An integral part of nearly all online classes is the threaded discussion-it is where students interact on a nearly daily basis, posting their thoughts and information on main discussion topics, your postings, and the postings of other students. While you have measured control over the content, length, and tone of student postings, you have full control over your own.
To ensure that your responses to student postings in discussion are effective, incorporate the following ideas:
Great ideas in this article to provide insightful feedback in student discussion posts.
* Be professional and sure that the info is consistent
* Be a good role model
* Show your personality and humor
* Include the entire class in any post
* Use examples from your life
* Ask further questions to stimulate more discussion
* Create a bank of responses
All great reminders for me to keep things fresh and interesting! Thanks!
In this article, Errol Sull provides us many good reminders of what we should be doing to make sure our online learning environment is effective and positive for our students. I feel confident in his guidelines because he's been teaching in the online environment for fifteen years. His suggestions also make sense in both an online and f2f discussion.
This article by Errol Sull presents us with suggestions for online discussions. I personally have been nervous about having all class online discussions after a Moodle incident I had last year. Fortunately, my Moodle settings were set so that only two students were able to get a at each other. I will apply these ideas to my classes in August.
A discussion of "disruptive innovations" and how online learning can be used in brick and mortar schools to engage students in richer, more complex learning experience and increase student/teacher interactions.
Example of prezi presentation. Also at the top are tabs to learn how to make a prezi presentation and an explore tab showing other prezi presentations and reasons to make one. Good background for anyone to learn more about Prezi.
Nowadays IPAD is being used in the classrooms for more and more functions. This article introduced APPs offering 5 new software and assistive technology for special needs kids.They have a lot of other options for a child's particular needs. I am sure IPAD(APPLE) will keep their great contribution in the education in the future.
"We believe the more connected students are with their peers and instructors, the more likely they are to enjoy the overall experience and successfully complete their course. Decades of research from scholars such as Lev Vygotsky and Gabriel Tarde indicate that by making groups more interactive and social, student learning experiences can become more productive and fun. We are working hard to evolve the online learning process from markedly remote to highly collaborative."
Original article site: http://adaptcourseware.com/adapt-courseware-delivers-new-social-learning-tools-to-improve-student-engagement/
Online homework is beneficial to students. They get feedback promptly, even more promptly than that provided by very conscientious instructors. Online homework can also be designed so that it allows students to work on areas that frequently cause trouble and/or on areas where the individual student is having difficulty.
Original Article site: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/online-homework-systems-can-boost-student-achievement/
This brief article points out that many new online teachers focus on two of the three critical elements identified by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) that support instruction and learning: cognitive presence and teaching presence. The third, social presence, might be overlooked. The article's author, Dr. Oliver Dreon, offers five ways to build social presence in an online class, many of which are familiar to the VHS community.
While this article is about 'flipping' in general, it also describes a team-based learning approach to flipping. The author used this approach at the university level by grouping students into heterogeneous and permanent teams of six or seven. The students then used the author's templates to explore course material.
This article fully explains implementation of blogging in a classroom. The teacher explains: expectations; use of blog posts for classroom discussions, and decorum. She highlights that student blogging enables her to bring to the classroom, without pinpointing a particular student: "insightful responses, inaccurate interpretations, good questions, and lively exchanges". Excellent Information!
This is actually one of the most useful blog things I've seen. It's a solid reminder that teaching an online course is not a checkout for the teacher. Students really want constant feedback - because many things are not verbally explained and the students have to break them down into steps for themselves, it can be overwhelming. They want to know "Am I doing this right? Is this what you're looking for?" so constant feedback and grading reinforcement in more necessary online than in f2f.
This blog really hits home with me. I do get overwhelmed at all the different places I have to navigate to get my work done, so it is important, as the article stated to have an easy-to-access-course - design. Trying to tab to resources , clicking on links, then opening up different websites. I love the videos, which help me, because I am a visual learner. As stated in the article, it is difficult for the teachers to be present all the time.to answer questions, but if students and teachers work together the class can work out. Some students take longer to master a new process than other, so good communication is the key here.
