Marcela Sandino

As an instructor, I have learned the importance of altering a course in order to maximize my students' learning potential. 

Instructors must work toward preventing student alienation. Due to the lack of F2F contact in an online course, students may become disengaged, which is why it is important to maintain a good level of S2I contact. It is vital that oneself mantain a sense of professionalism when recieving negative feedback from others in the workplace setting. 

Time managment is key to being a successful proffesor. User-centered interfaces are ideal when creating an online course. Try to make sure that your students have sufficient social presence. 

Time managment is the tree from which the fruit of workload managment grows. Time managment skills have taught me to properly distribute my workload throughout my day. A proper understanding of the LMS('s) used is also crucial to properly running my clasroom. I learned that creating a hierarchy of tech-support will also streamline my work-process. 

Universal Design is critical when creatind a course usable for all. When implementing videos in a course, be sure to include a transcript and captioning. Avoid changing fonts and using colors to categorize things (in order to not disadvantage color-blind students).

When using an LMS, what is helpful for some, may be harmfull to others, particularly the disabled. I will study different kinds of AT devices so that I am able to better advise disabled students in the future. 

Several laws have been passed in order to make sure that people with disabilities a given the same opportunities as anyone else. It is our job as educators to familiarize ourselves with such legislation in order to better accomodate our disabled students. We must also be conscious of the differences between different pieces of legislation. 

This lesson has taught me the importance of being patient with all my students. What some may percieve as lazy in a student can actually be an unfortunate manifestation of a disability(s). When creating lesson formats for the disabled, it is critical to make lessons pithy in order to maximize learning. As an instructor, I will be sure to do research on different disabilities, particularly when a student or students of mine have disabilities of any kind, in order to create a more inclusive and accomodating learning environment. 

Media hosting and sharing can be a gray-area in terms of assesment. You must use different methods of grading for diffferent situations. Media hosting and sharing sites should be used with the goal of improving a student's comprehension of the material. Peer reviewing and rubrics are great grading tools for different kinds of media. 

When microblogging one should attempt to incorporate purpose, learning outcomes, and evaluation. Social networking sites available for use include twitter and facebook. When students microblog, they are able to streamline their thinking process due the limit of characters they can use when writing a summary.