Tuesday 31 January 2017

Critiquing LMS 's

To start off I have to apologize for the lack of activity this week.  Life gets stressful some weeks and for me it's been a long one.... Report cards are easy to blame, but at the same time, life with a toddler, two classes, a very pregnant wife, a mother getting knee replacement surgery, working 2 jobs and the variety of other things that life throws us all any given day has made this week long.  So my apology is to all of my classmates for being tardy with this post and for not reading and commenting the way I should have this week.  

As I read through Audrey Waters article, Beyond the LMS, I was seriously juxtaposed. I understand where she is coming from, especially when it comes to open concept teaching and expanding individual personal learning networks (PLN), but at the same time when I think of my students, whom I am to keep safe, and ensure they learn the required Saskatchewan Curriculum I think that is partly why we use a LMS, vs a more Utopian option that she hints at throughout her post. As much as we are to be evaluating based on specific outcomes and determining whether or not a student is progressing, meeting or exceeding grade level expectations, we also want to develop healthy, positive, forward thinking students who will be ready to enter the big scary world of adulthood without any of the protection of an LMS.

I do think that we want to develop independent thinkers, and people who, when needed are capable of learning information on their own to suit their current needs. To do this though, I do think that we need some sort of structure or a way to manage our priorities. When it is Christmas time, or close to Spring Break, or the end of the year, a teachers life becomes more stressful... Why, because of the irregularity and unstructured nature of those times. We do not want to begin a new unit, in fear of having to reteach the material, or we want to reward the students for working hard, so we plan fun activities that aren't directly tied to curriculum, but are more developed for social interactions.

Now when it comes to the LMS's that we have talked about in class. I am an avid Google Classroom guy, who uses this platform in his classroom on a daily basis. Four years ago, I started using Edmodo and I enjoyed this platform as well. Through researching, I like Schoology mostly because of the options of setting up groups within a given class. Including the learning outcomes within this platform is definitely one of my favorite tools. With it being an American site it doesn't have any of the Canadian standards, let alone Saskatchewan specific, but there is an option to add them into the assignments which is great! The intricacies of the program I am not entirely sure about, but I know if I had to restart, or my school board dropped the GAFE option for us, I would probably switch to Schoology.

Within our class we had the opportunity to look into Canvas. My initial response to Canvas is one of confusion, frustration and a general distaste from attempting to set up a course. I have a variety of material that I have used in the past and when I attempted to upload it I found it was not the right format. Then I looked into importing another persons course through their commons option. I could only view small portions of the units, and I had to download a full unit to look through to determine whether or not I wanted that unit. Having not spent a lot of time on this LMS I would not completely write it off, but given the same amount of time to Schoology I was able to quickly use my already developed files and they were compatible. I am sure once a person is used to searching, and understanding the nuances of Canvas that there are a lot o positives to the platform, but in the hour I spent fumbling around I found it very disjointed.

Let me get back to Edmodo. As I have already used this site, I logged in and began reminiscing about how I used this and where I wanted to take it. I appreciated the familiarity my students had with this platform due to its similarity to Facebook (if your unfamiliar here is a blog about the similarities) and their willingness to give this new 'flipped' classroom a try. I was able to use this to manage the learning in a very transient class, with a huge variety of needs, including K-8 reading levels, variety of students with an assortment of learning needs from dyslexia to low cognitive function to FAS and ADHD. Using this platform helped the students keep track of their assignments and know when things were handed in and what they received for marks. It gave me the opportunity to have the students who had the opportunity to work on more individualize plans and enrich those when needed. There were some issues with this platform. Some were that not all the assignments were as easy to complete due to the nature of the class, ex; math, but there were also the spaces, where they had to be within the application to do their work. There wasn't an option to do the assignment outside of the platform and the collaboration piece was more difficult, at least it was difficult to ensure the students were putting in an equitable amount of work.

This brings me to GAFE, more specifically Google Classroom. I love this platform. Now Alice Keeler wrote a blog about is Google Classroom a LMS or Not? I feel she made some very good points, but at the same time, when referring to back to Audrey Waters post about teaching Beyond the LMS, my question would be does it matter? In terms of how can I manage, yes sorry Audrey but as a middle school teacher I need to manage, my students workload, evidence of learning, and utilize the tools within GAFE to facilitate and check in on my students daily. I love how this platform increases the level of accountability. The main thing I like is that I can create and share documents with students who can then collaborate within that document and then the evidence of who did what is at my fingertips through the document itself. I can quickly see who did what, and who did nothing. Another thing I love about this LMS the closed option that still includes parents information. This was a new addition this school year, where the parents are sent an email daily or weekly (their choice) as to what is going on in the students classes.

