Week 1 Blog

Starting a project like this can be very intimidating.  Throughout the Learning Technologies coursework, I have created each of these parts in pieces but never put everything together.  It seems to be a daunting task to include all of the things necessary to create an effective course.  The Constructionist learning theory seems to be the one that makes the most sense to me to be used in an online learning environment (Savery and Duffy, 2001).  It allows the learners to learn at their own pace and create material that is meaningful to them.  This gets more engagement from the learners and will then allow them to better retain the material being taught.  This makes the learning more personal and allows the learner to work through the material and create something from their learning.  The course that I am looking to design will help with the new hire technology orientation for my school district.  Right now we are hiring about 300+ teachers each year.  There were 80+ new hires at the high school alone.  We will be opening at least 2 new schools each year for the next 5 to 10 years.  We are a technology-rich district with Chromebooks in every classroom from 2-12 and not all teachers are comfortable with that level of availability.  This is on top of the basic set up new accounts, creating welcome web pages, and setting up phone systems that each new hire must complete before the first day of school.  Larson and Lockee (2009) talk about the importance of design and technology in other areas outside of education.  This includes the training developed and run by HR offices for their new hires.  This done in an online format that allowed access from anywhere a person wanted to learn when they were ready to learn would increase the retention over a set time and place.  These ideas are going to drive the development of my course.  I want the new hires for my district to get access to the course when they complete their account creation training that they attend so they can start working on their technology knowledge before being bombarded with district New Hire Orientation that takes place over 3 days before returning teachers report for in-service days.  Stretching out the learning and allowing learners to go back and repeat modules, learn at their pace, but still ask questions to the course instructors could really change the way new hire training works.  It could allow for more information to be taught and learned to help teachers attack the learning curve of how to teach with the technology we use in my district.  Ruey (2010) sets the bar at changing the passive learning of the corporate world into a more collaborative environment seen in other places.  This will be a challenge to set up but it will help increase the learning in the course I develop.