Welcome to Andrew Ferneyhough's Personal Webspace
After 26 years of life in London, Ontario, my girlfriend (future wife – future ex-wife) and I decided to sell our things and depart on a six month expedition around the world. The three months in Europe and three months in South-East Asia are certainly a treasured memory for me. Seventeen years later I still find myself eagerly chatting up anyone who will listen about the mezzo-litros in Italy and the Baked-Alaskas on the Nile Cruise.
After returning to Canada, my fiancé and I moved west following her mother and step-father to Comox BC. Here I continued to pursue my goal of becoming a Stock-Broker by signing on at the Bank of Montreal in Courtenay and working for other brokers as an assistant. To make a long story short – three years later I had decided that being a broker was not what I was built for and returned to the world of retail.
Managing at Canadian Tire was not exactly where I pictured myself at the age of thirty, so, after much soul searching, and cajoling from my step-father–in-law, I decided to sign up for the Education program at Malaspina University.
Now, ten years later, I am seven years into my teaching career and thank my lucky stars each day that I have found something that I feel both good at, as well as rewarded by.
On a family note, I have been separated for two years now, but have a wonderful nine-year-old daughter named Ella who is the love of my life and who makes me laugh on a daily basis. When asked to fill in a, “What should I know about your child?” survey recently, I replied, “She Hilarious!”
My experience with Distance Learning is quite limited in terms of actual schools that provide services outside of the brick-and-mortar facilty. I have vistited NIDES on several occasions and worked hand-in-hand with the teachers there, however, I never did get the opportunity to explore ‘elluminate’ or D2L.
From the moment I stepped into my first teaching position, I knew I wanted my students to have access to my material online be it a homework page, criteria sheets, or even their grades. I have been through Dreamweaver, Moodle, Edublog and several other mediums, before recently settling into google docs to interact with my students as well as their parents. I have always believed it crucial that if a student is at home and wonders, “What was I supposed to do?” that they have no excuse not to have that information at their fingertips.
For me, Distributed Learning within the classroom is the single most effective way for me to bond with individual students. If 25 of my students are engrossed in their self-paced, individualised activity, then that provides an opportunity for me to really focus on those five others for whom this format my not be appropriate, or are simply encountering challenges of one form or another.
As I see more and more teachers coming in to the ‘blogging’ community, I fear that many are just towing-the-line. I fear that they are just doing it for the sake of doing it or that they feel they 'have to’ or they will become dinosaurs. I have seen too many teachers use technology only for the sake of using technology, not because they have solid pedagogical ideas supporting their work.
It is my hope to stay on the ‘cutting edge’ of this recent surge in integrating Online Learning into the classroom so that I may help guide others through the muddy waters.
One of my many questions, or perhaps fears, is that I am confusing the work that I am doing online, with a “true” definition of Online Learning. Do webquests, computer simulations, and other such exercises provided by me count as ‘Online Learning’? Is your vision of Online Leaning a course that is completed in and of itself?
After returning to Canada, my fiancé and I moved west following her mother and step-father to Comox BC. Here I continued to pursue my goal of becoming a Stock-Broker by signing on at the Bank of Montreal in Courtenay and working for other brokers as an assistant. To make a long story short – three years later I had decided that being a broker was not what I was built for and returned to the world of retail.
Managing at Canadian Tire was not exactly where I pictured myself at the age of thirty, so, after much soul searching, and cajoling from my step-father–in-law, I decided to sign up for the Education program at Malaspina University.
Now, ten years later, I am seven years into my teaching career and thank my lucky stars each day that I have found something that I feel both good at, as well as rewarded by.
On a family note, I have been separated for two years now, but have a wonderful nine-year-old daughter named Ella who is the love of my life and who makes me laugh on a daily basis. When asked to fill in a, “What should I know about your child?” survey recently, I replied, “She Hilarious!”
My experience with Distance Learning is quite limited in terms of actual schools that provide services outside of the brick-and-mortar facilty. I have vistited NIDES on several occasions and worked hand-in-hand with the teachers there, however, I never did get the opportunity to explore ‘elluminate’ or D2L.
From the moment I stepped into my first teaching position, I knew I wanted my students to have access to my material online be it a homework page, criteria sheets, or even their grades. I have been through Dreamweaver, Moodle, Edublog and several other mediums, before recently settling into google docs to interact with my students as well as their parents. I have always believed it crucial that if a student is at home and wonders, “What was I supposed to do?” that they have no excuse not to have that information at their fingertips.
For me, Distributed Learning within the classroom is the single most effective way for me to bond with individual students. If 25 of my students are engrossed in their self-paced, individualised activity, then that provides an opportunity for me to really focus on those five others for whom this format my not be appropriate, or are simply encountering challenges of one form or another.
As I see more and more teachers coming in to the ‘blogging’ community, I fear that many are just towing-the-line. I fear that they are just doing it for the sake of doing it or that they feel they 'have to’ or they will become dinosaurs. I have seen too many teachers use technology only for the sake of using technology, not because they have solid pedagogical ideas supporting their work.
It is my hope to stay on the ‘cutting edge’ of this recent surge in integrating Online Learning into the classroom so that I may help guide others through the muddy waters.
One of my many questions, or perhaps fears, is that I am confusing the work that I am doing online, with a “true” definition of Online Learning. Do webquests, computer simulations, and other such exercises provided by me count as ‘Online Learning’? Is your vision of Online Leaning a course that is completed in and of itself?