EC&I 832 Major Project – Conclusion

This was a really unique project for me as I was able to scaffold and build upon my knowledge and understanding from EC&I 834 (looking at Online Learning and course development). The two classes blended so well together, I figured I would take aspects of that Major Project and apply them here.

For EC&I 834, I created an online course based on Grade 8 Science Water Systems outcomes and developed a great resource that I can use both online, in-person, or both! For EC&I 832’s Major Project, I did not want to simply dump a bunch of resources and content into a document that would never be looked at again, so I decided to mirror the Online Course Development aspect of 834 and created an online (or Hybrid, or in-person) course centred around digital citizenship (seen in the course walkthrough below).

I created a few modules and based each section off of one of Ribble’s 9 Elements of Digital Citizenship. I have used two of the assignments listed in the course in my classroom before but heavily adapted them to fit digital citizenship content and the Faith-based component of my school division’s Digital Citizenship outcomes. It really came together nicely and is a resource I will be able to use in the years to come. All assignments could be adjusted to fit a variety of grade levels and they mesh well with online, in-person, or hybrid styles of learning. Each of these lessons alone may not resonate with students, but creating a resource that can be spread out over a few months of class means that students continue to look at DigCit rather than seeing it for a week at the beginning of the year and never coming back to it.

My project updates for EC&I 832 and 834 really helped guide some of my decisions regarding content and how to use these tools effectively. I for one am very thankful for the critical feedback on my updates for 832 and 834.

There were a few tricky learning curves along the way that slowed me down but were good tools to have going forward. A few notable ones are: do not use any “- = , @ &” in the tab creation in OneNote. It will not be recognized and you will have to go through each student’s “binder” to delete the tabs pushed to them and redistribute them. Secondly, and I sort of touch on this at the end of my final submission, is that once you push a page to students, you cannot edit the original page…. they do not sync. SO, again, you’d have to go to each student’s binder to delete that page and redistribute.

Overall, using OneNote has been a positive experience. I have been using the tool for a few years now and I still get stuck on some of the systems it has. I would ideally like to import this notebook into Teams and function solely in Teams for messages, calls, meetings, content and homework submissions, etc. HOWEVER, the two tools still do not blend together. If it was not for the fact that I can actually use OneNote and the course I created in future years in my career, I fully believe there are better tools out there to use as LMS systems. I recently learned that the online teachers in my division can use Moodle for their platform, which I think would be far more beneficial than the tools we are provided as classroom teachers. Regardless, OneNote helped me get through online/remote learning during the pandemic and it has been a positive learning experience in creating an actual course, rather than the smorgasbord of thrown together teaching we were forced into back in 2020.

Enough rambling on. Here is my Digital Citizenship Course Prototype. I went above the recommended guidelines for ECI834 (requiring two modules, each with out 15 minutes of student content time) and have included all aspects of the ECI832 requirements for creating a Digital Citizenship resource that I can use in my class. Some of the content is resources I have found online, and built in with Ribble’s 9 Elements of Digital Citizeship, I was also able to curate my own content to help my learners gain a better understanding of Digital Citizenship, Digital Identity, and Digital Literacy. I hope you enjoy!

Source:

If you are interest. Here are links to the videos listed in Module 1, Module 2, and Module 3&4 which were created if this course was ever to be taught online with no hybrid options available. Essentailly, all these videos are is a more student friendly version of my Course Overview above.

Looking forward to tacking EC&I830 next semester!

Until next time,

-Dalton