You're semester or school year is off and running - am I right? In my last post I encouraged you to take care of yourself over the summer. To show yourself some compassion as you prepared for this fall. I hope you did that. If you didn't now you have another chance. In the world of helpers, September is Self Care Month. Consider this my gentle nudge to remind you to take care of yourself as you work online with your students this semester. Self care is another blog post, but it is a form of self compassion and if you don't show this to yourself, you will struggle to offer it to your students. Find someone you can pair up with who would be fortunate enough to have a self care partner in you. Speaking of fortunes, I was fortunate enou gh to attend several profess ional development sessions this summer. As we work together to grow our knowledge and skills using a compassionate pedagogy framework, let me share some compassion with you. This was shared with me when I atten
Doubtful About Teaching With Tech:
The Prep and The Plan: Part 2
Quick Tips for Online Teaching
My first post covered the first of our quick tips for online teaching. Many of you are here because you just discovered your university will practice social distancing hoping to slow down the spread of a pandemic. Sounds dramatic but let's applaud all who are working to keep our students and each of us healthy.
Quick review: You've outlined your class session goals, reviewed what you have and what you need, and developed a communication plan. Let's move on to our final steps in The Prep and The Plan stage.
Learning About Your Tools
Most schools and universities have a learning management system (LMS). They also have various degrees of use by teachers and faculty. By this I mean that some of us are required to use our LMS often and some of us only us it for a few things like providing students with access to articles and our syllabus. In either situation, it's time to learn what your LMS system can do and what its limits are.
How do you find this information? Most school districts and universities have people that you are going to become good friends with. These knowledgeable folks are located in different places in different organizations - IT, Centers for Learning Excellence - most likely you know how to find them.
Reach out to them to find our where you can locate information about the features of your LMS system. What can you do with the system and how do you get some basic information if you have to learn to use it quickly? What are its limits? Can you upload movies? How do you build discussion boards?
It is very likely that you have already received training links in recent emails that you may have skimmed over. Now is the time to view them, take notes and get ready to use this system to make your learning goals happen.
One important question to ask: Can you and your students easily accessed your LMS on a smartphone?
Student Preparedness & Access
You have students leaving your campus and you have had no time to connect with them about how ready they are for online learning and how much access they have available to the tools they will need at home.
To help support them and understand their needs, create a survey or a questionnaire that they can fill out. Many are savvy Google Drive users so you could certainly use a survey feature there. My experience leads me to use a questionnaire that I have students email to me. I am more interested in knowing about each individual student than I am in seeing loads of data. This is just me - you decide what will get you the information you need the quickest.
Below I have provided two links to share sample questionnaires you can use to get to know your students and their online learning needs and accessibility issues. Feel free to create your own helps you assess student readiness to learn online.
My recommendation: focus on student's knowledge and use of your LMS, past experiences with online learning, access to tools such as WiFi and computers or tablets. Students may leave campus to a home environment with much less access to technology than they have on campus. Finally, ask the students to share their concerns about this move to online learning, as well as their strengths.
Needing It All In One Place
I've created a tool for you to use that contains all the information I've presented in these first tool blog entries to help you stay organized and not have to be on this blog while you prep and plan. Many like visual organizers and I have taken all this information and put it in a document for you.
The Treasure Hunt
Colleagues of mine remind us that now is the time to go on a "treasure hunt" for your support network. First stop in this hunt is to connect with those you know have taught online and have been successful. Secondly seek out information on what kind of support you can expect from your department and your IT team.
Now breathe - our next posts in this series will focus on the different preparation needs for synchronous (live classes over technology platforms) and asynchronous (classes that will not meet via live technology platforms).
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