On Tuesday we had two guest speakers Donald Girouard and Shannon Magee. They both work for Manitoba Education in the Webased department. Blackboard learn is the current application/website that is being used in Manitoba. Blackboard learning is a webased system that applies to the senior years curriculum in Manitoba. There are a total of 44 courses available on blackboard learn. Shannon and Donald talked about how blackboard learn works and how to apply for a course. They explained how you all you have to do is apply for a course and then you have access to it. Once you have access to the course you receive all of the lessons and corresponding resources with that lesson. I like how you are able to add videos or text right into the lesson that is already made up if you prefer a different video. As a new teacher I think having access to all of these resources would be very beneficial in your first couple years. They mentioned that even if you are not teaching a webased course you can still apply for access to a specific course.
I never had to take a webased course in high school, so I do not have a lot of experience with how they work, but it seems to be pretty simple to organize. I have taken an online course in university and it had some of the same features that blackboard learn offers. One of the problems I could see arises in a webased course would be dealing with the students who are Skyping or Zooming in. You would have to make sure that you are in regular contact with theses students to make sure that they are doing their work and that they are understanding the material.
Overall, I think the presentation was well done and if I ever find myself teaching a senior years course I will try and use blackboard learn even if it is just for resources. I think this was a very beneficial presentation and I would be a lot more comfortable teaching a webased course after attending the presentation.
Brook, the presentation from Shannon and Don was really good in my opinion. Learning that we can access course content directly from MB Ed is going to be a huge help for me this term because I am starting to feel the pressure from class and placement and not knowing what clusters I will be teaching. The content blackboard supplies is already broken down for me and that I can just convert into my teaching style which is going to reduce the amount of prep time needed to run a class.
ReplyDeleteI find that, in certain cases that these IITV or online courses can be really helpful more specialty classes or small divisions because there is a limited amount of teachers in small divisions along with students whereas large divisions should be able to supply teachers in each school for specialty courses. I might be being bold on this statement.