haiku LMS

Jenna Ream, M.A. is an instructor at the University of Colorado Denver, School of Education and Human Development, Department of Literacy, Language and Culturally Responsive Teaching.  With a background in literacy and language development, Jenna has taught at the elementary, secondary and graduate level for fourteen years. Her experience spans teaching and coaching in English as a second language, early and adolescent literacy, assessment, multicultural education and the foundations and history of education.  She brings with her a passion for working with teachers to help them best understand and meet the needs of diverse learners in every classroom.

We asked her to talk about her experience with teaching and technology, and how haiku LMS has affected her teaching.

I have been a teacher for 14 years: first in elementary, then in professional development teaching teachers, and then for the past 7 years also at the graduate level. My passion for teaching teachers came from my collaboration with colleagues as an elementary school teacher. We felt we were not reaching all of our kids and recognized that there had to be a better way to meet the needs of diverse learners in the grade level classroom. In working together we started to develop ways to examine what was happening in the classroom and strategize ways to better meet the needs of all of the kids. Well, this collaboration soon grew into professional development, and that soon grew into an opportunity at the University. Recently I have also branched out into independent consulting, working with an alternative licensure program to support teachers as they just start into the field.

What brought you to begin teaching online?

I began to teach online as a way to meet a need in my department and have a flexible off-campus schedule so I could work around raising my young family. What I did not expect was that online teaching would resonate so deeply with me and that I would begin to explore and even develop a passion for bringing the social and collaborative nature of today’s world wide web into the graduate level classroom. And in teaching teachers, my passion only magnified when I realized that this quality use of web 2.0 tools as adults could help us best develop into quality teachers of children, and well, at that point, the only question for me was to figure out how.

So as you began to explore how, what were you thinking about?

I have been teaching on-ground for years now, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about good pedagogy- what makes a really good class- what makes good questions, and what makes good interactions. As I began to teach online I used a lot of threaded discussion, uploaded readings and submission of papers into a dropbox. This worked well at first, but soon I found myself unhappy with the limitations of this kind of instruction and realized that with countless tools being generated online every day, that there had to be a better way.

And what steps did you take to find that better way?

I was grateful to find haiku LMS. I was fortunate to work within an organization that had flexibility, and was equally committed to finding the Learning Management System that would best support the teaching and learning that we support and provide. We had tried other LMS software, but none came close to the functionality and ease of use of haiku. As I began to teach my class, the literacy class, all online, it was important for us to find a way to maintain the quality interaction and collaboration that was happening face to face with these same groups of students. What I was looking for was a way to get students to collaborate in the online classroom. What I see in my face to face classes is a richness when students come together and create something as a group. The work they do to explain their thinking and come to agreement around their ideas is important.  The process of then synthesizing the key ideas enriches the experiences for them, and then they can bring forward that collaborative effort to stimulate and participate in further conversation within the class. When this happens, the results are powerful. As I saw this happening in face to face classes, I started thinking about ways to access this quality of thought and interaction online. Web 2.0 tools seemed the obvious way to go to get that collaboration faster and better than we have been able to do that before in online classes.

As you explored using web 2.0 in your classes, what did you find you needed??

One of the things I absolutely love about haiku is that whenever there was a point I reached when I was looking for a way to do things differently, I could converse about it with tech support and we always were able to come up with ways to make those ideas achieve functionality. The confidence I have in the fact that the folks behind the scenes at haiku care about the success of these tools in my classroom is so valuable. It makes my job so much easier knowing that they are dedicated to creating and maintaining the LMS that will best suit high quality online instruction and interaction. Without this, I don't think I would be as willing to take the risks inherent in figuring out the best way to collaborate with my students online.

How has haiku LMS helped you in this process?

haiku makes it easier.  What I love most about haiku, though, is the dimension and collaboration I can experience as a professional seeking the best learning experiences for my students. Learning is social, and by using web 2.0 tools to connect and collaborate with one another we can learn and grow, professionally and personally. I appreciate that haiku is bringing together the best of the web in a way that allows me to incorporate these tools within the familiar context of the LMS. By bringing together web 2.0 and a quality LMS, haiku makes it an easier leap for students to bridge to online collaboration, and brings together in one central place, all I need to teach at my best online.

Interested in what Jenna has to say?   You can read more at her blog, Our Present Partial Knowledge.