Month: October 2011

Happy Halloween! (Retrieved Image from Microsoft Online)

This week my nightmare is gone or one could say, it was never really there.  It was a way to look at the world to face real life problems brought on by stress. Going to school is creating a few financial problems I cannot resolve. Furthermore, I am under a lot of stress trying to create a course an instructor will use.  Working as part of a team means, I cannot accomplish the task on my own. That is pretty scary… because I am not in total control of the project. One the other hand, it is like working with a safety net. Most likely, the team will not let me fall to my death so to speak. It takes a lot of trust and in that area I am a few quarts short.

I suppose most survivors have to learn to trust again.  In my case, I do it very infrequently.  I do not like giving others power over me if I can avoid it. Anything I have succeeded at was done mostly through my own efforts. Some of those efforts were almost super human. Any time I have failed, it was partly because of others. I re-learned that lesson when I was part of a team in one of my certification program courses. I react pretty strongly to being devalued. I spent a lot of years being treated as though I had nothing of value to offer.  I spent a lot of years being battered into compliance. This has been especially true in the workplace.

So, I need to get my team working with me to develop the course for Charlene. She is the person using the Bb Vista site and teaching in the classroom. Most of the content will be determined by her. I have presented her with the syllabus. Obviously it was only a first draft; however, to be on schedule and complete this project in time, I have to depend on the time she can spend with me. Needless to say, she is a very busy person.

I have decided what tools might be useful to Charlene and will now wait until she responds to my offerings. Next, I need to start setting up modules.  This means I need to create files to upload to the Bb Vista application. I need to know what content Charlene wants in them. I will be meeting with Robin this week to clarify a timeline and to find out if I am on the right track.

The hard work is just around the corner. I will need to create a course for Charlene, at the same time I create a course for a potential employer, that I can teach. I am using a free application by Bb Vista and dislike it already. Each entry has to be read and then tweaked to get it right. I don’t like how it sets up; but it is a bit more user-friendly than Instructive Canvas, which I first hoped to use. I really like Wikispace; but it is open to the public and much easier to copy. I want the intellectual property to be mine and protected.

I keep trying to figure out how I can manage to show a potential employer that my work is designed to focus on the learner and not the instructor. Many instructors may differ on the whole concept of on-line teaching and “best practice.” I have chosen to try to teach again, because I do find the idea of constructivist thinking adequate.  I want to teach in an environment that uses technology and Web 2.0. Why?  Because I have done it the other way through out my studies and didn’t like it. I don’t want to exclusively lecture, present power points and make my students power down.

I want my students to be self-directed learners and have the skills they need to face the technologies they will have to work with in the future. I want to prepare them to keep working and growing on their own through such things as personal learning systems (PLS). Teaching is changing and I think many instructors are going to fall through the cracks unless they change their thinking. Institutions are far too conservative for their own good.  Less money from the state and tight budgets will drive colleges to move toward more on-line courses. Who will teach these courses?

My week started out with a fever, chills and eventually a cold and cough. It is not easy to think clearly when your head is stuffy and has cobwebs in it! Ah, the cold and flu session is upon us this autumn quarter. My pressing problem this week was how to polish up my ePortfolio, which is one of my objectives for the internship. After listening to the people in the Women’s Center and speaking with Ann, we decided there is little to do technically. However, I did need to write a hard copy of a resume and include it in the ePortfolio.

This is where things got a bit difficult. It is a challenge to write what you have accomplished not using the word “I.” Then there is the laborious process of trying to clean up all the mistakes in grammar and spelling and layout. Since I went from the tenth grade to college, with a few years in between, I still struggle with these writing issues. In fact during the years I was a student at the various universities, I hired a company to scan my papers for errors and type them. They did this for an interesting sum of money, which I had at the time. Today, I am left to process my own work and I struggle with this task.

Two years ago, I took an online course at Cascadia Community College in order to update my skills using Microsoft Word and the other applications. I spent the most time developing my skills to use Word at the advanced level to process my various papers. Robin tells me that Microsoft Word doesn’t correct all grammar mistakes. Great! I do not have the money to hire someone to proof read my documents. The women’s Center states that your ePortfolio and resume should be perfect. As luck would have it…I am not.

My next task was to address the issue of assessment and how I will use it in the course. This week Charlene approved my objectives. Robin stopped by my office to give me two books addressing assessment, both instructor and student self-assessment and online discussions. Luckily I addressed this in my meeting with Charlene on Wednesday (before going home and crashing). Charlene gave me an instructors guide that dealt with presenting discussion questions for the course and ill-structured problems. The book gave many examples of each. I am now plowing through the reading material and the newest edition of the textbook which came to my home on Friday. I am very glad I like carrots…because I am going to need the eye protection they supposedly give the person eating them.

My next project is writing the syllabus and trying to figure out a time line for placing content in Bb Vista. Robin and I are meeting next week to work out some of the bugs of putting course material in Bb Vista. I should be able to get the shell up and running, because I now have the chapter names from the new edition. Incidentally, I did go see the BC library expert on copyright law to find out how to cite Microsoft clip art images. As General Robin (I see her as one and am still trying to decide how many stars she has) says, “…Onward!”

Retrieved image from Microsoft Online.

I began this week rested and optimistic. I went to class on Monday and my hybrid course continued crystallizing in my mind’s eye. On Wednesday when I met with Charlene, I handed her the first attempt to write the needed learning outcomes. She didn’t seem too impressed; but it was just a first attempt to comprehend what was needed. After I emailed them to Robin my mentor, she gave me a few lessons on writing them that I found absolutely helpful. It was very hard to look at fifty learning outcomes and condense them into 5-6. Also, I did not get the textbook soon enough to read it before classes started. This hindered my knowledge of what the textbook was offering to the learner and the instructors on campus. Most of the outcomes were based on the textbook’s chapter readings and tasks.

