E-Portfolios

      Using Digital Portfolios is a new idea for me, but one that is useful as a public and or private account of personal assignments in online learning environments. When students use e-portfolios as a learning tool in the online environment it serves as a record to validate progress students are making and share their progress with other students to encourage subject matter dialogue.

     Benefits of using an Eportfolio is the culmination of data over a duration of time. When a student has a chance to save and manage their progress during class it can later be used as a reference tool and evidence of growth. Saving and documenting student work showcases skills, abilities, and knowledge during the online experience. 

Other benefits are the data stored in eportfolios allow students to reflect on how they have met the outcomes for the learning environment and later be used as a catalyst to spark dialogue topic between peers. E-portfolio also serve as a part of formative and summative course assessment.  

     Some challenges of collecting an e-portfolio might be where the digital collection will be kept so that it is assessable for the student and the world wide web to share. One large concern is with everyone storing data online in these digital folders how will the accommodation of these files be created, and who will maintain them? What will be the legalities of all this data stored in the eportfolios and how will it be regulated?

     Using eportfolios in future learning involve making recordings of student vocal development listening to them, digitally assessing them and at the end of the class using the vocal development as a tool to encourage musical growth.  Evidence of the learning would be vocal recordings of individual and group performances to asses growth and vocal rubrics to challenge young singers to evaluate themselves.  

     One example of a culmination of eportfolios in an online musical digital experience is below. 

     This is also a future use of music in E-portfolios. Using the video as a form of evidence for the assignment but the combining of all the other voices and the digital responsibility of responding back to each musician and combining all the music tracks is an assessment in itself that would have a rubric developed as a guide.

     Using Google docs in music theory is an immediate tool. As a reference point to a new song, I use various recordings from YouTube as a listening point and also to teach students how to evaluate performances. During music theory, an effective use of an e-portfolio will aid the students in studying for the final exam. 

Hand Games

My story of online interaction begins here, me, I am a social learner, social listener, and social interactor. Sitting back and thinking and asking myself, how do I learn inside of the classroom environment and how is that form of learning the same or different from how I learn as an online learner in that environment. 

One hot summer day as a child running around outside playing I remember stopping in my tracks when for the first time, I saw hand-games being played between two of my friends. 

The key-word being, "saw", I am a visual learner. As I watched the game in my familiar neighborhood a few times, immediately I wanted to try.  Learning in a social way is key for me but in relationship to learning online, the social constructivist perspective suggests that "all higher psychological processes have their origins in individuals' interactions with others" (Gavelek & Raphael, 1996 ). Learning happens when experienced learners share knowledge that moves nonlinearly to novice learners ( Bouling, Hough, Krinskey, Saleem, & Stevens 2012).  As I visually experience what I want to learn, I am not threatened during this interaction to learn, because I am comfortable and confident I can try to learn the new skill. 

As an online learner there is an importance for community interaction in online learning but are they completely necessary? Let's take a look. 

First I said, I saw the little girls playing the hand game. I can watch the video of the little girls playing the game and learn how to play today in my home. OK, no problem learning can take place for me. The next part was the little girls were my friends who lived in my neighborhood. Ummm! we may have a problem. Being familiar with the teachers, (my friends),  the new skill allows me to feel safe to interact while learning to learn a new skill. Socially I trust them because they are my friends and they have mastered a new skill that I want to learn. According to the Cognitive Apprenticeship Model, (CAM), one of the dimensions that encourage learning is sociology. Collins suggests that sociology is how students work on realistic tasks together as they communicate how to accomplish meaningful tasks, (Collins, 2006). Although the girls in the video are not personally familiar to me their faces are similar to mine so if I am a motivated learner I can accept this familiarity and trust them as my teacher. 

As an adult learner who is still visual and social, I need to trust the teacher to interact. The need for online student community is not relevant for me, I prefer individual work because of the lack of "neighborhood" friendship is a difficult task to create in an online environment. Although when I started in the LR grad program we meet in video meetings (visual faces) and I previously had established personal relationships with a few of the students in my classes so we were familiar with each other and it made collaborative work more successful. For me, as an online learner, the need for the neighborhood melted away and I was able to learn on my own because my goal was to complete classes to move to toward the goal, the degree. 

