And so the 3240 adventure begins!

As I continue on my path towards the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program certification, I am now participating in PIDP 3240: Media Enhanced Learning.  This blog is to keep track of my progress and insights I have while working through the course.  Part of progress is, as the name suggests, to pull me - kicking and screaming at times - into the current world of social media.

My background is fundamentally the same since entering the program, although the milestones are constantly being updated.  My initial foray into teaching was with online courses through Royal Roads University, where I had to become comfortable with Moodle (which continues to be an extremely valuable resource to me).  When I began teaching face-to-face fulltime at the beginning of 2012, my mission was to just get through the class with the amount of sweating, stuttering, and panic minimized.  After a year and a half, I have a solid grasp of the material I am teaching - admittedly not always the case - and am looking to make my classes a bastion of engagement.

Which brings me to 3240.  I am active Facebook user, have a Twitter account which I use in a pinch, and have a blog.  So it makes me wonder: why do I find a course on this so intimidating?!  It could be that aside from the blog, I haven't used these tools in a non-personal situation.  This is where I feel I'm missing a tremendous opportunity - if my students are avid Facebook users, am I trying to fight the tides by not embracing this as a valid communication method?  Where I find this all very interesting is that my next wave of courses start next week, providing me with a good testing ground for my ideas.  I will put a link through to the pages when I have them built and can then dissect and analyze how things are going.