After I met with Charlene on Wednesday, I attended the training on how to use Bb Vista and found I had learned far more than I thought. This fact reinforced my confidence and I began tackling both the learning outcomes and my ePortfolio. I needed a tutorial to place in the website. So, I downloaded Camtasia and made my first two minute and fifty-four second recording. I began to edit my website with a renewed belief in myself and have ironed out a lot of problems. The road blocks that had bothered me last week didn’t even come close to slowing me down this week.

The next chore on my plate was creating an Elluminate/Collaborate session for my meeting with Robin on Tuesday of next week. It was relatively easy to do, since I used the application in my first course for my certification. When we meet to iron out the issues we have on Bb Vista, we will visit the Elluminate/Collaborate session to see if it works. I bought a new laptop and will have to take it over to the N building to have it hooked up for accessing the wireless system at Bellevue College. Other than that, I think it is good to go.

My next task is to begin loading chapter and module information in the Bb Vista shell. When it comes time to load content for the course some of the tasks will already be done. To insure that the pictures I use in Bb Vista are not under copyright law, I have contacted a friend of mine from North Carolina. She used to work with me at T-Mobile in Coal Creek. She is taking a series of Criminal Justice pictures and will release them to me with unlimited restrictions along with her permission to use those photos on Bb Vista and my website. My grand-daughter is a photographer too. I was going to ask her if she could do these pictures for me; but she starts school in November.

My next step will be putting a request in to the techs at Bellevue College, in order to get the sizing of the pictures for the applications and modules in Bb Vista. I want to create something that has not been used before and is easily recognizable in the Criminal Justice field. I am rather excited to have this project under way. Tasha is a great photographer and artist and has her own website. I highly recommend her work to anyone who wants to buy her creations. She is a painter and can draw a mean picture as well.

This week, I will be going on a job interview to possibly work weekends in a flower shop to support myself while in this internship. My unemployment benefits have been exhausted. I have until the end of the winter quarter before I finish this last phase of my learning experience, with the possibility of extending my internship into spring quarter. I do not know where all of this will lead me. I am just taking it step by step and savoring the moment.

I am including two videos I think tell the story of how I accomplished the task of writing outcomes and putting information into my website ePortfolio. It explains why people with ePortfolios are ahead of the game.

This week was a week of frustrating, time-consuming meetings and training. Simply stated, there are not enough hours in a day to get everything done. So, I am hoping to approach Congress and ask that our days in a month be extended to 36. I want a few more hours in these days, too. Oh that’s right; I keep forgetting, Congress doesn’t seem to get much done either!

The week began with the third class of the quarter at 5:30 PM on Monday and seemed to get busier with each passing hour during the week. I suppose that every instructor and student has weeks and days like this in the beginning of the quarter. For example, the CJ class instructor was supposed to have a quiz ready on Chapter One, Wednesday. Unfortunately, he went to copy the test twice during our class hours and both times had problems. The class never did take that test. He took the situation rather calmly, in comparison to me. I was supposed to give a presentation with my group while he was making copies. I found my mouth was dry and my knees were shaking when I opened my mouth to give my part of the presentation! I can sing and play in front of a few hundred people, but froze in front of 33 students! What is happening to me?

I met with my mentor on Thursday and we were both mentally frazzled by that late date in the week. At this point, I was driven to contemplate grabbing a student’s teddy bear (her boy friend had just asked her to attend an important social event and gave her the stuffed bear to soften her up a bit), crawl under a table in the library and assume the fetal position. With this state of mind, I told her my plans for the next two weeks:  searching for the “big idea” and writing objectives. At the end of this meeting, Robin looked up at me and said,”…my brain has just stopped working.” Next week just has to be better. 

When I met with Charlene on Wednesday, before going to Bb Vista training and the CJ class. She handed me a list of objectives (learning outcomes) that had been previously written by Bellevue College. The 50 objectives were requirements that were supposed to be met in the Intro to CJ course. My job is to create a “big Idea” and condense the objectives down into 5 or 6. I looked at those 50 learning outcomes and wondered if I could say with confidence that they could be accomplished in 12 weeks or one-quarter, much less 12 years!  Since objective writing is not my strongest skill, I cannot explain how 50 objectives reduced me to tears! I laughed so hard there were tears in my eyes when I contemplated the magnitude of the task.

Between my meeting with Charlene and the class on Wednesday, I took my first class on how to use the shell of Bb Vista and upload files into the system. I walked out of the hour class realizing I didn’t understand most of what had been taught to me. Referring back to my notes, I thought I was reading a foreign language! I was so frustrated and wondered how I would ever place content in the system once I managed to get the design worked out. There was no “hands on” training during the class, which I really needed. Luckily my mentor Robin suggested we sit down during our next meeting with a laptop and go through some of the basics of using Bb Vista.

I am still shaking my head at the idea that I am as tech savvy, as some instructors think I am. When I look through the back door end of Bb Vista, I feel totally inadequate. Added to this feeling is the realization that my university education, after nine years of taking courses in the area of law and criminology, still didn’t completely prepare me to take on the challenge of teaching in a community college, online. In fact, I have been out long enough to see the distance between where my studies ended and how some things have changed.

The basics are there in the storage area of my brain; but when I look at the skill level of the people teaching in that department, I wonder if I will ever be considered for a position. My fears of inadequacy tend to dissipate when I think about how much I have learned and how much I have updated my skills through the years. I can only hope employers will look at my academic history and desire to teach through the lenses of what was accomplished during the years I worked to develop myself in the work force.

Looking in on my alma mater…the University of Minnesota for some ideas on how to relax, I ran across this video. I love being a life long learner! Go Gophers! What a great way to burn off frustration and tension!