Part One of ONTL 650, WOW!

Part One of ONTL 650 has been quite a learning experience. Though I work at being technologically savvy, there were a few things I hadn’t considered in my media and teaching designs. My first major eye opener was learning about Constructivism. It made such perfect sense. All students come to you with a past learning history that you as a teacher can pull from. It’s a great way to start your student-teacher interactions. There is nothing better than real-world case studies to get class discussions energized. I discovered through learning about this theory that I had a constructivist classroom. I encourage students to share their past experiences with the class and use it as a base to build on. Now I understand how to effectively use constructivism as an exploration tool for all of my student-teacher interactions.

One of my favorite lessons from part one was about learning and teaching styles. The initial DVC Survey put me on the right track. I didn’t fully comprehend how important it is to have a good working knowledge of these theories. I'm a Kinesthetic/Tactile learner, with reflective qualities who likes to contemplate in the cave before joining the campfire where I act as an Expert and Formal Authority, whew! I now know there cannot be effective teaching without understanding and applying these learning and teaching theories. I realize there’s a theoretical reason why video or audio files assist visual and auditory learners. I get why verbal learners react better to written instructions and flash cards. But I believe, even with the style differences, ALL learning and teaching benefit from the interactivity, immediacy, and variety of the online environment.

The challenge as I see it is how to make the “high tech” environment, “high touch.” I’m a technology lover, but I lean toward the hybrid design option because I really love the student-teacher f2f interaction. Wimba, synchronous Chat and asynchronous discussion boards help with community building in the “high touch” environment, but I have to admit I really miss the eye contact. I think people naturally feed off of each other’s energy. Though I like going off in the web world, researching and exploring on my own. I like regrouping to share the “aha” moments. So to me, online feels a bit lonely at times.