At the beginning of this course, there was a learning curve with some of the tech tools. In particular, Prezi and Screenpal took me hours to relearn. I do not teach online, and I do not make that many videos with my classes, When I do make videos, I tend to use the simple video making tool on D2L or Zoom. At the beginning of the course, I was a little bit discouraged by the hours it took me to figure out these tools. I only ended up using Prezi once, but I did use Screenpal for a few of the assignments. When I used Prezi in the past, it allowed users to record per slide, but that is no longer the case. Regardless of the earlier challenges, things started to go more smoothly around week three.
That said, I will certainly be using Screenpal in the future. It is going to be useful for some committee work at the college. I plan to use it to create some educational trainings for the classroom observations for the new tenure-track faculty.
Despite the early challenges with the technology, I had more facility around conceiving of the blended part of the course. There are many parts of my face-to-face courses that function in a more blended way. Students work at home reading and preparing, and class time is used for more questions and collaboration with their peers.
The parts that I focused on for this course centered around writing and revising. However, had I known that I was only going to focus on these throughout the course, I might have chosen speech-related activities. I felt like the writing parts that I created were a bit redundant, and I might have been able to be more creative with the speaking and listening activities for my Speech 100 course. This course uses podcasts, Ted Talks and news articles for the basis of the classroom collaboration. In one activity, students work in groups to lead a discussion for another team about a particular Ted Talk. They elicit main ideas, develop an oral summary of the Ted Talk, and write discussion questions. Then, they learn and practice skills for leading and facilitating discussions, including how to keep a discussion on track, how to prompt students to speak more and how to appropriately comment on their peers’ responses. It’s essentially preparation for college-level seminars.
A different Audience and a different idea for a course
I would love to develop a blended course around culturally responsive teaching. In the past, I also thought about developing online trainings for an LGBTQIA+ ally training. If my audience were peers, including faculty, staff and administration, I would create a series of videos where I interviewed people in the community around their experiences for these concepts.
In either case, the basis for the course might be short videos that led to an online discussion. I thought I would break the training into segments and have students and faculty talk about classroom experiences and some of the concepts of the training, including gender expression, gender identity and creating a welcoming environment in their classrooms.
Regardless, the course structure would involve video content, online discussions, and video creation to discuss concepts and their classroom applications. This idea is something I hope to pursue in the near future.
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