Nearly a month!

It has nearly been a month since I hae made a posting to the blog on my online teaching. I really want to be in a position to conceptualise how the self-study works and have had a conversation with a colleague of mine about these processes. Do I do this on myself or do I do with via collaboration with another staff member?

The students have been away on their teaching placement for the last 4 weeks and during this time I have continued to develop their online learning platform. I have created the podcasts, I hope they find this useful? How do I know it is really difficult to get some feedback from the students about my online teaching. What can I do, perhaps I might need to post something up on the platform to see whether this is appropriate. Yeah why not, I think I saw a reading on self study about the issues of engaging, reflecting in action and then changing the pedagogy throughout. Is not this the sign of a good teacher? I am sure that it is. I did make a call for the students to make a posting here, I even gave them the URL for the blog. Why have not they posted any of their comments? This concerns me a little as online learning environment really needs to be discussion driven. But on the same page it is interesting that they might not want to make their postings public, they might prefer them to be private. But I think that the online environment and teaching is relationship driven, it is always dialectical and needs to be open in this way.

Back to the content - I have created a new folder which provides students with the opportunities to make comments about their teaching placements. I have even tried to embed a twitter screen into this week so that students could tweet their thoughts on their placement. Once again is this because students are overwhelmed with the technology or is there some other reason. Feedback, I need to get some feedback. I remember being to a session a couple of weeks ago on online learning tools. Yeah I think that I am a leader in this sense, I use twitter, podcasts, embedded videos, different folder icons. I do need however to continue using some other conferencing facilities so that I can give students a real time opportunity to discuss these issues. Surely this would be an opportunity to develop and use some feedback about the unit. I did post a survey for this so maybe it might work. Oh I can not access the tool myself, perhaps I need to get the e-desginer to help me out with this. I did go and speak with this individual about some other things, but now I have remebered - I wanted to ask about the online chat environemtn in MUSO or something else.

Content - so I created some sites for relfection on teaching placement, this hopefully should do the trick. The following module was focussed on contemporary issues. This is really tricky as I know most students will choose the issues of obesity, health, fitness and others - how do I get them thinking in other ways. The issues that they are most likely are facing them relate to issues such as academicasation, technologicsation (is this blog contribuitng to this or not?)healthisation and sportisation plus others. Green talks of this and has written well on this topic. Hopefully the students will have a read of this.

Is really putting questions in a tutorial form an effective way of learning, it helps students learn at different rates - so perhaps. But is just seems really cold. I have given them podcasts and videos and readings all in multi-modal ways. So I really hope that this is effective. The last module I am currently working on and relates to Physical Education futures? What next for our future physical education teachers. Clearly it is related to them finding a job, might need to think about a session on writing to key selection criteria.

Enough for now. Need to invite my colleague into this.