Pedagogical goals and objectives for a possible or current class:

I have to admit that teaching biology in the way I would LIKE to teach it in my face to face class has been a little bit of a struggle. I would love for my students to have more time to work on their small group in-class projects but the volume of scientific information I need to communicate to them every class makes that difficult. For the part few years I have attempted to give them more of the basic information on-line via Bb (lecture notes, study guides, etc.) in order to free up more time for discussion and application in class.  I would like to involve my students in more problem solving exercises in my face to face classand any online classes I may teach. I would like to work on ways to implement this idea via Bb.

I would also like to use Bb as a vehicle to get my students to participate in on-line discussion  groups.  Just like any class you have that small group of students are open to talking in class and those who are shy and rarely speak up. Hopefully on-line forums will allow those shy students have a voice.  Hopefully implementing new technology will help me reach these goals.

My favorite ideas from week two are the use of Google Reader (RSS feed) as a means to keep up with the sites and blogs I am interested in and the idea of course flipping.

To be honest my husband has been using Google reader for a while now and I must admit I did not see the value in using it, mainly because when he showed it to me the linked RSS feeds were all from sites that interest him. So until now I never made an effort to set one up for myself. This weekend when I set up my account I feel like I opened a whole new (and more efficient) world. It is amazing what can happen when you take a little time and personalize a platform to work specifically for you.

I love this idea of course flipping. I do something similar but on a smaller scale in my face to face class. I usually give my powerpoint lecture notes to my student prior to class, leaving us more time in class to do what I call “In-class assignments”.  These assignments usually begin in small groups (2-3 students) which allows every student to participate in some discussion and then the entire class comes together to go over the answers.  I would like to work on ways to increase these opportunities for my student in my face to face classes and find ways to translate this also in on-line classes.

I did not have any problems creating my Diigo account. I decided to put the Diigo tool bar on my browser and that took me a while to figure out.

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to introduce myself. I am an associate faculty member at MiraCosta College teaching Biology. So far I have only taught face-to-face classes, so my on-line interactions with students has been limited to Blackboard. I would like to broaden my horizons and learn new techniques to enhance my face-to-face class as well and start a new adventure in on-line teaching.

To be honest writing in a blog is outside my comfort level, but that has never stopped me form starting something new. I am very excited  to start this POT experience with you all.

Melissa

Welcome to your brand new blog at Edublogs.

To get started, simply log in, edit or delete this post and check out all the other options available to you.

Also, if not already, please consider becoming an Edublogs Pro User – you can easily create and manage additional blogs (which also get extra themes and mobile blogging – perfect for students!), a massive storage space of 10GB for files, images, and videos, and access great features such as wikis and forums and many additional ‘Plugins’.

And you get premium email support and over 130 extra cool themes too.

Pro users are what keeps Edublogs running and providing free blogs for education, so give it a go today

For assistance, visit our comprehensive support site, check out our getting started with Edublogs guide or stop by The Edublogs Forums to chat with other edubloggers.

You can also subscribe to our brilliant free publication, The Edublogger, which is jammed with helpful tips, ideas and more.

And finally, if you like Edublogs but want to be able to simply create, administer, control and manage hundreds of student and teacher blogs at your school or college, check out Edublogs Campus… it’s like Edublogs in a box, all for you.

Thanks again for signing up with Edublogs!