ECMP 455 Summary

This is an exciting time, although I don’t seem to have the time to be excited. It is the end of the semester, which for me means it is the end of my 4 year Bachelor of Education degree! Wow I did it, well I assume I will do it.

With that said I want to take some time to reflect on my experiences in ECMP 455 this past semester.

We got off to a bit of a rough start with some scheduling conflicts but overall I had a good experience in ECMP. The class was stuctured with some face to face time and some online time together. I think this is a good idea as it is important for us to get used to communicating online in the class. As much as I consider myself a digital native I find that I learn better in a traditional environment. This could be because of the fact that it is the only way I have learned over that past 18 years of my life. Because of this I think meeting in a classroom together a little more would have been beneficial to someone like me, even just twice a month instead of one time per month.

I was really excited to take this class with Alec as it is widely known that he is kind of the guru of this stuff at the U of R and beyond. I didn’t have the greatest experience in ECMP 355 and I really wanted to get something more out of the class in 455. I think I did.

What ECMP 455 forced me to do was become my own teacher, I think this was done on purpose. What this allowed me to do was focus on the types of things I wanted to focus on in the class instead of being dragged through stuff that a) I already knew or b) that I didn’t care about. I was able to seek out the stuff that interests me and I was able to go about it in a way that suited me personally. This was great.

My favorite part of the class was that I was able to work with other Business educators to create a online learning resource. I have a blog post about it below so I won’t get into it too much but I really loved working on this, I would definitely keep this part of the class.

Mentorship was another part of the class that I found parts of it to be rewarding. I learned alot in a little amount of time just observing from thousands of miles away from others and it was a good experience overall. I do have some criticisms but I don’t want to get into them here.

If I had to give ECMP 455 a rating out of 10 it would have to be a 7.5. I think it is a great class and with a few changes it could easily be a 10!

In the future I hope to take other classes like this and continue to explore what is going on in the technology world. I have not had a chance to really look into it but if there are master level classes on educational technology I would be interested in taking some down the road.

Business Education PLC

I had a friend call me yesterday to tell me about how his interview went with the Regina Public School Division. He was flat out told that Business Education is a dieing subject area. I was taken back by this comment, mainly because the past four years of my life have been spent in the Business Education program at the University of Regina.

I got to thinking and thought how could a subject area with so much be dieing? For a project of mine I have created with a couple other Business Education students a wikispace dedicated to resources for different areas of business education. When we started the project out we thought about what subject areas would fall into the area of Business Education. Here is our list:

• Accounting
• Business Communications
• Communication Production Technology
• E-Commerce
• Economics
• Entrepreneurship
• General Business
• Information Processing
• International Business
• Law
• Management
• Marketing
• Memberships & Associations
• Personal Finance and Consumer Studies

I would think that is a good list of legitimate subjects that can be and should be taught in high schools. Maybe I am just a bit biased.

When you look at it though only the Faculty of Arts has a high enrollement than that of the Faculty of Business Administration in Canada. The stats back that claim up: http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/educ54a-eng.htm. So why is it that Business Ed is a dieing subject area? Is business going to simply go away? I don’t think so.

To strengthen Business Ed we thought that the wikispace would be a great place to allow fellow business educators to come and share their knowledge with others. Collaboration makes us all better teachers and the wikispace is the perfect venue for this to occur.

Each subject area has it’s own page already loaded with resources, the goal is to invite others to contribute and make each page burst at the seams with content and resources. The first step in this process was undertaken at the annual Saskatchewan Business Teachers Association spring conference. At the conference the wikispace address was handed out to every teacher in attendance with the hope that they would then join the wikispace and add to it. Further efforts will be made such as emails to other business educators, blog posts like this one, and links sent to member associations across North America.

The process of creating the PLC was quite simple, as I stated before we sat down and brainstormed the different subject areas we considered to be a part of Business Ed. We then went and dug up resources we already had to add to the site, then we went online and found resources that we had not used. Within each page on the wikispace you will find links or information relating to curriculums, videos, online resources, games, simulations, articles and lesson plans. The beutiful thing about the wiki and allowing people to contribute is that people are not limited by what they add, if they have a great resource that doesn’t fit with the headers we have created they can simply add their own!

I am really excited about the possibility of this wikispace exploding with interest and content, not online within Saskatchewan but Canada, North America and the world. I would love to be able to get in contact with some educators from Australia as I know they have some great stuff going on down under in regards to personal finance. This is a never ending project that could turn out to be something amazing!

One last thing, you probably want the link to the wikispace:

http://businessedplc.wikispaces.com/