In this blog post, I want to share the recent online course by Coursera which I have completed successfully. The course title is Emerging Trends & Technologies in the Virtual K-12 Classroom. Although this course is meant for teachers, my institution also made it compulsory for administrative staff especially those in the IT department to aware of the various technologies which could be used for teaching. The completion of this online course is another small achievement for me as we come to the end of 2016 and the beginning of my new job.
About this Course
Emerging technologies are quickly gaining momentum in the field of virtual K-12 instruction. In this course, we will explore how the latest trends in the use of technology affect student learning and engagement. What innovative learning spaces and tools are available to instructors? How can instructors best utilize free and open resources to more deeply engage students in their learning? What impact can the use of emerging technologies have on student retention and performance? We will discuss the possibilities and challenges of using technology in fully online environments, although many of the ideas can be applied to blended and traditional environments as well. Learners will compare and contrast tools for use in K-12 virtual instruction, as well as examine best practices for implementing and managing these tools.
Lesson Plan & Assessment
The entire course is conducted over 5 weeks with video lessons and a short quiz (consisting of 5 multiple choice questions) for each week for week 1 to 4. Trainees are also required to complete a written assignment which will be reviewed and graded by 3 fellow trainees. Each trainee will be reviewing and grading the written assignment submitted by 3 other fellow trainees. For week 5, there is a video lesson on final course reflection and a final quiz consisting of 35 questions. The multiple choice questions are rather tricky and some require the candidate to select one or more correct answers. To complete the course, trainees are required to obtain a score of 80% or above for all quizzes and the written assignment. In addition, trainees must have reviewed and graded the written assignment submitted by 3 other fellow trainees.
My submissions for the assignment are described below. As the target audience for this course are teachers, I attempted this assignment in the context of a secondary 3 English teacher. There are 3 questions for this assignment as follows. My answers to these questions are written in blue color.
1. Briefly describe the particular activity or lesson you would like to create, improve, or change. Include the following information. Your response should be no more than two pages of text long.
- Grade level (or age of students) and subject
- Overview of the activity
- Up to three student learning outcomes this activity will address. If your institution is required to meet specific government-established standards, please also note them accordingly.
- Reason for creating, improving, or changing the activity
English, being the official language in many countries is estimated to be used by over 2 billion people in the world. In Singapore, English is the language of administration and is mandatory for all students who are grade 12 or below to pass its examination in order to advance to the next grade in education. The English language examination consists of essay writing which is a critical aspect in assessing the students' proficiency in using the language. As an English teacher in a secondary (middle) school, it is crucial for me to find ways to enhance my secondary 3 (equivalent to grade 9 in the United States) students' writing skill.
My class of 40 students are required to submit hard copy essay to me for review and grading on a fortnightly basis. The length of the essay is expected to be between 350 to 500 words. There are specific topics (either short stories or general issues) for the essay each fortnight. Some examples of the topic include "A Supernatural Encounter" and "Challenges Faced by Teenagers". After reviewing and grading the essays, I would return them to my students for their perusal. Only if time permits, I would share with my class during lesson some of the interesting essays or common mistakes made by the students in their essay writing.
There are 3 learning outcomes for this essay writing activity. Firstly, my students will be able to improve their grammar and build up their vocabulary which are the essential elements for writing. Secondly, writing essay facilitates the development of critical and analytical thinking skills through breaking down the topic into several subordinate ones in order to gain a better understanding. Thirdly, this activity fosters active reading by making my students do some research on the topic before writing.
As the essay writing portion of the English language examination has been amended to include a section that requires candidates to identify and then edit grammatical errors for a given text of continuous prose of not more than 250 words, it is now necessary to incorporate peer review of essay into my lesson plan. Moreover, with the introduction of the "teach less learn more" policy in Singapore, up to 20 per cent of content has been reduced from syllabuses. The shift of paradigm from feeding excessive knowledge to students directly to the students themselves learning through participation in innovative projects or activities allows teachers to devote more time to engage students in this area.
2. Identify the technology or trend you would like to apply to the lesson. In no more than two pages of text, answer the following questions:
- Why did you choose the technology?
- How will the technology enable your students to accomplish the stated learning outcomes?
- What challenges do you foresee in employing the technology?
