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In March of 2020, Canadian education systems first began to close schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as the emergency response shift to remote learning from home, we must also begin to turn our attention to preparing teachers for the future of schooling over the short and medium term. As school reopenings in provinces such as Quebec, British Columbia and countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Denmark and Israel are showing, this is not simply a return to schooling as normal. Moreover, since education in Canada is a provincial responsibility and the Ontario government has delegated much of the responsibility to the individual Boards, responses to COVID-19 have been diverse and we would expect plans for the future to be appropriately varied.
The biggest obstacle to teaching online probably isn't the technology. The big problem is how to integrate it. " Inadequate professional development and training" is one of the key obstacles to using technology productively in classrooms. (Vega, 2015) @TLMarkides expresses below her challenges during this stressful period.
The Ontario government has licensed two Learning Management Systems (LMS) for its various Boards, Google Classroom and D2L Brightspace. I am planning to critique the Brightspace which I use to teach my eLearning Grade 12 International Business course. I submitted a proposal to give an online interactive workshop to other educators about the use of D2L Brightspace in the online classroom at the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario (ECOO) conference in August.
Dirksen (2012) writes that “the best learning experiences are designed with a clear destination in mind, but sometimes a clear destination can be harder to pin down than it seems. Learn how to determine your destination with accuracy.”
The purpose of this workshop is to help educators be better prepared for September, where teachers will be using either an online or blended learning format to teach their students. Dirksen says that one of the rules of training is that you tell the learners what the objectives are. I will need to identify at a later date the specific learning objectives of the workshop.
Dirksen (2012) writes that “your learners see the world differently than you do, and to design effective learning experiences, you need to understand their view of the world.” @Rastin expresses below what learning experience she is looking for.
References
References
Dirksen, J. (2012). Design for How People Learn. New Riders.
@MsRastin (2020, May 5). I'm trying to think what can be harnessed for September. [Tweet]. https://twitter.com/MsRastin/status/1257652690114564096?s=20
@TLMarkides (2020, May 7). Just now have some time for training. [Tweet]. https://twitter.com/TLMarkides/status/1258507108124778496?s=20
Vega, V. (2015, December 1). Technology Integration Research Review. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/technology-integration-research-learning-outcomes
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