Reflecting on my practice

Take stock of your pedagogical approach and ask yourself:

• How do I see myself as a teacher?

The attached, cheesy, but fun, picture I made last summer (RNix_imagined) will give you a quick view of how I see myself at the moment, professionally. My teaching practice is governed by my life-long learning! It’s a nice whole with my research informing my teaching and driving my design… and so on! I consider myself a constructivist.

• How do my students respond to my teaching style?

Due to the unusual nature of my completely online relationship with our mostly onsite students, I am thrilled that we all seem to manage to get along! It’s easier for some, but by the end of the semester, we’ve all figured out how to communicate effectively in this virtual realm – one of the learning outcomes of the Ed Tech course. Offloading most of the content to the LMS and finalizing updates before the semester starts enables me to focus solely on each individual, in addition to the class as a whole. I try to model professional and appropriate correspondence while remaining human and approachable. I want the course to be a safe and secure place for students to practice the same. By the same token, I am able to ‘nudge’ them with guidance and encouragement to experiment with new tools and techniques.

• What types of learning activities do I incorporate into my face-to-face classes?

I only teach online now, leveraging most of the tools available in BlackBoard now (surveys, quizzes, etc.) to support my own lessons that are supplemented by a textbook. To gain experience and demonstrate ability, we work together to develop a major 3-part project that is peer reviewed throughout the semester. Students are also assigned to smaller teams (groups) to help with ideas for that through structured forums. When I do have a ‘real-time’ F2F audience, I almost always start out with some sort of experiential trainnig activity. You can see the virtual renditions at http://www.utdallas.edu/~rnix/activities/activities.htm

• What changes in those activities do I need to make to move into the online environment?

I suppose I jumped ahead! Because I’m teaching about technology, it was easy – actually naturally logical – to migrate my presentation into the online environment. Now that was another story for the online Masters of Arts in Teaching I helped design and deploy… but that’s a story for another day!

Reflecting on the future

What are your thoughts on using reflection in this course?

I think that using reflection in this course is appropriate and will be effective. Most course development focuses on the future… All the hype of new possibilities tends to overpower the lessons to be learned from past experience, prior knowledge, and larger contexts.

What are your thoughts on using a blog for these purposes?

In my case, the technology is impeding the creativity, but this is something I’ve wanted to learn how to do. Personally, I don’t think I like the way blogs seem to flow quite freely; I prefer to structure information by topic or purpose more than the way I see blogs as a chronology. One of my greatest pleasures is to hand-write in a dedicated paper journal so I admit extreme bias!

 

UTTC Faculty Training

Committed to walking the walk, I am adding to my professional life-long learning experience by taking a new Faculty Training course offered online by the UT-System TeleCampus in the Fall of 2009. One of our assignments is to use a blog site to develop a reflective journal, so, here’s the start of mine!

Practicing the 3Cs: Communication, Creativity, and Collaboration

The term tech·nol·o·gy is derived from the Greek tekhnologia, the “systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique“. This blog is all about using (or not using) technology in teaching; hence, we thought we coined a new term (that’s already been used a lot) for its title: teachnique! By definition, the focus is on:

1. a: the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area <medical technology> b: a capability given by the practical application of knowledge <a car’s fuel-saving technology>
2. a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge <new technologies for information storage>
3. the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor <educational technology>

Clearly a work in progress, this site will be as dynamic as any preK-life classroom, hopefully!