I know I always get too intimately and emotionally entrenched in my course development projects. This can be a good and a bad thing.
On the bright side, your passion and sense of detail hopefully translate into a product that is not only appealing but also soundly educational, innovative and meaningful. In any case, that is what you tell yourself to justify the 16 hour workday that you spend on it for months on end. Not to mention the feeling of being alienated from your family, your friends, your learning network and the universe in general. You completely forget to smell the roses.
Then there is the bad part. You lose all sense of perspective. You are so intimately involved, you become possessive of your baby and you don’t want to let go. Your course budget constraints have long expired and you keep nurturing monstrous scope creep while you carry on fine-tuning teensy weensy details that nobody will probably even notice in the global scale of things. Then there is the problem that due to your diligence, life has overtaken your course content and you have to keep on making adjustments to keep it relevant. Most of all, you don’t see glaring mistakes or even worse, you keep on seeing mistakes, missed spelling and grammar errors, missing full stops…..
So I need fresh eyes. I am due to hand this over to the flash designer and I feel like a mother giving her baby up for adoption. If any of you would like to test drive (another way of saying “please read with utmost care) this module section of an overview of social media (communication technologies), please let me know. It is one of the sections of a revised Open ICDL course (www.col.org/ccnc) that will be made available under an open courseware lisense once it has been packaged, “flasherised” and “scorminised” in Articulate.
If you are interested I will give you access to a folder in my Dropbox (you will have to create a Dropbox account), just leave a comment in this post below, asking for access. For those who have not used Dropbox before (amazing tool), once you have accepted my Dropbox invitation and installed Dropbox on your computer, you will miraculously see my course folder on your computer from where you can open the section’s PowerPoint presentation. You are most welcome to add comments in the notes area of the slide.
I am currently busy creating learning objects for the COL (Commonwealth of learning) for their CCNC (Commonwealth Computer Navigators Certificate). It is kind of hard for me to return to my roots to create a “web 1.0″ learning object and I am hoping (time permitting) to advance the process to elementary web 2.0 level. So what I thought is to incorporate some subtle social media references and emerging the learners (novice computer using teachers and vocational students) into some social media examples.
So I thought to incorporate a blog commentary as well as short twitter examples into the learning object. This is where I need your help. What were your worst experiences with presenters and their presentations?
I attend a lot of local conferences and are sometimes flabbergasted at the level of boring/bad presentations and even the way people are presenting. It is as if they do not care and think that by merely having their speeches up on the screen, it is enough and that they have the right to bore us to death. As teachers we neither have the time or the money to attend conferences and workshops where we are exposed to the mushroom effect (sitting in the dark growing mould in our brains)
So come on, tell me your stories! What have been your worst experiences? I do reserve the right to include it in my learning object as examples. You can also submit short ones to me via twitter: @maggiev
As I am busy editing some of my learning objects, I will dump some of them here to organise later. The object of this learning object (!!) is to give a quick overview of the new features of Outlook 2007.
I am at the Amesa Conference at my first session and the topic under discussion is:
IMPACT OF DVD TECHNOLOGY ON IMPROVING THE MATHEMATICAL PERFORMANCE OF LEARNERS
The abstact is: In an effort to enhance the mathematical performance of grade 12 learners, before enrolling at Higher Educational Institutions (HEI), various intervention initiatives were implemented by the Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Programme (GMMDP) over a period of five years. During these interventions, various delivery models were utilized in order to optimize the impact of presentations to educators and to learners. In this paper we report on the DVD-driven model that was introduced during the past two years and which seemed to have been the most effective.”
Hennie Boshoff and Werner Olivier descibe how this DVD programme has made a material difference to learners wanting to enter into university. The pass rate of the learners improved dramatically (by 20%) and they were not only taught using these PowerPoints, but were also encouraged to use the DVD’s to teach their fellow learners. Cascading, however, unfortunately did not happen
The 28 topics,which can be used for grade 11 and 12 learners as well as university bridging programmes, will be made available for distribution and sale shortly.
As community moderator at our mathematical literacy teacher community (www.mathsliteracy.ning.com) I see my main role as facilitator of relationships and communications as well as technical support person within the community. Within this context I have actually learn so much, in unexpected areas. One of my community members posed a question starting off with ” This must be the dumbest question…” and that lead to me having a wondeful new learning experience!
She wanted to draw a system of axes (with grid) to use in her linear programming worksheet where the learners could sketch on the grid. So I immediately jumped to the occation by uploading a ‘How to’:
We tend to want to remedy situations by offering help too fast and she then gently reminded me that she is working in the new WORD 2007. So I went to investigate if I could do it in Word 2007. I have been avoiding getting to know it as it looks so different from Word 2003 and the times that I tried to figure it out, I got quite frustrated. So I forced myself…
What a pleasant surprise! It got oodles of nice features and once you get over your innitial abhorance, I found myself getting around quite effortlessly. My only worry is that I will now have to retrain my teachers to use the new Word from scratch…
So the moral of this story is that we must not be scared to learn new stuff even if the “old stuff” were so familiar and comfortable. If we don’t we, might be missing out on wonderful new features…. I do realise that TIME is a big problem. So I have made a little tutorial to demonstrate how to do a system of axes with gridlines in Word 2007.
Creating graphs from our very valuable data is also a breeze. The following video explain in really easy to understand term, how to create pie and bar graphs using excel. Download Video: Posted by mathvideosonline at TeacherTube.com.
I am here today with some wonderful Curriculum advisors from Limpopo and we are teaching one another how to draw figures in Word. In the “old days” we would just “cut and paste” (as with scizzors and glue) our maths figures into our papers, which resulted in us not really being able to use the resource effectively again. So today we will do it in our papers!
For a step by step guide on how to do this, click here
Sometimes we need a few “web 1.0″ skills before we can submerge ourself in Web 2.0!!
Here is a few pointers to help brush up our “WEB 1.0 Skills”, using a few of the great slideshows from www.slideshare.net (which just goes to show that we do not have to re-invent the wheel!
I know I always get too intimately and emotionally entrenched in my course development projects. This can be a good and a bad thing.
I am here today with some wonderful Curriculum advisors from Limpopo and we are teaching one another how to draw figures in Word. In the “old days” we would just “cut and paste” (as with scizzors and glue) our maths figures into our papers, which resulted in us not really being able to use the resource effectively again. So today we will do it in our papers!
