I was encouraged by our productive team meeting this week because we were able to create a training needs assessment survey for teachers. Even though the short timeline puts pressure on us to design a training very quickly, I think our meeting helped us to focus on tangible outcomes that we expect from teachers. Once we had those outcomes, creating the survey was much easier. Once we see the results, we will be able to focus on specific needs of the participating teachers and design an effective training course.
While reading our material for this week, I took some time to re-examine the ADDIE model of team-based course design in the context of our tasks in this course. I had been able to use the model in our previous Givercraft experience and using that understanding was helpful in applying it for this course. I am an avid planner and enjoy thinking about overall design, the big picture goals, and logistics and process steps. Using an ADDIE approach is helpful for our team so that we all understand the process and steps involved and we can hold each other accountable for continually analyzing our process and product. I value different perspectives from the team that can challenge our assumptions and drive us to consider other approaches and ideas. Thanh Tam shared some great videos on the ADDIE model and the other blogs also discussed specific tools that would be useful in our course design:
Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation
Following our meeting, I created a team project folder in Google Drive and made a planning document to capture our agenda and progress from this week’s meeting. I also started an agenda for next week’s meeting; given our short timetable, we will need to work asynchronously to prepare for our meeting on Thursday, so that we may use that time to focus on tasks that require synchronous collaboration.
One of the highlights of my week was to help create the Minecraftedu challenge for our class. I enjoyed thinking about what tasks would help my peers to learn the teacher tools and I think the challenge will be a good starting point for us to create similar lessons for the Givercraft teachers.
My comment on Matthew’s blog summarizes how I feel about this week:
I like that I have a second and third attempt this semester to work on the Givercraft/Survivorcraft. There was so much that we were not able to do last time and this teacher training is a great way to support teachers in way that we did not have time for last semester. This of course makes me feel that we want the teachers to feel that we created a quality and effective training course that is worthy of their time and effort.
I am optimistic that our team is gaining momentum in this endeavor and I’m looking forward to seeing results from our needs assessment survey!
Rock Island Techie 