Hello Integrating Technology Colleagues,
It's been six months or more since in-person classes ended, and online or hybrid (both online and in-person) instruction became the norm in adult basic skills instruction, as well as in K-12 and higher education. Teachers, students and administrators, if they hadn't before, have learned about online teaching by doing it. Now, many -- perhaps including you -- want to know how to improve their remote or hybrid/blended teaching.
This discussion is about what you have learned about engaging and effective online teaching, learning and assessment, and what others have learned. It's also about your questions about how to improve online teaching and assessment practices, and what online tools and resources have good potential for meeting teachers' and students' needs.
To begin, let us know what you have learned about engaging and effective online teaching, learning and assessment and, if you wish, how you learned it.
David J. Rosen, Moderator
LINCS CoP Integrating Technology group
Comments
A California adult basic skills educator, Kristi Reyes, has made a 20 minute video for her teaching colleagues called "Best Practices for High Quality Online Instruction." There are a lot of ideas and recommendations in this short video and, whether or not you agree with them all or not, they will probably stimulate your thinking about improving your own online instruction.
After you view the video, consider and comment on:
Keep in mind that the focus of this discussion is what you have learned about engaging and effective online teaching, learning and assessment and, if you wish, how you learned it.
David J. Rosen, Moderator
LINCS CoP Integrating Technology group
Thanks for sharing the OTAN Tech Talk by Kristi Reyes - it was packed full of good information. One of her points was that students need to collaborate and engage with each other when working online. I agree but am struggling to make this happen in my completely asynchronous course this term. We are using Canvas, which has discussion boards available, but I have not found discussion boards to be a consistently effective method for engaging students.
I was inspired by the video to think again about collaborative work, so I am going to introduce a shared slide deck with my next week's lesson, where every student will be asked to contribute some pictures and notes about our topic, systems of the human body. I am ready to get to work this weekend, preparing this new approach to engagement that also follows the UDL principle of offering more than one way to share what we know. Thanks for prompting me with the video!
Hello Anita,
Your slide deck project, with students contributing pictures and notes, sounds like a great idea. I hope you can share a link to it with us when you finish, if your students also agree. Many different collaborative writing projects can take place in asynchronous teaching. Students can review and comment on each others' work, they can also write collaboratively, for example, using a Google Doc that you set up so that they (and only they and you) have editing privileges.Students can create class or program newsletters, blog articles, and more.
Several years ago, Susan Gaer, an Integrating Technology group member, then an ESL professor at Santa Ana College in southern California, and I organized collaborative international writing projects where adult learners shared information about their cultures using various cultural themes such as birth, marriage and death customs, child rearing practices, cooking and eating (of course), and in one case they watched and reviewed (freely available) online films, asynchronously. that could be done between adult basic skills classes and programs just in the U.S., too, and it could all be done asynchronously.
Do others here have ideas for engaging asynchronous projects?
David J. Rosen, Moderator
LINCS CoP Integrating Technology group