Through taking these courses, I've been able to further evaluate how I want my own classes taught. Chemistry and A&P are both meant to be preparatory courses for college. While these college courses involve a lot of memorization and math practice, I'd like to compliment that learning with some inquiry. NSTA has a few great resources that I'm using, incorporating forensics and clinical applications into both courses. Additionally, I've been evaluating my own online learning and have found resources that better shape my own understanding. Filling in personal gaps, I've run into many helpful websites and ideas to aid student learning.
From taking my own classes, I feel that I have found a great balance between learning content and applying content. I've decided to use CK-12 for a textbook in my classes. They have vastly improved their content for upper level science courses. I will also use my wiki to post my own lecture videos and math problems (the only weakness with the CK-12 book and the newer Chemistry textbook in my classroom is the lack of math application in Chemistry). I've essentially been investigating how I want everything to look, where I want my content to come from, and what content is most important to prepare future scientists. I've completed these tasks through taking my own online courses and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. I'm finally ready to move on and build my own online learning environment.
Wow, sounds like a busy summer! In thinking about how you "model" this to your students I really believe that students need to know how much work we put in on our own time in order to be experts. I say this not so that students "respect" us more for it but because it always seems to surprise students when I talk about reading content books or taking graduate level courses. I think that it helps bridge a sort of gap in that they then understand that we are students too and we are asking of them what has been asked of us as well. Hopefully you have come away with some great material.
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