The article explains the importance of Problem-Based Learning in Education. It is crucial to create lessons that incorporate interesting, safe and useful activities.
I read this and thought how true it is that giving feedback to students taking an online course...or working on a website etc. is as important as feedback we give on essay writing, reading, speaking and listening. Feedback is a key communication tool for students to know where they stand. As is any feedback - provided it is constructive.
An intriguing article delineating several useful methods to bring online classrooms to life. While text and self-teaching methods were the way of the past, we now have a multitude of means to engage the student both visually and audibly via an incredible assortment of tools and resources just brimming with creative potential.
I think that this article makes so much sense. Online classrooms are really evolving with the tools that we have at our disposal as well as our students. Assessments of drawing , discussing, sharing how to skills can now be accomplished with web tools. These tools can really engage students and get them involved in our online classroom.
This article takes math problem solving to the next level by incorporating a variety of technology devices in order to get students to think through problems.
Using online math course as the example, this article provides teachers and students with a lot of technology tools to create a rich online learning and problem-solving environment. With these digital tools, students get more engaged in learning and become more creative thinking. It's a good reference for subject teachers.
This article asks how we teach students the tools to learn how to talk, read, write, and think online. It mentions many of the media literacy tools presented in one of our readings.
February 21, 2013 By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning Almost everyone agrees that student presentations benefit the presenter in significant ways. By doing presentations, students learn how to speak in front a group, a broadly applicable professional skill. They learn how to prepare material for public presentation, and practice (especially with feedback) improves their speaking skills. (Much of what we want for our students is to work, respect, support, find the good in one another, have fun and use web tools together! Highlighting the peer evaluative piece was one I am doing my best to work on. Great resource!) ~Tara
Tara,
Good find. A nice way to get more students engaged.
An interesting, approach to student presentations. The author does a nice job of describing advantages, as well as disadvantages, to requiring students to critique their classmate's presentations. The image of the "comatose" classmates in their seats as yet, another presenter tries to impress the teacher is comical, yet accurate. The students doing the critiques also had a vested interest as it represents a portion of their grade. A significant statistic was that,"
Seventy-three percent of the students agreed or strongly agreed that completing the evaluations made them pay more attention to the presentations.
" A final point of interest is that students were clear in not wanting their classmates critiques to have an impact on their grade.
Tom
The Dublin City University of Ireland site popped out at me. As I got into exploring the site, it reminded me of all the things we have discussed on "communication" and online education. The President of the university, Professor Brian MacCraith said of the learning experience at DCU "Online platforms are changing the traditional teaching and learning paradigms. Technology is providing an enhancement of choices and flexibility. Learning happens any time, any place."
The website also displayed specific and detailed regulations for students to be good digital citizens! Along with lots of other great stuff!
This article by Andrew Miller builds upon the initial posting by Grant Wiggins on assessing creativity. It provides suggestions on quality indicators, modeling thinking skills, reflective processes, and a few rubric examples with some very good descriptors.
Merits of Project-Based Learning. This is where I want my teaching to head back to. In career and technical education I did a lot of projects with my kids. Not so much lately and really want to move back to this because I really believe that it works!
It made me want to do more than I do. I cannot afford to use "time" as an excuse. Good learning from PBL's takes time and there are many benefits including providing applications to the teaching and answering the question "why do we need to learn about this?"
a handful of 14-year-old girls in a pilot study used critical thinking skills
independently online. "How teenagers use Web 2.0 tools has huge implications for
teaching critical thinking skills," says Ronda,
"These conversations and activities can be really important, and can teach students
valuable critical skills: how to find information online, how to examine the
accuracy and source of information they find online, and how to be not only
consumers of information, but active participants in creating it."
Finding information on-line is a learned skill of knowledge. Examining the accuracy and source of information is one of the highest critical thinking skills, which develops with time, experience, and rich schemata.
teens made decisions on who they connected to and what they shared, after
exploring options and reflecting on how these decisions would affect their
online experience.
