Metacognitive Blog

Overall, I believe this has been a very fun and productive semester. I have thoroughly enjoyed all the different ways we have learned in the course this semester, from group projects, blogging, and discussion boards to in class games. This made for a more fun and appealing learning environment, in the end making learning a lot more effective.

Throughout this semester I spent a considerable amount of time focusing on designing training systems, virtual high schools, e-learning, and multi-media instructional design. I personally spent the most time focusing on virtual high schools and also web-based training systems. I did my annotative bibliography on virtual high schools and my training project on teaching South Carolina teachers Google applications through the web. When I began learning about virtual high schools I was in the dark but throughout the semester I gained knowledge about the positive and negative effects they can have on students and the school system. I now believe they can be a great stride towards fixing some of the major problems that exist in our school systems today. I also believe that virtual high schools would be most effective if used in a blended way where you have face to face sessions mixed with session online. This covers the needs of students while also eliminating overcrowding in classrooms and also opens a window to evenly distribute learning materials. Some rural areas don't have access to all the resources and qualified teachers like big cities so if the resources are made available online, you can reach more kids. I think overtime as virtual high schools become more common, they will begin to play a much bigger role and I'm excited to see where they end up in the years to come.

For the Google applications training project, I had to create an instructional video and then come up with assignments/discussion questions to go along with it. After completing that portion, I had to post these items on a host site where the teachers could use this to learn. I learned a great deal about how important it is to always be educated on training and always thinking of new ideas for making it most effective. This involves knowing your audience and how they learn and then finding the best median that when implemented will produce the most productive outcome. Although I ran into some complications during my first experience as a trainer, I gained considerable knowledge and will be better prepared the next time around.