I actually love blogging and currently have three blogs going, one personal (laughing, learning, living, loving, luxuriating- wordpress), one for my oneline class, and one for the online class I will be teaching. I've found in the past that the more I write, the clearer things become and the better connections I am able to form about both myself and situations I find myself in. I also am able to take information from readings and apply them again to both myself and my life. I read a book last spring that said that writiing should be a part of every class taught and I tend to agree with that statement. You can read something and even discuss it, but until you put pen to paper and write about it, it doesn't become your own. So what are some of the things that I learned from Module 3? That designing questions that really get at the learning objectives is not easy and am fact I keep putting off this assignment because it scares me a bit. I love getting new ideas about how to engage students and like to try at least one new idea in every class I teach so many of the required readings were very helpful to me. I already am a rubric freak but again got some new ideas on how to refresh some of my old rubrics and build some new ones. Feel free to visit me on my wordpress.com blog...if I can find the time to get back over there :)
Philip was privileged to communicate first with an angel of the Lord and then with the Spirit of the Lord himself or the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit of the Lord dwells in us, we too have the supernatural ability to speak the words of the Lord in a way that others will be able to understand. When Philip spoke to the Ethopian eunuch there is a chance that there was a language barrier but the Spirit was even able to break through this. How fortunate we are as Christians to be able to call on God before, during, and after we teach, seeking wisdom and discernment both for the subject matter we teach as well as for each of our students. I, like Philip, need to know when to speak the Lord's truth to someone, when to listen to what the Spirit would have me speak and when to be quiet and listen to the Spirit speaking to my heart. We are all human and will struggle each day with that humanity..."but we have the mind of Christ" so we can be confident that He who began a good work in us will see it to completion.
Patti, I agree with you on the importance of writing in our classes. I think this is even more important in an online environment when the F2F is minimal. Writing is normally the chief means of communicating. Hopefully in this course you'll also see some other ways of incorporating other ways of communicating too, such as audio files, video, animation, etc. If we wanted to go to synchronous communication, we could also add things like Skype or video conferencing.
ReplyDeleteYou're right too about designing the right kinds of questions. I find I often tweak or change completely the questions I use to stimulate online discussions.