The importance of online interaction is important as an online learner but the interaction between me and my peers is not as necessary as me and the teacher. If I have a question or desire to reach out for clarification of the assignment then the teacher-student interaction is more important than the student-student interaction. Student interaction while interesting does not affect success in the online environment. Online student interaction seems to positively influence students perceptions but appeared to have little impact on actual performance ( Herring & Clevenger-Schmertzing, 2007). 

Although I enjoy and desire visual stimulus as a learner in the classroom and online I must admit that this type of interaction does not impede my progress in the class but I may not be able to recall the information I "learned" while in this community. Forty years later, as I reflect on how I was taught how to play hand games on the streets of my neighborhood, amongst friends, proves that I am a social learner inside and outside of the classroom and learning environments matter in all of my learning. Also, I can still run a good game of "hand-slide".

Sing-On
Ronda

References

Boling, E., Hough, M., Krinsky, H., Saleem, H., & Stevens, M. (2012). Cutting the distance in distance education: Perspectives on what promotes positive, online learning experiences. The Internet and Higher Education,15(2), 118-126. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.11.006

Herring, L. C., & Clevenger-Schmertzing, L. (2007). Online High School World History: Does Interaction Make a Difference? Social Studies Research and Practice,2(3), 419-437. Retrieved October 31, 2018, from https://www.socstrp.org/.

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TPACK vs SAMR

     The SAMR model for musicians id more natural and creative. For example in the SAMR model SUBSTITUTION allows for musicians to share their performances by recording them and uploading them to YOU-TUBE. Musicians want to share and is a natural way to get feedback on their performance. Which leads us to AUGMENTATION of SAMR once the performance has been shared the student can use Google-docs to collaborate with other student musicians about the performance, this peer feedback is an exciting and social practice for student development instead of hearing evaluation form the teacher. MODIFICATION is the next natural step for a musician, or how to improve performance to make the next performance better. Allowing the students to create a blog review of their performances is a healthy way to encourage personal ownership of individual musical development and building a stronger group dynamic. Moving to REDEFINITION makes a case to work with other student musicians interactively. Developing a interactive choir who has participated in the blog would be a challenging and great way to solidify the SAMR model.
     Although T-PACK has its upsides like, focusing on how I teach the music and the pedagogy of how the lesson is taught and what tools I will use to teach the information to the students BUT for me SAMR is a natural choice for music students to grow themselves because it has a model for students to collaborate together on how to improve themselves, as they learn to learn.

SingON
Ronda

Building your PLN

LetsSing!!!!?

Well this week I was charged with getting into social media. Anyone who knows me knows "social" media is not my thang, real face to face conversation I prefer, Cancerian, I need to feel you. 

Twitter was my first stop, I create an accounted and tried to find twenty interests to follow,that was a challenge. I finally got the account set up after the text validation and here is my twitter. rondamuhammad@muhammadronda.

     The next one was participating  in a twitter chat. After watching the video and opening the calendar trying to get into a chat was not a success. I added the event to my colander, I even got a reminder but where the chat visually was a t ten and ten thirty was a mystery to me. Was it in Twitter? Was it in TeckDeck? This is still a mystery to me. I did enjoy the visual complexity of TechDeck. I did fish around and find more people to follow, read comments from earlier and enjoyed what I saw. I may like Twitter because it is short, I like the simplicity of saying it quick.

Moving on or returning to Google+ plus was funny because I had set an account up but had no idea how to use it LOL! When I returned I saw some responses I made to complete for a class previously. But as I watched the video and played around and created a community, I began to think, this may be useful. Using the small circles that were already created I watched the video and learned how to expand them to invite more people to join the fun conversation of the new community I created.

In the Google community I decided to do something fun and relaxing, natural hair, we will watch and see how it will groooow.




The connection between Google+ and Twitter all in the same place on the front page of my Twitter account is very organized and makes lots of sense. By the time I closed this blog out I decided to return to my Twitter page and take a look at things and thankfully had my first follower, my father-in-law, support comes from people who you least expect.

SingOn!
Ronda

Min Lit Review