Finishing Task 1 (Assessment 1)

I logged on today and found that I had no checked the posts for about 5 days...shit this is not good when time like this has elapsed. I have particularly focussed on staying in contact with all these students. It is hard enough not to be able to speak with these individuals face to face the only way that I can do this is via Blackboard and other mediums (as an example of these other mediums I have attempted to use podcasting and audio tools to allow students to hear my voice, instead of just being an amorphous thing).

There are still a couple of students that have not logged on to any of the groups of assesment 2, is this my fault? have I not been clear enough? I made sure that I put an announcement to give these students an opportunity (last week)to give the students the chance to choose groups for themselves. I know that learning in the online world is much much different from face to face but the low interactivity in general on the site is somewhat concerning. I want the students to see how to develop a portal in such a way as well.

Are they reading this journal? I am not sure...The students have been asked to respond to their thoughts on the engagement with this unit through their reflective journal. Have they had a look at this site that enables/prompts them to think about their teaching? Where are there ideas for feedback, thoughts, emotions for them. What other prompting tool could I use...email them...make a podcast explaining to them to respond...this is a little hard here. I do hope that the students will at some point spend some time reading my thoughts here and are able to translate this to their own professional learning as either a student-teacher or teacher. Clearly there are some issues associated with using such a medium, but the importance of writing in this way is to uncover the pedagogical reasoning/rationale for teaching in the way that I have.

Enough for this evening. My baby girl (Sacha; 2 years is crying) and I need to go and tend to her.

Trent

Change in staff!

Well the election has been called. What does this mean for the on campus class? The staff is a candidate for election. She has called me and told me that she will have to resign and give her unit over to someone else. How is this going to work? Aren't I as unit leader going to be put into a position where the unit scores are going to be viewed negatively because of this. Shit! Why am I thinking about unit scores? This is a very personal thing to say? Why am I getting caught up in the notion of the academic BS that goes on? You should really be supportive of her development. You are not your CV. This is a quote from an article by Sparkes which discusses the relationship of the audit culture in universities. "You are not your CV" "You are not your CV" . Make sure that you call the new person and give them all the support you can. This is the person that you are.

I know that this person will do a great job, but really it is an unenviable task - she has been thrown in at the deep end and what kind of support can I give someone that is working over 200km away. The phone does some things but really we need to be doing things face to face. Is this problematic in our teaching? We are on 2 different campuses with 200km between us and she will be teaching on a third campus. Sometimes I really hate this gig. I want to do the best for all involved, the teachers, the students and the university but this is really frustrating and in reality is not fair on anyone.

Let's try and support her as best as possible. Help, help, help and support. That is what stduents want to see. Mentoring of staff, but why the hell is the notion of being measured at the forefront of your mind. What has the university done to you?

Week 3

Well the first assessment is in - a philosophical task on the importance of PE to education. I am really looking forward to these to see how many of the students have read and demonstrated their understanding, especially beyond the scientific. But this will also tell me about my pedagogy in this class and how I have set up the online environment. You have all seen my other posts on how I have worked on this for long periods of time, but this is where we may see some pay-off or not!

The discussion boards as the interactive mechanism with the group is starting to pay off. We have had some really great discussions with individual students about who they are and how they became physical education student-teachers. I am responding at the moment to these individually one-by-one trying to highlight a couple of points and even drawing some research into them. Is this an appropriate strategy? What do the students think about the approach presented to them? They are not really replying to one anothers posts yet. Perhaps I might need to put a reminder announcement on the importance of responding to others posts, how a discussion and clarity may come of it during the process.

The next couple of weeks will be focussed on planning. I hope this goes OK, but with only one post on their experiences in week 1 I am not sure what is going on. I have heard that some don't have the text - I wonder if this is impacting on what they are trying to achieve. Will pay attention here.