Shawna Jensen

ETEC 524 65A

January 16, 2022
Flight Path

I am currently working as a Teacher Teaching on Call in the Richmond and Delta School

Districts and have been doing so for the last three years. I am also a competitive curler and I

often travel to different parts of British Columbia to compete from September-March, so

working as a TTOC has been ideal since it is flexible and low stress. Working on call also gives

me the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of students from different geographic and

socio-economic backgrounds and that has really influenced the ways that I teach. In particular it

is seeing what some students at some schools have access to that other students don’t have access

to, which can be as simple as owning a bike. That said, I have not had a lot of online teaching

experience myself because I have not held a contract that would have required me to teach online

during the pandemic. My goal for this course is to absorb as many different strategies to

successfully build a course/unit that I can use in the future. I want to try to take a few risks and

incorporate elements that I have never used before so that I know what might work for my

teaching style and what won’t.

I think that I would like to learn more about the different types of interactive media that

can be used to engage and get students more involved in their learning. Online learning requires

a lot of self-direction and motivation from the student and that is often tough for many students.

Routine is also great but spontaneity keeps learning interesting and I hope to find a balance in

this area. Assessment is also a major learning point for me, especially with how to assess

whether our students are learning without actually seeing them reacting and working with the

material in person. I think the best way to inform my learning goals will be to thoroughly read

through discussions and readings, ask questions and take note of the experiences that others in

my position have had with blended and online-only learning. Additionally, looking beyond the
material that is provided in this course will broaden my scope and inform areas of my practice

that I may not have thought of.

In a society that largely depends on technology to get through everyday life, having a

course like ETEC 524 can help me to work through the types of things that will work well in

designing an online course or set of activities, and the pieces that might be better saved for in the

classroom. While there are a lot of ways that what we do in person can be transferred online,

there are also a lot of hurdles that make those types of experiences exceptionally different when

you change the environment that they are done in. These are some hurdles that I hope to work

through with this class, or at least know what alternatives I can use to create a successful learning

environment online. I have heard many different stories from colleagues about their transition to

online learning and there were a number who found success with Google Classroom, so I will

look to use that platform for Assignment 2 in this course.

To jump off of my previous section, the areas that I think are most important to me are

learning environment, interaction and communication, and multimodalities. I think these are the

places that I have the least experience in or could improve in the most. I mention that

communication is one of the topics that we will be studying, which I think is important because it

is one of the biggest and most important skills necessary to be a teacher or student. Whether it is

online or in person, being able to talk to teachers and peers about things they are learning and

what they are confused about. One of the resources that I might need to master these

technologies is knowing people who can help me work through issues that I run into.

Additionally, having access to different technologies (without having to pay for them ideally) can

really help to broaden my teaching range. While I also would like to work on assessment,

learning environment, interaction and communication, and multimodalities are the places I

would most like to focus as they are all interconnected and can make or break engagement online

or in person.