Week 7 Reflection - Beginning the Curriculum Unit

Blog reflection: What did you think about, or worry about, as you began to grapple with creating a unit for an online course? 


For me, I like to start with what I want the students to learn (what is the desired result?). For the purposes of lessons/units created for TC classes I also like to think about the grade level & subject because I am going to be certified K-12 and want to demonstrate a good cross-sampling of experiene. So, I decided that I wanted to target secondary level students for the subject "ELA." Within ELA, I wanted to focus on personal creative writing and my goal was to have students become comfortable expressing themselves through various forms utilizing online tools.


Putting an outline together was a fairly easy exercise for me but what I struggled with is conciseness. In other words, it's very very easy to include too much. I wanted to make sure the unit covered the necessities for establishing an online collection of personal expression without overwhelming students. 


Another concern that I had was finding a partner. I made sure that I posted my ideas on the discussion board early on but it seemed that everyone had the same thought. We were all posting ideas but there wasn't a lot of overlap going on. So, I decided to provide more detail in order to entice someone to join me. Fortunately, this strategy worked out and I am very happy with my partner. We seem to be in synch with the goals we want to accomplish, the tools we want to use, and the level of effort we expect to put into the unit. This is always a concern where group projects are concerned.


Finally, I am beginning to work through how we ensure that the curriculum unit meet iNACOL standards, use the tools that we want students to learn effectively, and properly assess the students based on performance tasks. I am also concerned about how deep to go with regard to the unit design. It would easy (albeit time consuming) to get lost in the details and end up creating too much content for the assignment. On the other hand, I would like for the unit to be usable and valuable, something that I can actually implement in the future (or at least something that can kickstart an actual unit).