CEDO 550 Blog Review

Before I get into the meat and potatos of this blog, I must first admit that I truly enjoyed the challenge of this class. We covered a lot of information in a very short period of time but did so in a mannner that allowed for much retention. I can't say that I will ever truly utilize this particular portion of the curriculum in my curricular area but you never know. With that being said, I must say that I still found the curriculum to be of interest to me and worthwhile.

Now, to answer the questions that were posed to us:
I will use what I learned in this course over the next 30 days by . . .

I'm not going to lie and say that I'm going to run out and create an online course and start implementing it immediately or anything like that but what I may do is demonstrate to my students the power of Elluminate to provide an example to them of some alternative ways they can collaborate together on their group projects outside of my classroom walls. I found the Elluminate tool to be extremely useful and think that this could be an extremely beneficial tool for my students.

I will use what I learned in this course over the next year by . . .

Again, I'm not at the stage of my career where I'm going to go out and start making an online curriculum for my engineering courses, however, I will certainly utilize some of the things I've learned from this course. First, I will definately use Elluminate as a means of providing my students with an area to meet and collaborate outside my classroom walls. We do a lot of collaboration projects so I'm always looking for ways to create more realistic and beneficial collaboration skills. Second, I intend to create screencasts for all of my classes so on days like today when I'm sick, I can provide those to the sub and they can play them. The skills I learned in facilitating online instruction will certainly carry over into this area. In addition, I am looking at the possibility of linking in on Elluminate so I could answer questions through text on days I'm out sick. I have the ability to see all of my students computers so if I can setup an Elluminate session with a link to a screen cast I could realistically teach class from home with a sub in the room to act as a babysitter.

After completing this course I would like to learn more about . . .

I hate to be redundant but at least you will truly know what interested me the most. I would love to know more about Elluminate and how I may go about implementing this into my classroom. I enjoy what I teach and how I teach it so I'm not looking to go into the online instructional realm anytime soon, however, I do believe that this is coming in the future and having these skills will be helpful to me down the road. In addition, if I can implement some of the technologies I feel are most critical for my students, I think my instruction increases as a whole.

I'd like to take a fianl second to thank our instructors for their professionalism and a great model of what quality online instruction is. I felt both Greg and Ken did an excellent job of providing immediate feedback and keeping us on track throughout.