ACTION... no ACTIVITIES, says HORTON
When i started to put together my Design document, I could feel my brain desperately trying to chunk everything into neat little categories -- and even though Horton has Absorb, Connect, and Do separately organized, for some reason I keep getting tangled between them all ...
I continue to catch myself forgetting that reading/listening/watching are considered ACTIVITIES in the sense of learning ... Absorb, Do, & Connect ... after "traditional" schooling or perhaps never having reflected upon teaching methods and the practice of learning, I always think ok reading/watching/etc. as passive and not ACTIVE ... but i need to take the root ACTIVE out of the word ACTIVITIES and remember that they're all equal and important in the learning process.
I must admit that deciding on the activities for my project has been the most difficult -- especially because most of mine are skill-based and similar in nature, just variations of the same. (For example: how to use terms and connectors vs. how to use wildcards.) This leaves me with lots of choices - I could have a game for x or a game for y -- or both? I just couldn't decide!!!
The other thing that is getting me is how many activities are you supposed to have? And i'm still, as I write this write now, catching myself feeling that simply reading about wildcards just doesn't count as learning ... it's not enough. So i think i need an ACTIVE activity for each learning objective?
WEBINARS
The webinar topics have been very interesting and I must admit that I have not been able to attend as many as I would have liked ... I like reading the discussion threads that follow in my inbox or around the ECollege shell. there are so many interesting tools out there!
Presenting our webinar went much more smoothly than I thought it would considering we could not get the volume to work for a good 40 minutes before hand! I have noticed some things that I like a lot better about Adobe Connect but some others that I don't ... Also, it's hard when you have 3 presenters b/c if I wanted to get a poll or something prepared, I don't think that I can really do that without taking over the flow of the presentation/viewing area ... so that was hard b/c you don't want to interrupt your colleagues to say, "weren't we going to do this now?"
It's also very different for me b/c I am used to doing webinars via the phone and not the headset of the computer ... it's nice to see the little mute/speaking icon next to people's names when they are speaking ... on our team meetings we just have to know one another's voices :)
GAMES and FUN
As usual, I truly enjoyed all the fun activities that were given to us to do ... I wish that there had been a few more buildings in the ECOGREETING but it was cool nonetheless.
MISC
I will say that I think this class has inspired me to take advantage of things that are around me ... for example, for the most part I use GOOGLE - the plain version -- but when I am just playing around, I use the IGoogle ... i have all the gadgets that I like on there :)
- rememberthemilk.com
- dictionary.com
- daily quotes
- yahoo
any more and it would be too crowded to be usable really ...
The other thing I would like to say, and I have been meaning to send a thank you to the team, but after participating in the webinar on WIKIs, we received a survey -- the survey was a fill in the blank form made via GOOGLE DOCS. To be honest, I had heard of and used once before Google Docs ... never thought too much about it. But after this survey, a light went off in my head -- I logged on and explored and searched tips and how-tos and ended up making my own fill in the blank form -- for my wedding RSVP! I sent the link to doug and he posted it on our website! I was very very excited!!! All this wedding stuff has computer crazy -- I've even taught myself 3 new excel formulas :)
Sorry Patrick for being behind again!!!
