics of Noddings and Gilligan [Yes, btw, Noddings is Vicki Noddings' mother], and at the same time by Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Inge Bell's (author of This Book is Not Required).

After graduate school I was somewhat involved in the unschooling movement among homeschoolers, and then I was influenced by the writings of John Holt, Nancy Wallace, Peter Stillman and John Taylor Gatto.  I was never brave enough to totally "unschool" my children, but I took something important from my readings in this area.  I had the pleasure of hearing Stillman and Gatto speak at a conference.  Stillman spoke about the teacher and the librarian, about the teacher telling him what to study, and when to study, and how to study, and the librarian being so much more educational just being available to answer questions, help him to locate resources when he was pursuing what he wanted to study for his own purposes with no evaluation of how well he learned it except self-evaluation.  Gatto's Dumbing Us Down:  The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling was eye-opening and often profound.

I don't know if I'd say my pedagogy is constructivist, it's certainly not lecturist (lecturational? lecurativist?).  I believe that whether the learning is online, onground, or on the phone, education is always about the relationship between the teacher and the student.  I try to inspire my students to think subversive thoughts, to participate in their own education, and to see that we're participating together in constructing the learning in the class, often by deconstructing the beliefs we've held for so long, the beliefs we learned without knowing we were learning them (in school, on t.v., from our political system).  

One way my pedagogical approach informs my praxis online is in having students slowly take over some of the teaching activity.  First they do it in the discussion -- coming up with their own examples from the media and showing their classroom colleagues how the examples work.  Later it becomes more full-blown, but still in groups. In one class I have the students develop a website where they go through all of the steps of subjecting two or three competing hypotheses to the same criteria.  In another class, I have the students actually construct a section for a chapter they're learning.  They have to do an introductory page, write essay questions and have another student in the group answer them, write a quiz, find related webpages and link them.  At first they often want to wait for me to answer all of the questions, and they'll be angry with a student that takes a teaching role.  I have to really encourage them and tell them that I expect them to ask probing questions, to educate one another, to critique and even sometimes to correct.  I think, in a way, this is easier online because they don't have the outwards symbols of my authority.  Online I'm not up at the podium with the book -- wielding the technology, taking role, the only one in possession of the official list of all of their names.  Online my fonts are the same size as everyone else's. 

Another way it informs my praxis (in perhaps a more negative way) is that I detest grading, and I hate it even more online than I do in person, so I struggle.  Teaching builds a relationship, but grading tears it down.  I try to focus on communicating with my comments, my answers in discussion, my participation in the things I'm asking them to do . . .  But still I cringe when I have to put that number or letter somewhere.  I'm critical of my students' work, but try to be inviting at the same time.  Comments start and end with positives -- the first set of comments tell them what they did right, try to pinpoint the things they should keep if they were rewriting.  The second part is criticisms/critiques.  There I try to talk about the problems in the work (not in the student).  The last part is positive and helpful suggestions, an invitation.  The hardest part is not mitigating that last part -- not saying "Overall, good work, BUT . . ." 

-- Louisa

In order to engage students I try to hook students and make them excited about what they are trying to learn. I love to make my class fun and slightly unpredictable in order to encourage them to think critically and “outside the box”.
I try to set up appropriate expectations of what to expect in our class and why…For example, I explain to them things such as the level of rigor that our class must have in order for our class to matriculate to the UCs and CSUs; the meaning of a Carnegie unit and how that relates to the amount of outside work that my students must do; and what makes college courses different from high school courses. Basically I explain to them how we all need to step up our game.
I always try to have an easygoing style that makes our learning in class feel more like a conversation and less like a formal lecture. I like using different media (e.g., PowerPoint, whiteboard, videos, overheads, manga, anime) to explain the content in a fun and fluid way. I encourage my students to have the freedom to veer off topic so that they may get excited about what they are learning, which leads them to ask critical thinking questions (which by their very nature have not all been answered yet). I try to challenge my students to hold opposing views in their head and become more comfortable with answers that are not always black and white but many shades of gray. I try to engender in my students an “aha moment” at least once a week. And, I want my students to laugh and have fun. I do all of this in order to help my students learn. Bringing my spontaneity, flow, and rhythm to the online environment seems to me to be my biggest challenge.

Like many of my colleagues on this blog I am both a lecturer and a constructivist, but I tend to lecture more in order to provide my students the scaffolding that they need in order to construct their own knowledge.

Favorite teaching activity

The first time I heard about Team-based Learning I was hooked. Coming from a background in business where groups in the workplace are used to develop products, trouble shoot, make company-wide decisions, and problem solve. I knew I wanted to bring groupwork skill development to the classroom. I have always believed that we learn best as social beings within social environments rather than behaving as well trained, antiquated tape recorders.   

There are many challenges to consider when asking students to work in groups. To begin with, each student brings their own motivational level to the group based on their own need and desire. Then, of course, there are the different personalities, personal backgrounds, and educational levels all coming together, in an attempt, to form one cohesive and productive learning environment.  Occasionally, I have worked with groups which express trouble in forming cohesion, this in itself is a learning opportunity, but for the most part I see students learn and support each other through the learning process.

When forming groups, TBL recommends spreading the resources. That is to say, each student brings a different strength to the group spreading the wealth of knowledge and creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. As soon as the group is formed, students introduce themselves and share what they bring to the group. This is the students’ first opportunity, generally occurring very early in the semester (if not on the first day), to apply their own personal experience, skill, knowledge, and education to a project at hand. What they bring to the experience (the group) becomes alive and immediately applicable.

Team-based learning (TBL) is a fully developed teaching strategy created by Larry Michaelsen, Professor of Management, University of Central Missouri. http://teambasedlearning.apsc.ubc.ca/

When I think about my desire of bringing groupwork to the classroom it further validates my personal teaching style as a constructivist.  Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy giving a good lecture or two or three, and this passion, thankfully, adds to the structure of my groupwork assignments.

This week I was introduced to the connectivist theory of learning. As I read, I couldn’t help but recall when, as a young adult, I first heard the famous quote by Henry Ford, “If I should really want to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid people who can answer any question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts. Now, will you kindly tell me why I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have people around me who can supply any knowledge I require?” I first read this quote in the book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill during a time when I was still developing my own identity. I thought, “Wow, working in groups is really smart!”

Today, on Google, I searched for Henry Ford’s famous push-button machine and perhaps I found it. Henry Ford knew where to find the knowledge he needed at any given moment.  
This image has been altered from its original located at:  http://www.life.com/image/50499923

 According to George Siemans's connectivism the focus on knowing how and knowing what is replaced by knowing where to find the knowledge one needs. Technology is changing the way we learn; knowledge is growing exponentially and requiring us to think in terms of interconnected knowledge nodes leading us to seek the information we need (Siemens, 2004).  To think in Sieman's terms and using his words to define my teaching style it would sound something like this: The best way I know how to equip my students for a future filled with the possibility of working within many unrelated fields is to teach them the skill of collaboration and knowing where to find reliable knowledge in a world that is rapidly evolving.

I love delivering pedagogy through technology. The problem I'm trying to solve is how to effectively guide and motive online distant learning group projects. I’m looking for that push-button, turn-key technology which will afford group cohesion, engagement, and accountability, behaviors Larry Michaelsen (TBL) would attribute to a highly functioning team. To date, and thanks to Robert Kelley, the best online group project tool I have used is Google.docs.
The screencast below is one example of how I use Google.docs in the classroom. I send this video to my students after I have introduced them their group project assignment: