Assignment 3: Final synthesis Video Tour (Assignment 3)
Braden Holt
August 2025
Link to Video Tour:
I said in my flight path at the beginning of this semester, “In my experience, learning by doing is the most effective. I look forward to exploring the different LMS options and working within their structure to build engaging content.” Now looking back from the end of the course, my prediction was accurate. I enjoyed learning to work with Google Classroom while building up the content and my skillset together. There were many quirks to figure out such as how to make the quizzes grade themselves, how to build a rubric within the LMS, and how to create a discussion post that all students can contribute to. I may teach online in the future and also my school may adopt Google Classroom in the upcoming years so I’m thankful I have started building the skillset to use the LMS effectively.
However, it’s not just the technical skills we developed in this course. Knowing how to make a self grading quiz is a useful skill, but I found I also spent a lot of time thinking about non-technical choices such as how to communicate, how to assess, and how to engage students as much as possible. In my Google Classroom course I made every effort to make the progression of each lesson (and the course as a whole) intuitive and clear. As Mazur (2013) said, student behaviour is driven by assessment. That’s why there are required practice questions, discussion posts, quizzes, and of course the final project where students design and analyze a space ship that spins to create artificial gravity.
I also designed my course, the Circular Motion Unit, and the final project with the UDL principles (CAST, 2024) in mind. The course is taught through video lessons (which I would record myself if I were actually teaching the class) that cover one key topic at a time. There are five of these video lessons and each one has multiple means of representation within it. The videos contain audio, text, real life video, animated video, calculations, and more. The course itself has text, videos, and images in the lessons and some assessments. There are also multiple means of action in the forms of practice questions, discussion posts, quizzes, and the space ship project. The project has multiple means of expression and engagement because students can show their project through any skillset they possess such as sketching, modeling, rendering, and more. They also choose the function of the ship on each level, bringing in their own interests and creativity.
The next steps for me are in many directions. I plan to continue teaching physics in person, but I hope my school will bring in a modern LMS we can use alongside our teaching in the classroom. I also plan to continue finding new digital tools that make learning more engaging and accessible for all learners.
Last semester I built an electromagnetism physics game using the Game Maker Studio engine and plan to build on that experience to continue making online games and simulations to assist in teaching/learning science. My intention is to make games or simulations that are engaging to students so they are motivated to explore the concepts at hand. Also, many people teach and learn physics by memorizing algebra steps so they can get ‘the answer’ to a problem, but they are not understanding the real world situation discussed in the problem. I strongly believe that conceptually understanding physics is far more valuable than training yourself to make your calculator spit out the correct answer without understanding why those steps were taken or what the answer represents.
In 2018 and 2019 I taught physics 12 online asynchronously while also teaching in a classroom part time. I was not given much chance to change the structure, presentation, or content of the course that students worked through online at their own pace. Unfortunately this course rewarded memorizing steps to solve problems and gave no incentive to understand deeply. If I am ever in a position to teach online again I plan to use the skills and ideas I’ve learned in this course to create an engaging, robust, challenging, and intuitive course that will help learners reach their fullest potential of physics understanding. Even in my physical classroom, some of the ideas I’ve used to shape the design of my Google Classroom such as UDL principles and Mazur’s views on assessment will help me to shape the engagement and education of my students for the rest of my career.
References
CAST. (2024, July 30). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines (Version 3.0). CAST. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Mazur, E. (2013). Rethinking assessment: Dudley Herschbach Teacher-Scientist Lecture [Video]. Harvard University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBzn9RAJG6Q
Assignment 2: Unit of learning - Part II - Reflection (Structured Pathway)
The circular motion unit is my favourite unit of physics 12. I really enjoyed building additional content for the unit and structuring it digitally. I plan to use some of the discussion questions and video analysis activities with my in-person classes next school year as well.
It is certainly different designing content for an asynchronous online class. While I'm teaching in person I can read the room and if students are confused, interested, or exhausted then I can adapt to support them or engage them depending on the day. With the asynchronous course you don't get that instant body language feedback as the teacher so you need to embed quizzes and discussions to collect data on the class understanding and participation. I hope the data I gain from the formative quizzes and discussion posts would be enough to help me support any students who are falling behind and encourage others if they need it.