In order to facilitate sharing and peer review of essays, a blog is certainly the best technology to leverage on since it supports long paragraphs of text. First of all, every teacher including me in my school is assigned a laptop computer which we can bring to classroom to conduct our lessons. Every classroom is equipped with a projector and Wi-Fi connection is available to teachers and students within the school premises. Majority (or in fact all) of the students own a smartphone and laptop or desktop computers at home. There are also several computer laboratories with high speed Internet connection in my school which can be used to conduct lessons. My students themselves have access to the Internet at home and also on their smartphones or tablets. There are in fact more than sufficient infrastructure to support our blogging activity.
After considering a few blogging sites, Google Blogger was chosen due to cost, usability, popularity, accessibility and privacy. Without the need to pay a fee to use this blogging site eliminates the hassle and lengthy process of seeking the principal and parents' approval for funds. In terms of usability, Google Blogger provides an easy-to-use Rich-Text editor which the usage is similar to typing and formatting a document with Microsoft Word, the software which my students are already using to create documents for their project. One of the advantage of choosing Google Blogger is the fact that many people including some of my students already own a Google account and are able to start blogging without signing up. Google Blogger is also an asynchronous application which users can access anytime and anywhere using multiple platforms such as laptop and desktop computers, tablets and smartphones. High Internet bandwidth is not required by Google Blogger unless the blogger chooses to upload large-sized images or videos which should not be the case for our blogging activity. With the built-in privacy settings, my students may choose to grant viewing access to their blog posts only to authorised personnel like me and their fellow classmates.
With Google Blogger, my students can post their essays directly to this blogging site for me and fellow classmates to review and comment. The blogging tools enable them to include hyperlinks (useful for making access to additional information convenient to readers), pictures or even videos to make the content more interesting and appealing. My students will be more motivated to write essays if they are able to make use of technology to showcase their creativity. Naturally, their grammar and vocabulary improves after writing more essays. The ability to include hyperlinks, pictures and videos encourages my students to research on the topic and share their findings. Having the essays available online enables all students to have access and opportunity to review one another's essays without passing the hard copy around. This practice saves paper and in turn spare me the hassle of carrying them to classroom.
The biggest challenge I foresee is students spending enormous amount of time to decorate their blog. Although the design of the blog will not be taken into consideration when grading their essays, my students will insist on making their blog look as beautiful as possible in front of their fellow classmates. This will result in my students spending time to focus on the blog design rather than the quality of the essay. The way to overcome this challenge is to set a simple standard layout and design for my students to follow when writing their blog. Another major challenge I foresee is students who are weak in English or writing may not be willing to share their essay with everyone. In this case, the privacy settings can be used to control who can access the blog.
3. Identify how you will assess your students' work in the activity and the activity itself in no more than one page of text.
Every fortnight, I will give my students a choice of 3 or 4 essay topics to write by publishing the topics on my blog together with some keys points. Over the next few days, they will do their own research, write the essay on their blog and comment on fellow classmates' essays written on the previous fortnight while I review, comment and grade the essays which they had written on the previous fortnight. At the end of every fortnight, the students will be able to view comments (from me and other fellow classmates) of their essay in their blog. However, the grade I gave to their essays will be communicated to them privately. As the essays would remain in my students' blogs as long as they are not removed by the student, everyone can still continue to view and comment on one another's essay even after the essay has been reviewed and graded by me.
My submissions were reviewed by 3 guys. Based on their names, I could tell that the first reviewer (Reviewer A) is from Hong Kong while the the other 2 (Reviewer B and C) are from Singapore and in fact I found out that both of them are in the same institution as me (i.e. fellow colleagues) but from different departments as I could find their names on the MS Outlook address book. All 3 reviewers awarded full marks for my submissions. Their general feedback are as follows:
Reviewer A: Excellent!
Reviewer B: well done
Reviewer C: Clever use of blogs for student to post their work and allow a community to form within the class itself for the activity
As for me, I had reviewed and graded the submissions from Reviewer A (the guy from Hong Kong as I mentioned above), Reviewer B (also being mentioned above) and an Italian lady. From the submissions, I found out that Reviewer A is teaching Physics to 18 years old students and the Italian lady is a private tutor for students with dyslexia condition. Reviewer B is an administrative staff like me who is being forced to sign up for this course. He had attempted the assignment in the context of 18 years old students working on final year project in the institution we worked for. I had also awarded full marks for all 3 fellow trainees as they had really put in effort to produce clear and concise contents.
Overall, I achieved a final grade of 86.3% for this course.
Feel free to give me feedback on my submissions too. I would love to hear from you too especially if you are a teacher!
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