The teachers are as good as the researches, since we have to keep up with the teens, and the technologies.
Social media tools hold great potential for developing important proficiencies
that have to do with communicating and expressing ideas and thoughts, conducting
research, and accessing and creating knowledge.
This article discusses the importance of differentiation and especially the need for students to "redo" their assignments until they get them correct. By allowing students to "redo" they are improving their higher level thinking skills. Good and short article with practical reminders.
I love this article! Great reminders for all of us as educators to simply differentiate learning for our students.
-vary the length or quantity of the assignment.
-extend or curtail the duration of the assignment.
-change the language of the assignment.
-scaffold the learning activity from hard to medium to easy.
-compact the activity and teach only what they don't know.
-give them learning activities that let them perform the same learning objective with multiple mediums like summarizing a story they have read through narrative, drama, song, poetry, art, or design
They also discussed the ability to redo assessments and I agree with this but somewhere in my teaching experience this has been engrained in my head only once. But I realize the feeling of success this allows a student.
In this blog, Ben Johnson reiterates the misconceptions in education about all students getting concepts in education at the same time. He goes on to discuss the importance of true differentiation in the classroom and that it is not creating an imbalance among students but a way for all students to succeed. He emphasizes the things teachers already do in the classroom to help students succeed and ends with a suggestion to allow students to redo their work in all areas (not just English and history).
A great perspective on the similarities between the initial transformation from folk culture to commercial culture and the same transformation back from commercial culture to folk culture. Everyone can produce, but, at the same time, it requires that we be more critical of what we consume. It discusses the transformation from high schools of the past to the present.
How to make a disucussion board effective. Divide a large group into smaller study sections. Make certain to post application questions, not fact-based or calculation questions. Apply the questions to the students' life/future.
This article highlights some key points about how to successfully integrate online discussions into core subject content. He does this by pairing down the discussion groups much like we are doing in the Web 2.0 course right now ,"When I did discussions with the class as a whole, the students grumbled about having to read repetitive messages. They were much more willing to participate in the study group if there were relatively few messages". He is also looking for an inital post and a follow up post written with correct grammar and spelling.
In this article, Rob Kelly discusses how he uses online discussion boards to enhance the learning in his classroom. Students end up helping one another, and the conversations go beyond accounting so that students really see the applicability of the subject matter to their future lives. Students who really excel in accounting help students who struggle, and the split classroom discussion helps to make it manageable for all students.
This article talks about how to make online discussions work for skills-based courses.
Using Professor Roger Gee's practice and approach as an example, the author offers examples to guide students in expressing themselves creatively and persuasively, which engages and motivates them. The class is divided into study groups for the discussions. Each discussion begins with a posting by Professor Gee, the discussions are to begin after students have read the material, viewed the PowerPoint, and taken a quiz. Professor Gee encourages students to work within the study groups to help each other.
"Making Online Discussion Boards Work for Skills-Based Courses" is an article written by Rob Kelly and posted in a higher education newsletter. The author describes ways on how online discussions can enhance learning in skills-based online courses. He suggests rather than having students resolve math problems for example, steer students to coming up with an opinion supported by facts they have learned. Students should have the opportunity to have read the lesson, PowerPoints and other related resources before a discussion takes place. The discussions should also give students the opportunity to share opinions and how the material may affect their personal life. Like our class, the author suggest each student to post a reply to the instructor's question and reply to at least one other student's reply. The posting should have good spelling and grammar as if they were in the business world. Another way to enhance learning is to have students work collaboratively and help each other out. The suggestions offered by the author are similar to what we have received in this course. Although the article is written for higher education, I would assume, but I have to also wonder if this is valuable information at the secondary level too?
This is a first-rate article on how to run an online discussion for a class on a technical subject. The article elucidates the techniques used by an accounting professor at San Diego Messa College. Issues addressed include whether to focus on calculations or opinions, the size of discussion groups, at what point in the lesson plan students should post, and what role the teacher should play in introducing a topic. Professor Gee advocates that posts focus on opinions rather than facts or calculations, since the latter provides an opportunity to spread error. He also discusses dividing a class of 35 into two groups, having students post after they have reviewed a substantial part of the lesson, and the teacher introducing discussion topics and modeling the first comment.
