Michigan Merit Curriculum

For our latest assignment, I read the Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline Companion Document. This helped me learn about online learning and it's usefulness in my classroom.

One of the technologies that is an online experience that I'd like to use with my students would be a videocast/podcast. What I'd like to do is begin to tape my lectures and then upload them to my class website so students can download links to what I talked about in class. This could be very helpful to students who miss my class - or to students who just want to hear everything again. I think that lecture is something that kids either get or they don't - and it's difficult to make up - even if the students have the notes. Missing out on stories, anecdotes and information cant be made up by just copying down another student's notes.

What's great about video or podcasts is that it would help me teach just about any lesson. If I were able to record instruction, students would be able to play it back, or download it anywhere

I think there are many teaching strategies that you could use - and they all differ depending on what online technology you use. If you create a podcast, you could provide guided notes. If you had a webquest, you could provide the students with questions to answer. If I used a blog, I could have my students comment on it, and read the posts of others and agree or disagree. The possibilities are limitless, like the technologies that are available.

I think some technologies that may be harder to use would be Moodle and Blackboard. At our school, we have issues with large sites and download times aren't too fast. I hate getting involved with programs that make students log in. It always seems to take forever.

Wiki's!

In our latest session, we learned about Wikis. For this unit, I made a wiki, and also added something to wikipedia.

Here are some examples of things that I have done in this session.

1.) Create a wiki - http://www.nmssocialstudies7.wikispaces.com/





2.) Added NMS to Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Middle_School

UDL LAB

I just finished learning about the UDL Lab, which enlightens teachers to potential barriers in their classroom. There are many things you might not think of when creating a lesson. The lesson might be instructional, engaging, and hammer home benchmarks, but there still might be problems with it.

Using the UDL checklist, educators are able to identify barriers in their instruction and provide means around them. Below are a list of barriers, and what I've done to take them out of my plans.

I've inserted it as a picture to provide for best readability.