Module+2+Reflection

Describe a technology experience you had this week.
//Description://

My class meets face-to-face on Tuesday's and Thursdays. This week, due to a bad winter storm, my class did not get to meet on Tuesday. I had not physically seen my students since last Thursday. As everyone knows, in college you have to soldier on with or without the teacher. We have a LMS, Angel, that we use at Stark State College. At the beginning of the semester I instructed the students that they need to log-in on either Sunday night or Monday to see what announcements, etc. I had posted for the week. Many students are either fresh out of high school or are non-traditional students and therefore are used to when you miss class it's okay because the teacher will start up where they left off. With that in mind, I was very disappointed to see that at least half of my class had not logged in to our class at all and therefore did not have the work done. During class yesterday I explained that this is college and even though we didn't meet face-to-face that they still had the ability and the responsibility to log-in and continue to work on our class from home.

//Impact://

I was disappointed to see that my students had not reached that level of self-directed learner. I had hoped that I had made myself clear when I was explaining and showing them how to find out all the information that they needed to use in Angel. Everything from our course calendar to weekly announcements explaining assignments more in depth can be found there. I feel that they all check e-mails and social networking sites on a daily basis but they did not take ownership of their own education from a student management viewpoint.

//Intent://

My intent from this point forward is to motivate students to take ownership of their own learning. Instead of waiting for the teacher to tell them what to do they need to be looking and figuring out what to do next, take a "where do I go from here" attitude. I plan to implement some sort of discussion board that gets them to log-in and take part in the building of our class online in and out of the classroom.