Activity #4 – I’m an Experimenter!

A response to the I’m an Experimenter! Activity
created by Tam Visser (@t_visser2)

Number of views: 115

  1. The three activities I chose to complete were:
    1. Challenge Set – I chose to create activities that fostered community within the classroom by including 5-15 minutes worth of questions, ice breakers, and group games at the beginning of each class.
      1. LINK: https://bank.ecampusontario.ca/response/activity-1-challenge-set/
    2. Information as a Graphic – I created an infographic that introduces the five stages of project management.
      1. LINK: https://bank.ecampusontario.ca/response/activity-2-information-as-a-graphic/
    3. Virtual Field Trips – I decided to find a virtual field trip my students could take, and I found an amazing visual story of how a computer works that will greatly benefit our students.
      1. LINK: https://bank.ecampusontario.ca/response/activity-3-virtual-field-trips/
  2. Three overall lessons I learned from experimenting are:
        1. Building community within the classroom fosters a happier and healthier classroom – this in turn, increased student success, decreased conflicts among students, and increased excitement to attend class.
        2. Offering different styles of instruction is just as important as offering different types of assignment options (i.e. presentation vs. essay vs. infographic, etc.) – I think I have always focused on offering students options for submitting their assignments, but I was not utilizing enough options for instruction.
        3. Students seem to retain more information (and have a lot more fun) in a classroom that focuses on UDL and teaching as an ‘experimenter’ – I have found that overall, my students are more eager to learn and retaining more information when the classroom is varied, uses different technologies, and accounts for all types of learners.
  3. I completed “Activity #3 – Virtual Field Trips” on my mobile device. This type was easy to complete on a mobile device, but I would anticipate a lot more headaches trying to complete the other activities on a mobile device. One challenge is the lack of screen space – working on a small cell phone screen is a lot more limiting that working with two full-sized desktop monitors. An advantage was being able to explore more options for our virtual field trip while on the go.
  4. When designing learning experiences in the future, I will use these different technologies, ideas, formats, and approaches learned in this module to incorporate my new knowledge into my lesson plans. I have bookmarked all the resources provided in these modules so that I will easily be able to go back and find more examples when updating my course content. One video I really like for explaining UDL and this type of experimenting is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih0QVKjYvG4

Example for "Activity #4 – I’m an Experimenter!":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih0QVKjYvG4