As a current student of online courses like this one (ETEC 524) I know how valuable it is to provide a variety of multimodal content such as videos, discussions, assignments, images, and projects. Students who are asked to spend too much time on one type of communication are missing out on the affordances of the others to improve their teaching. I appreciate that this course has a wide variety of activities and communication media so I tried to emulate that in my own unit on Google Classroom.
If you click on one of the tabs at the top you will see the content I used to post for my students from about 2017 to 2020. I tried to post the notes, questions, activities, or assignments each day as we did them in class so that students could see them if they were away, or they could look back on them at the end of a unit. It was a lot of work and I can now see the advantage of using a dedicated LMS like Google Classroom instead of a website like this one. Embedding and assigning content is significantly quicker and it automatically appears in the feed in chronological order. My school switch to Microsoft Teams during the pandemic which is an awful substitute for an LMS. I sincerely hope we switch to a dedicated LMS soon!
Assignment 2: Unit of learning - Part I - Reflection
I really enjoyed getting acquainted with Google Classroom's various tools such as the Question feature, the Rubric maker, and uploading from Google Drive. It's a very intuitive program and I hope with all my heart that my district stops trying to use Microsoft Teams as a sloppy LMS substitute and adopts something like Google Classroom.
Let me discuss some of my design choices around the activity and assessment I've created in Google Classroom. This is a Physics 12 course so the students have a good idea of what physics is. As stated in the University of Toronto Online Course Design Guidelines, courses should have "resources or activities intended to build a sense of class community, support open communication, and establish trust". I wanted to do something leading to easy student interaction that didn't have any stress from having your physics knowledge tested. I thought it would be fun to ask serious physics questions, and then get the students to answer with silly and creative "wrong" answers. See the post in google classroom for an example. I hope this low stakes activity will help students get to know each other and also get them excited to learn with some creative thinking about physics.
The final assessment I have chosen is for the Circular Motion unit of physics 12. I designed this assignment myself a couple years ago and it's probably the assessment I am most proud of in my teaching career so far. Students must design a space ship that spins to create the feeling of gravity on people within the ship. There are several challenging analysis questions that go along with the design portion. Assessment criteria is given using a rubric that I created using the built in google classroom rubric tool. The rubric focuses mostly on conceptual understanding, communication of ideas, and critical/creative thinking. As Eric Mazur said in his video (2013) students' behaviour is driven by assessment. By assessing students' ability to think critically and understand concepts deeply I am driving them to progress in that direction. Many people think physics is just math, but physics is really visualizing and understanding how things work. I strive in this project and in my teaching in general to focus on deeply understanding concepts in addition to being able to use math as a tool in physics.
I wish I could discuss broader design choices within Google Classroom but that is fairly moot when I have only three things posted. I have the syllabus and introductory activity in the "Introduction" module, then I have the space ship circular motion project in the "Circular Motion" Module. As I add more content for the next part of this assignment I will take a closer look at how to place content intuitively to maximize engagement.
References:
Mazur, E. (2013). Rethinking assessment: Dudley Herschbach Teacher-Scientist Lecture [Video]. Harvard University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBzn9RAJG6Q
University of Toronto. (n.d.). Online course design guidelines. In *Teaching and learning services*. Retrieved June 29, 2025, from https://teaching.utoronto.ca/resources/online-course-design-guidelines/
ETEC 524 - LE Evaluation Rubric Personal Reflection - May 29th
Working with Carlo and Jason to design and implement a rubric seemed daunting at first. As a high school teacher I was out of my comfort zone by picking the "corporate" group, but this turned out to be a great learning experience. I enjoyed seeing a different side of education and I feel like I was able to consider the LMS use cases in a more straightforward way by getting away from the type of teaching I do every day.
