Blended Course Design

When creating the blended course, one of the major issues I ran into was to make a course at the level of my first graders. The age group I teach needs a lot of support when using technology in the classroom. They struggle with typing since this is a new skill that they are learning. When creating the blended course design, it was vital that I took their technology level into consideration and created activities that they won’t struggle with. Next time, I will make a part of the lesson that goes over explicitly how to use the components of the blended course. Another challenge I faced was finding technology tools for the blended course, I wanted to make sure these activities were accessible for the students. Finding ways to integrate technology in the course was a learning experience for me. It made me aware of the numerous technology tools that are available. I hope to use these tools in future blended course designs. I feel that I could have done a better job of finding vastly different technology tools in the blended course design. Next time, I want to make sure that each lesson has very different technology tools. Also, I want to find different tools that I have not used before.

            I feel that if I designed this course for a different audience, I would have to find different technology tools to have in the blended course. The course I designed focused on key details in a text, and this is something that is worked on in many grades at the elementary level. I feel that if I designed this course for the upper elementary level, then I could have students write their own stories to show key details or use an online story creator to do this. I feel that the activities can get more complex and detailed as higher the grade level gets. I also feel that if I was designing this course for my first graders towards the middle and the end of the year, the technology activities of the lesson may be easier for them since they have practiced using technology.

The school that I teach at is a title I school in a low-income area. A lot of the students at the school don’t have their own devices. One reason for this is that I teach at a school that services Kindergarten to Fifth Grade. A lot of the students in my first-grade classroom do not have their own devices. A lot of the students share tablets with their siblings. Due to this, it would be hard to have students bring their own devices to use in the classroom. Also, my students don’t have mobile devices, and this would make it hard for them to bring a device to use from home since they don’t have a mobile device. 

At the school site, every student is given a Chromebook to bring home and bring to school every day. This ensures that students have a technology device present to use at school. The one problem that does happen is that students forgot to bring their Chromebook or they don’t bring their Chromebook charged. That is why I make sure to remind parents every day that students need to bring their Chromebook and charger to school every day. The school also is considering buying a set of Chromebooks for every classroom so that students can keep a Chromebook at home and have one at school.

Apps like Flipgrid can be used with a smartphone to create and share an assessment. This is due to students needing to record themselves creating a project. Using a smartphone can help with creating the project and this can be a great way to assess students. I personally would not use a smartphone to assess my students due to not having that resource present and due to the age group of my students. I feel that this would be more beneficial for older students to use since they may have this resource available. 

I feel digital storytelling is a great tool to use as an assessment strategy. It allows students to show what they learned in a narrative form. I feel like this is something that can be used when teaching so many subjects. This also allows students to practice and develop the technical skills that they need. 

This blog will have posts about different module assignments that I will be doing for this course. This post will be about module two’s assignment. This assignment had me create an eportfolio, a list of artifacts I have created so far in this course, and a self-assessment. I am attaching my reflection for the module below.

Reflection:

This module’s learning focused on creating an eportfolio. I wasn’t familiar with the concept of what an eportfolio was, so I researched it. It was interesting to see how similar this was to a portfolio that teachers may have students create to show their work for the school year. I had to create a folder on google drive and that will be my eportfolio. This is something that I feel is a great way to set up an eportfolio because of how accessible it is to do. I had to then upload all the artifacts that I have created so far in this class. I went back through the completed discussion posts and assignments from modules one to four. I found a total of eight different artifacts. 

One of the first artifacts that I found was from the Module 2 discussion post and this was a video response. I remember that I used my phone to record this and wanted to next time find a different tool to use. I wanted to find a different tool to see what else tools are out there to use. I then uploaded my curated space lesson. This was created using Blendspace. I found this hard to upload, so I put the link to this on a google slide in the eportfolio. Next, I uploaded the Edpuzzle video I created for the annotated video section in the Module two assignment. I also struggled with finding a way to upload this, so I put the link on a google slide. I uploaded three artifacts from the Module three assignment. I first uploaded the key details assessment. This artifact has an assessment using google slides. The Edpuzzle assessment was uploaded into google slides with the link. The last artifact uploaded from the module three assignment was the cumulative assessment. For this artifact, I uploaded the google forms and the google slides that have the story that is linked to the assessment. The Youtube playlist was uploaded as an artifact. I couldn’t figure out how to put it as a video on the eportfolio, so I uploaded it as a link on a google slide. This is something that I plan on changing because I know there is a way to upload it as a video. The last artifact that I uploaded was the lesson opener. I also uploaded that as a link on a google slide and will change it to a video. 

This module’s assignment showed me what content makes up an eportfolio. The content that is the eportfolio provides one with different examples of how I used technology when designing lessons. Also, the use of eportfolios it helps push for learning centered instruction (Eynon et al., 2014). I feel that is something that I started doing with creating this eportfolio. This is something that I can also do when I teach my own classroom to help with establishing learner-centered instruction. Overall, this module has allowed learning about a new technology tool that I can as both as a teacher and for my professional use.