Seeing that Pod1 aims for a better understanding of words and grammar, and being able to construct and understand simple sentences; I believe this would require students to come into the program with a basic understanding of English, in order to successfully reach their goal of learning English as a second language. Knowing that these students are not familiar with the English language to begin with, adapting to new activities may be daunting.

There are many different styles of learning that are available for students, including cooperative learning which utilizes group work; this is a beneficial tool in gaining experience in pronunciation, fluency and vocabulary. Further, interactive learning resources provide students with interactive tools that best support their individual needs. By providing different strategies for students of diverse abilities, this ensures that all students are accessing the same quality of effective instruction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpfgaMc51QQ

Prompt 2. The video provides lots of information about long and short term debt cycles, including the pushing factors of these cycles like debt. Since the video is information packed the best way to take in the most information while watching the video is by taking notes. Considering it’s the best way to take in information on the video I feel it is the most likely way learners will respond to watching the video.

Prompt 3. An activity I would suggest after the students finish watching the video would be to draw out the short and long term debt cycles as well as the productivity growth line. After they have accomplished that task they will have to label key points in the graph and explain the forces that cause these movements. This will help reinforce the foundation to later theories developed around the model. This foundation will also help increase the students over all knowledge on economic booms and recessions. The technology used for this activity would be YouTube and simply pen and paper or note taking applications on a tablet or computer.

Prompt 4. Students can take a picture of the work they have done and submit it in an online drop box. If the students used a note taking application, they can save the file as a pdf and hand that into the drop box (E.g. course space drop box). The grader can view the work they have done and leave notes on what they need to improve. The technology students will need is a laptop or a computer.

Prompt 5. The work this activity would cause will be very reasonable. Creating the assignment its self and rubric would be fairly straight forwards considering the linearity of the information. Grading the assignment would take some time varying on the size of the class. For a class of thirty students grading would be very manageable. For a class of one hundred you’d need some help grading the assignments in a timely fashion.

Prompt 6. Some of the video design seemed to try and sell you on Economics, glorifying aspects with funny examples. The video was running a line of an entertainment purpose video other than educational. If the video was slowed down and they put more emphasis on key points it would have been easier to comprehend, also making it easier to take notes and engage with the ideas the video portrays.

While considering our interactive learning resource we used the three pillars of universal design to start out our framework. The first step in this process was choosing a platform that is easily accessible for everyone, instinctively we went directly to a website to accomplish this task. A website can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, anytime, and is extremely affordable. Another benefit of a website is you can have all the learning resources in one place. These resources can be placed with hyperlinks or directly imbedded into the text making the learners job easy. These resources can be readings, videos, pictures, and possibly games to ensure we cover all grounds of engagement, representation, and action. This also ensures that learners with different learning styles such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic can all excel and not fall asleep while taking in the information. An example of this that I thought about spacing out resources in our website so that there’s seldom two of the same type in a row (text followed by text), giving a diverse flow of information going through the course. A website is a fun thing to play around with on the creator side due to the fact that you can structure it nicely so the topics/chapters are easy to find and navigate through. This gives us lots of opportunity for trial and error while testing out our website so the learners can have the best possible experience.

A problem of designing an interactive learning resource is making sure the needs of all learners can be met. Our approach to conquer this problem has been through making the course as easy to access as possible through a website. Another approach to this would be to make sure that the resources on the website are user friendly to all types learners so that we can best meet the needs of our learners.

Direct instruction is a form of teaching that relies on small learning increments combined with small tasks to help develop knowledge on a certain subject. This combined with a small enough class size to allow the teacher to cater to each students needs is what creates success in direct instruction. The debt cycle is a concept that affects everyone who plays a role in the economy by making transactions. It is easy to understand the topic of the debt cycle when it is taught through direct instruction, because there are several small sub-topics that need to be understood. Students can get confused by different sub-topics and a teacher can aid those students to better understand the sub-topics in order to see the bigger picture of the debt cycle as a whole. Direct instruction is a useful and effective method of teaching the topic of the debt cycle. Because it allows students to learn sub-topics and receive aid for things they do not understand in order to eventually understand the topic as a whole. The debt cycle is an important topic for students to understand because it explains a basic yet important part of the economic machine which affects all of our lives. By understanding and learning about the debt cycle students can make better financial decisions and have a better understanding of how the economy works. This topic is important for students to learn and an effective way for students to learn about the debt cycle is through direct instruction by a well educated teacher on the topic.

Behaviourists

Behaviourists believe in feedback and reinforcements to shape their learners. I have witnessed this a lot in my experiences with coaches. I played and was surrounded by football for years of my life, leading me to be around a lot of coaches. These coaches ran the players through drills and gave us homework which they figured out was the best reinforcements to our success on the field. Some examples of this were selected game tape and unique drills that would help us identify on field scenarios. This approach gave myself and many of the players on my team a good foundation of work ethic.

Cognitivists

A lot of school teachers I have had are cognitivists. Cognitivists help the learners uncover and use appropriate learning strategies while also helping them make connections to their prior knowledge. Most teachers I had were good at helping the kids understand and use the tools available that would allow them to succeed. This was seen through textbooks, computers, and communication with other classmates. They would also connect theories and principals taught in previous years to the current information and expand on it. A lot of this was seen in math classes and science classes I took like physics, where you would expand on lesson and rules learnt in the previous years.

Constructivists

A good example of constructivists would be parents or guardians. A constructivist lets the learner make their own meaning and interpretation through experience and interaction. My parents did this by signing me up for sports when I was younger, and keeping my mind active by taking me to science centers and zoos. This allowed me to create my own understanding of social interactions, and my own mindset around the world, morality, consciousness, and science.

Catch ya later

1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

• Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
• Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “edci335” category).
• See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the the edci335 category assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
• Add pages, if you like.
• Include hyperlinks in your posts (select text and click on the link icon in the post toolbar)
• Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works). To embed a YouTube video, simply paste the URL on its own line.
• Under Dashboard/Appearance,
  • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, new header image, etc.)
  • Customize menus & navigation
  • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
• Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep it for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to rename the label of the course category in menus (e.g., as we did where it shows “Learning Design” as the label for the “edci335” category menu.  This will enable readers not familiar with university course numbers to understand what to expect in the contents.

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

• WordPress resources
• Using RSS feeds to read blog posts from your networks (e.g., Feedly)
• Privacy resources
• Copyright resources
• Finding images you can use

1. in the blog feed on the front of your website
2. in the Learning Design menu on your website. This is because we have applied the “edci335” category to this post and the menu item “Learning Design” has been created from the category “edci335.” For every post you make for this course, please assign the “edci335” category to it. You are welcome to use this blog for your personal hobbies or for other courses, in which case, you could create additional menu items and categories for them.
3. if you give permission, your posts categorized “edci335” will be aggregated onto the Blog Feed on the EDCI 335 Course Website.

Feel free to delete this post once you understand this. If you have any questions, please reach out to your instructor.