Week 6 Reflection

"Cybercoaching: Rubrics, Feedback, and Metacognition, Oh My!" by Naomi Jeffery Petersen, Ed.D. was a good article to read at this time. She defined cybercoaching as "a way to use readily available technology for the coaching funtion of an instructor." (page 3) This ties in well with our final projects. It really fits in well with mine as my focus is on the teacher and the use of the available technology for assesment. As I mentioned in one of my assignments, though, this is not a "basic idea" in my school, and not much of Montana. We are the only state in the nation that does not sponsor an online school in some fashion. Reasons from the state are it is too expensive, the union fights it, etc. There is also the issue of administrators afraid of online education and teachers who have not been introduced to it, so are afraid of it.

Another point I mentioned was in response to Stags comment about coaching and teaching. The things that many teachers forget is that you can't always expect the kids to know. As a coach, I teach even the basic skills every year. "You should know how to do that" doesn't work too well in a varsity game when expecting the player to remember a skill that was introduced in 6th grade. Same goes in the classroom. When teaching grammar, I never "expected" anything. I quickly, or slowly, covered verbs, nouns, subjects, predicates, etc.

My online class will attempt to provide a tool which will introduce online assesment tools to my teachers, and then perhaps go beyond our school. My previous entry will have a link to my project, as well as a better explanation of it.

Working on the dimdim today was nice. Even though there were some technical difficulties, it was a nice tool to tie in class members from around the world. I have used elluminate before and it allows for more people to talk, but other than that it was not much different than dimdim.