Here is a snapshot of what my LMS homepage looks like. From this platform I am able to manage the work for my 106 Science, 28 Math, 26 ELA and Homeroom, along with being involved in our Lion King Musical group. In the past I have also used this platform to run our sport team schedule, games, and practices.

I know I am biased towards GAFE because of my current situation within Regina Public School Board, and I know it is heavily biased towards Google and Pearson, but at the same time, through strong teaching techniques and using inquiry based learning opportunities I am hoping to give my students as well rounded approach to their education as possible. I look forward to reading others blogs about the LMS's they use.



Friday 20 January 2017

Collaborative Genius Hour

What will it look like?

So this week I took the time to begin looking at what are good qualities of an online learning opportunity or blended class. Kyle shared a post on our Google+ page around 7 Tips to Plan for Effective Blended Learning. This site demonstrated some great tips around the layout and developing questions to guide an educator on how to take a face-to-face unit and adapt it for an online/digital world. I specifically enjoyed the way it was laid out because it doesn't tie you to a specific type of curriculum, only guides you into the forum of what you should be thinking about. Ashley tweeted about another great article on the 6 Essential Tips for Planning an Effective Online Course. This article broke it down to more of a unit based, step by step outline, talking about how to plan, organize, and demonstrate how the expectations should be laid out. These two articles are similar but give a nice perspective that I was able to begin my thought process about where I wanted to go with this assignment of developing an online/blended learning course.

A quick visual of these concepts are put together in an awesome tweet from Jenn
Courtesy of Jenn StewartMitchell

What do I want to do?

So far this week Jorie and I have been working towards creating a group around genius hour. We are excited about creating a program that can be used for multi grade level, and essentially work for a variety of inquiry based concepts.
I am a big fan of inquiry based learning because it gives the students the opportunity to demonstrate their passions and interests in a creative and positive way.  This article on a Davenport Boys High School is a great example of what can happen when we guide students learning in the direction they want to take it.  

Jorie came to me very excited about Genius Hour and how we should/could incorporate this not only into this class but implement it at our school level, while working on a buddy system for our different grade levels (Jorie is a grade 2 and I teach 7/8). Her energy is hard to turn away from so obviously I was on board.

Who else is on board?

Then with a quick question to our Google+ Community, within 12 hours we had a group of 6 people on board for developing modules and an online course around Genius Hour. The group consists of Adam Krammer, Danielle Maley, Jenn Huber, Lorraine Wagner, Jorie Gilroy-Beck and myself. We have already planned our first Zoom meeting and have a collaboration document rolling. We are all very excited to get started on this assignment, I for one and thrilled about the opportunity to create something that I know will be such a valuable tool for me and my colleagues in the future.

Genius Hour?

If you are wondering about what Genius Hour is all about here is a video that gives a quick overview:


Thursday 12 January 2017

Yet Again Another Ed Tech Course

I am Kyle DuMont.  I am a grade 7/8 teacher at Jack MacKenzie School in Regina. I am married to a wonderful, but very pregnant woman, who is also a teacher.  We have an amazing little toddler, Lily, running around that generally chases our 10 year old coonhound, Whiskey.  This is my 8/9th class in my masters program.  Luckily this is my 4th Courosbrandt course.

Photo Credit : mkhmarketing 





I am very excited to be working on developing a blended/online learning course.  I currently use GAFE in my classroom regularly.  I attempt to utilize it as a blended learning format, but due to time constraints it is not always perfectly blended. My twitter handle is @kyledumont2 and one of my goals for this course is to utilize twitter more than I have in the past.  Usually I am a Google Plus kind of guy and I follow others on twitter and usually just like other tweets or re-tweet.  This course I plan on tweeting more often and being more interactive in this space.


Throughout this class I am excited to find new tools that will help me develop my blended learning atmosphere in a more synthetic way.  Right now I am a YouTube abuser and find videos that link to the teaching, I would like to take a leap and begin videoing some of my teaching and use them as my videos to share with my students and colleagues.

Because of my affinity for GAFE I am also hoping to find other LMS systems that are comparable or at least interactive with many of the GAFE systems.  I would love to see how I can expand my horizons and being interfacing Microsoft OneDrive with my Google Classroom, as I am finding many of my students have this as their option on their BYOD's.