One aspect we debated the most was the complexity of the rubric. A simpler rubric can be more intuitive and faster for the assessor to use, but if the rubric is missing an important aspect of assessment then the assessor lacks options to communicate what they need using the rubric. We settled on 9 parameters each with 4 performance levels. If you asked me before the assignment I would say 9 is far too many for an efficient rubric, but after careful consideration we agreed each is distinct and important for assessing the LMS use. We also used parallel language and descriptive language to increase clarity and usability of the rubric (Miller, 2012)
Once we identified the organizational needs of WestJet, it was easy to apply our rubric to Cornerstone OnDemand and SC Training (formerly EddApp) and see which was better suited. Cornerstone was the clear winner in almost every category, so our rubric made it abundantly clear which LMS was more suited to WestJet's purposes.
I really enjoyed how this exercise made me step back and look at the broader picture of what an organization (or school) may need and what an LMS can offer. I teach my students in person, but they also have access to the MS Teams page for our class. Sadly, Teams is almost certainly not the best LMS (Ganji, 2020) for a hybrid learning environment. It is simply what my school district had access to since they already paid for Microsoft software before the pandemic. If I could take the rubric designed by the Secondary School group for this assignment and use it to assess Teams, it think the score would be tragically low. I hope in the future my district will move towards a tool with better analytics, 3rd party integration, content authoring, and user experience, so that the needs of staff, students, and admin are all better met.
References
Ganji, M. R. (2020, November 9). Microsoft Teams is NOT your next LMS. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-teams-your-next-lms-m-reza-ganji/
Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: Tips for designing and using rubrics. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/designing-using-rubrics-andrew-miller
ETEC 524 - Flight Path Assignment - May 14th
Tell us a bit about yourself, your experience, and your goals for this course (or, perhaps, the MET, as a whole).
Hi, I’m Braden and I’m a physics teacher in North Vancouver, BC. I have previously taught a primarily asynchronous physics course using the Moodle LMS but I am currently teaching traditional in-person classes. I’ve completed 8 MET courses so far and they have all been valuable in different ways. My main interest is in designing digital games or simulations to assist with teaching science and last semester I created my first game from scratch, which helps students better understand magnetic and electric fields. In this course I look forward to learning how to design and implement instruction effectively.
Explain what you want to learn about learning environments, creating engaging and exciting content with rich media, meaningful assessment strategies, social software, and more.
While I am passionate about making digital science games and simulations, I know there are already so many wonderful tools out there and I would love to learn more about them. Also, the way in which a teaching opportunity is presented makes a huge difference in my experience so I would like to deepen my knowledge of how to engage learners synchronously or asynchronously
We would like you to reflect upon how you might inform your own learning goals in this course, in light of the competencies listed in the standards, the principles and the view on faculty in 21st century.
I think the ISTE standard “Establish a learning culture that promotes curiosity and critical examination of online resources and fosters digital literacy and media fluency,” is one of the most important challenges of our lifetimes. With the rapid rise of AI, it will very soon (if not already) be close to impossible to tell what is real online. Also, it seems most of the generations above and below me cannot use a computer well. Technological literacy has shifted to phones and I think that shift is getting even worse. I would love to learn more about how to positively impact these skills in my students as an educator.
How can ETEC 524 help you become a digital-age teaching professional?
I am hoping to expand my repertoire of digital tools to use in the classroom and online. I also want to see the different ways I can structure the implementation of those tools to maximize engagement and learning for my students.
What are the key skills and approaches that you feel you need to develop to meet your goals?
As a science teacher I am familiar with many digital tools that I use to engage my students. I think structuring those tools along with other resources into a complete unit or course that flows nicely is a skill I should improve. Also, when I did teach physics asynchronously a few years ago, I found communication to be awkward and I would love to learn how to make it more natural and beneficial to the learner.
Look at the course schedule and the range of topics we'll be exploring together and think about what areas are most important to your own goals in becoming a digital-age teaching professional.
I am particularly looking forward to the Assessment module. I found this quite challenging while teaching asynchronously. Even while teaching in a classroom this is sometimes the most stressful part of my job so any additional insight is very welcome.
Estimate what resources you might need to master these technologies as a novice professional.
In my experience, learning by doing is the most effective. I look forward to exploring the different LMS options and working within their structure to build engaging content.
Citations
International Society for Technology in Education. (2017). ISTE Standards for Educators.