From the beginning of this initiative, I have gained exposure to a number of alternative opportunities in which my site can engage and partner with families in order to support student success. It is my intention to implement the initiative in the fall of 2014, as I foresee implementing it this late in the year might detract from its potential to reach parents who are now very focused on transitioning their child into kindergarten. By waiting for the start of the next school year, I will be able to introduce it as part of our Beginning of the Year package. This will address another challenge that I foresee, which is that I don't want parents to feel like participating in LORE is a chore, which it might feel like at this time as their focus is primarily on their child's transition into k-12. The beginning of the school year will feel like less of a 'crunch' time which means that parents are more likely to be open to exploring a new platform for engagement, and they will be able to get comfortable using it so that it doesn't feel novel to them come Spring 2015. I think it is worth it to wait on implementing this initiative because ultimately, it will allow us to reach more parents. Most parents at my site work long hours in the food industry or in factories, so they do not have the luxury of long lunch breaks or working regular 9-5 shifts. By giving them a quick way to connect with our school, they can be more informed about their child's progress, which many families have expressed their interest in when they come to pick up their child at the end of the day.
I think that, as a platform, LORE lends itself easily into being used for future e-learning initiatives for both teaching/learning and professional development. For example, teachers can use it amongst themselves to share resources they have found when implementing a unit plan. What often happens now is that teachers either don't share resources with one another even though we are doing the same unit, or we share them during our lunch break which isn't a sustainable practice.
I came into the course thinking that e-learning faced many obstacles to providing the quality of learning that face to face learning produces [when done effectively]. The biggest shift I see in my perspective is that both face to face learning and e-learning have the capacity to be effective or ineffective, depending upon multiple factors that this course focused on, such as setting up the environment for success and techniques of effective facilitation. The facilitation activity we did as a team for this course provided me direct experience with the challenges of increasing rigor in an e-environment, but it also provided me direct examples of higher order learning happening when the conditions for it were created and sustained long enough. Being in the same room as someone does not guarantee that higher order learning will follow, which is something that I am well aware of, but prior to this course I held a prejudice against e-learning in that I believed being face to face was universally better than e-learning. I see now how that perspective is damaging to both my professional development as someone in the education field, but also to students who are growing up in an increasingly technological world. They need to know how to learn in these e-settings just as much as the f2f settings, and this course has greatly shaped this perspective I now hold.
