Week 5 Reflection: The Importance of a Good Start

This week in Collaborative Communities the focus was on the days before and the days immediately after the beginning of an online class.  This time is a window of opportunity that is so critical that Lehmann and Chamberlin recommend that instructors devote 70% of their energy to this crucial time (155).  Discussions and working surrounding this window of time have led me to reflect on the beginning of my online Politics and Law class last fall, my first and only online class.

A couple of factors complicated the beginning of this class, and as I look back on it, I think these complications contributed to some difficulty in the class.  This was not only the first time that I had taught the class, it was also the first time the class had ever been taught.  I spent much of my summer designing the course and had not completed it when school started, although I did have the first few modules completed.  As a result I was still devoting a fair bit of time to instructional design.  The students and I were also spending time and energy figuring out how to operate the Cisco TelePresence rooms that we used twice a week.  I blogged about using the room here.  The f2f communication made possible by these rooms was eventually very helpful in answering student questions and demonstrating tech tools, but its use distracted us at the outset of the course.  We quickly settled, but by then we were past the window.

This image shows a six seat TelePresence room. I was working in an eighteen seater with a bank of twelve seats behind the front room.  There were also two additional screens showing my computer's screen to the class.  Image courtesy of Cisco, all rights reserved.

Forum participation was one area where I devoted more energy than I anticipated to getting students to participate.  As I look back I think that my prompt in the introductory forum was too straightforward--basically, "introduce yourself"--and included too many posting tips.  My work in Collaborative Communities this week and my experiences the first time around will definitely serve me well in my next online teaching experience.  I am glad to have had the opportunity to draft a new and improved prompt for an introductory forum, and I am looking forward to feedback to facilitate further improvements.

Week 4 in Collaborative Communities: Tools

Another week of productive collaboration in Collaborative Communities class.  We spent a lot of time discussing different collaborative tools.  This discussion allowed me to refine my thinking on some of the tools that I currently use, and exposed me to tools that I would like to explore.  I organized my currently used tools into a community matrix in my E-Portfolio.

An example of new uses for a current tool: I've used Diigo for a couple of years to collaborate with other teachers and to keep track of my own resources.   If students were to bookmark items in Diigo, their annotations would be artifacts that could demonstrate critical use of information.  Additionally, they could use the social networking functions of Diigo to collaborate on research.

I've also found myself appreciating how easy it is for my students to use the Google suite of collaborative products. All students in my district have a Google account that they can access from the Moodle server.  In my f2f classes and my online class, I have students create Google presentations and docs; and, in the online class students used Forms and Blogger.  All of these products promote collaboration and limit the number of external applications students need to learn.

I added Dropbox to my tool kit this week.  Like Diigo, I think that I will begin by using it for myself by making files available at home and at school.  From there I hope to use it to collaborate with others and then to facilitate learner-learner collaboration.  Many of these collaborative functions, however, may duplicate capabilities of Google Drive.  I am looking forward to finding out, though.

Week 3 Collaborative Communities

This was a very useful week in Collaborative Communities.  The class was discussing facilitating forum discussion and I was actually facilitating one for my AP European History class.  The class meets everyday f2f, but we do occasional forum discussion in order to get the benefits of that format and to give students the opportunity to sharpen online discussion skills.   The students will probably be discussing content online in college, even if they do not take an online class.

I directly applied elements of this week's forum discussions to an online forum discussion of excerpts from two readings by Sigmund Freud.  I used a response of main to craft a list of value added techniques in the assignment prompt.  As a result most students have been changing the subject line to reflect their ideas.  Here are the guidelines that I created.  Value added heading highlighted reflects discussion from Collaborative Communities:

I also submitted the prompt that I was using to the Blue Group and received helpful feedback that I will use to restructure the prompt for next time.  Lenore and Barb pointed out that the ideas in the prompt ran together.  I was attempting to provide multiple ways of accessing the readings, but they pointed out how this made the prompt potentially overwhelming for students.  I was able to clarify this in class with students, but this was a good lesson for me to learn because if I am teaching a fully online class I won't have this opportunity.

Finally I encountered similar scenarios to those discussed in the whole class discussion.  Despite the students all being native English speakers in an Advanced Placement 11th grade class, I did send a couple of reminder messages about spell checking and proofreading.  I used language similar to that suggested in the forum: be direct, specific, and positive.  Inspired by these reminders I am sending messages with feedback to as many students as I can.  The results so far are richer and deeper discussions.

Week 2: Collaborative Communities

I had two big areas of learning this week in Collaborative Communities in E-Learning, one technical and one pedagogical.  Technically, today was the first time that I have used a Blackboard product. My partner and I began planning our Checklist Project in a Blackboard discussion.  It was a good reminder of how unfamiliar such spaces can be to newbies.  It took Lenore and I quite a while to figure out how to talk to and see each other, but once we got going we were able to talk and to share screens.  We will be creating a checklist for facilitating student blogging.

Pedagogically, my small group had a rich forum conversation on factors to consider in grouping students.  The "aha" moment for me was considering the power of using a single question to do rough grouping at the beginning of a course.  Classmates brought some very interesting, complex inventories to the discussion, but ultimately these may take too much time and provide too much information.  Less clear to me is which question to use, although of course that depends on the purpose of the grouping.  In general, our instructor's strategy in this course of initially grouping type A students with other type As and type Bs with each other seems sound.  Removing possible frustrations seems especially important in E-Learning where the technology side can always provide obstacles.