As a teacher of a 2 year high school accounting program, I enjoyed reading this article about Professor Roger Gee's use of online discussion boards. I introduce my students to several elements of personal finance as it relates to a service business owner's personal finances and wondered how I could engage my students to delve a bit deeper into their own thoughts on their personal finances now and in the future. I will be using Gee's suggestion as it helps students use some critical thinking to plan for their future. Some of the items mentioned actually are part of the "flipped classroom" concept; students already having read the lesson, watched the PowerPoints, and taken the test. Then comes the discussion using the learned skills. I appreciate this information for a skill-based course be it high school or community college. As we articulate with our neighboring community college, and attempt to make our students college-ready, this concept fits the bill.
Rob Kelly discusses how to he used online discussion boards in a skills based course. This concept could be followed for any type of study group. Given students learn best when they not only teach the information but share and collaborate with others, this idea enhances the learning process.
I'm the only Accounting teacher and have been teaching for 2 years at the high school level. I feel this article does a great job not just on how discussion boards can help and guide deeper levels of thinking among Accounting students, but provides the opportunity to take baby steps including technology in the classroom and push critical thinking. I can appreciate this article greatly because I believe we all learn through experience and as Gee mentions, some of the students have worked in the field and may be able to offer their peers another insight.
This article discusses research that has been done regarding the needs of people to obtain media and information literacy skills in order to better many of their experiences in 21st century society. The article states that "knowing how to search for, analyze, and interpret information is a skill that will be used for more than just writing a good research paper: People use media literacy skills for applying for jobs online, getting relevant health information, and sifting through online educational opportunities, for example." Ten recommendations for developing stronger media and information literacy skills are given in the article. Legislative efforts from the federal government to provide funding in support of programs that help to develop these 21st century skills are also discussed.
Wow, What great tools? We are thinking about incorporating apps into the Web Development class next year. Very excellent sources and information. Thanks for sharing Sterling!
This article brings up some very good points about turning to e-books for textbooks in the classroom. The research hasn't been done on the effects of doing so....what would the effects be on students and their reading skills, learning, or the repercussions on teaching in the classroom? Also, they bring up a valid concern of how much control this would all give to Apple?
This article talks about how companies use Web 2.0 media as an advertising agent, and how some of these are scams. Furthermore it suggests he Better Business Bureau as a tool to identify these scams. It relates to IML as students need to have the technological literacy to determine which posts are frauds and which are legitimate. Furthermore, the need to have the awareness and ability to check these scams out on a legitimate source
Great article providing a Better Business Bureau list of scam alerts which I found interesting. The article mentions Facebook in particular but I have faced these scams and schemes in emails and on other game sites. I don't trust these surveys either that are sent through emails where they promise you to enter you into a prize drawing etc. So many scams- its good to know there's someone trying to do something about it by making the public aware of these scams. Also teachings students how to use the Internet safely should be part of the curriculum and also digital citizenship. We need to make our students responsible internet users and contributors.
Interesting interview with Dr. Chris Dede, Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, about using technology in the classroom and re-imagining teaching and learning. You need to be a member of the Thinkfinity Community to view the video.
"...actual career readiness requires an even more rigorous blend of academic, technical and employability skills, and the ability to apply these skills in authentic environments."
Research and support of benefits of online learning for ALL students
I get fired up when I read articles like this...they validated my beliefs...especially when using technology in education. But, it is also refreshing to consider a more balanced view such as this comment to the article.
"Education, at all levels, has two very different functions. The first is developing the capacity to ask new questions. The second is developing the capacity to answer questions already asked.
Both capacities are equally necessary - a curious person with no technical knowledge of the tools with which he could satisfy his curiosity would be stymied in his goals, while an incurious technical expert would never know which goals to have unless instructed.
The methods of developing each of the capacities is different. The latter needs to be more didactic, the former needs (progressively less) guided exploration."