For this post, I have made a short video discussing some major concepts from my Educational Technology course this semester.
Unfortunately, I could not get the video to embed no matter what I tried so I have included a Vimeo link to watch it instead!
For this topic, I have created a VoiceThread presentation to quickly discuss some crucial elements of online teaching in order to support all learners.
My VoiceThread presentation is linked below:
https://voicethread.com/share/22732100/
It can be difficult to adequately address students who are not participating in class. While a variety of outside factors influence a student’s participation such as inadequate food or shelter, many students lack motivation or cannot grasp content or expectations. To figure out if the issue lies in motivation or lacking mastery of content, educators can use “The Can’t Do/Won’t Do Assessment”. This is a quick assessment that can give teachers a better measure of what a student needs to succeed. First, pick out two similar assignments for a student to complete. Then, identify what motivates the student and provide the first assignment without any extra incentives. Then, offer an incentive and instruct the student to complete the next task. If their second task shows more than 15% improvement from the first, motivation is likely the student’s problem- rather than a lack of skills. This diagnostic test can be crucial in identifying the next steps for intervention.
If it is determined that students lack the skills needed to complete tasks, you can first reteach content in a different mode to reinforce concepts. This review can help many students to achieve proficiency. However, if this intervention does not prove to be effective, you may need to assess a student’s self-evaluation skills to ensure that they monitor their own progress and can identify issues with their concepts of topics. If students are still struggling after using these tactics, you may need to use Multi-Tiered Support Systems (MTSS) to provide smaller-group support based on what interventions they need and how rigorous of support is required for them to succeed. In the most severe of cases (ex: if MTSS interventions fail), students may need to be evaluated by supporting teachers in the necessary content area. Ultimately, the support offered to a student needs to be individualized and personalized depending on their own strengths and weaknesses. Providing assistance to students cannot be treated as a one-size-fits-all situation.
Provide clear expectations for standards of work and conduct by use of rubrics, constructive feedback, and open opportunities for students to ask clarifying questions.
Use discussion boards and other tools to encourage peer communication.
Utilize a variety of mediums for instruction and demonstrations of knowledge to have students practice a variety of learning and expression modes.
Let students voice feedback at multiple points throughout the course
Encourage students to consider peers’ perspectives in a respectful manner.
As someone who has taken numerous online courses throughout my time in school, I understand just how important it is for instructors to maintain student motivation to minimize burnout. Overall, clear communication is crucial to an online classroom environment. This includes allowing students to access rubrics and clear expectations for work quality. Especially for students that find themselves anxious in the school setting, having a rubric takes out some of the “guesswork” that puts added stress on students. Additionally, allowing peer interaction can be beneficial to students in online classes because it creates a sense of belonging and minimizes lonely feelings that are felt by students in asynchronous environments especially. By giving students a chance to share their perspectives and respectfully discuss others’ opinions, students are productively exposed to ideas that may differ from their own. Further, multimedia instructional and demonstrative tools maintain student attention and prepare them for real-world situations. This can include delivering instruction using a mix of video, PowerPoint, and infographic sources, and allowing students to choose how they demonstrate their learning, often using a detailed rubric as a guideline. Finally, as an instructor, collecting and analyzing student feedback is crucial to improving courses and allowing students to feel that they have a voice. Ultimately, students that have a sense of belonging in online learning environments are more likely to maintain motivation and productively engage in learning processes.
The following infographic provides statistics and information regarding online assessment methods, with a specific emphasis on the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on virtual learning environments.
Nearpod keeps students engaged with teaching tools like adding questions throughout presentations and collecting feedback. This not only keeps students focused but provides teachers with a measure of how well students are understanding the content. Another highlight of Nearpod is that it is compatible with Google Slides, PowerPoint, and YouTube which are tools that most teachers are already familiar with. This saves time and encourages teachers to use Nearpod since they only have a small amount of new technology to learn within the app of Nearpod itself. Quite possibly the biggest benefit of Nearpod is that its’ base package is free to use. This is major for teachers as they already spend a lot on their classrooms, so free tools are always a big plus.
However, although the base package of Nearpod is free, it only includes three teaching modes and a limited amount of storage and features. Depending on what teachers intend to use Nearpod for, they may need to upgrade for a fee of $120 or $349 per year- depending on which package they choose. This is pretty pricey when considering that a number of other websites and applications have similar features for less of a fee, or even free. In my opinion, another drawback to Nearpod is that it encourages virtual communication rather than face-to-face interaction. While this can be great for some situations, like online classes, face-to-face communication is crucial for students to build social skills. Additionally, using Nearpod requires each student to have their own device to participate. For instances of limited access to technology, this can make it literally impossible to use Nearpod.
Many teachers in my high school actually used Nearpod in a variety of ways. A lot of them used it for test-prep days as an interactive study guide to see what students were struggling with and what they needed to review with the class before the exam. This was super helpful for me because it meant that my teachers would spend extra time on the content that we were struggling with, to ensure that we would do better on test day. Nearpod can also be a valuable tool for VR experiences including virtual field trips to many places around the world. Since Nearpod allows teachers to control the content as it’s being presented to students, teachers can do guided field trips with the whole class, rather than self-exploration through Google Maps or an equivalent. With Nearpod, there are many applications for nearly every topic to be taught and it encourages teachers to be creative in their curriculum delivery depending on the unique situations of their learners.
The RobotLAB VR Expeditions tool is a classroom kit of VR devices and technologies allowing learners to “visit” various and engage in experiences that they would not have access to in a traditional classroom environment. The RobotLAB experiences include embedded Encyclopedia Brittanica content to help answer questions that may arise while students explore these experiences. The RobotLAB system is meant to extend the features of a previously popular educational VR platform, Google Expeditions. The premise of RobotLAB VR is to create engaging and immersive experiences for students to learn about culturally rich destinations paired with the Encyclopedia Brittanica information to build knowledge and meaning for these “trips”. This creates a well-rounded learning experience that promotes deeper cognitions about the world around us, from right within the classroom.
This technology could be super helpful in history, geography, or culture classes, as well as world language classes. In my high school Spanish classes, we would frequently use Google Earth to “explore” culturally rich places in Spanish-speaking regions. However, I always found myself wanting to know exactly what each piece of scenery meant to the overall culture of that location. With the Encyclopedia Brittanica extensions of RobotLAB, students are encouraged to seek answers to any question that may arise throughout their experience, promoting exploration that can be especially helpful in World Studies classes. Additionally, RobotLAB VR could even be beneficial in English, art, or music classes to explore where a writer or artist lived and dive further into how their geographic region may have impacted their creative process and life experiences. With many applications like these, RobotLAB VR technologies can be impactful in so many aspects of a student’s education.
When a student engages in culturally rich experiences like what this VR system can provide, they learn to question themselves and the world around them in a productive manner. Once a student’s mind gets used to these types of cognitions in one context (such as when they are using this technology), their mind will crave these immersive and cultural bits of knowledge in many other aspects of their lives. This creates a love of learning both in and out of the classroom, which can be amazing to help shape young minds into passionate and lifelong learners. Teachers could also benefit from using VR tools such as these in order to teach lessons about places that they were previously unfamiliar with in greater detail. This knowledge for teachers would be reflected in their lessons, and in turn, impacts their students’ learning experiences. The only downside to the RobotLAB system is that it can be quite expensive. However, if a school district bought just a few of these systems, they could share them among teachers at different times to ensure that a large number of students can experience it, making it a more valuable tool for the amount of money spent.
This is my Bitmoji classroom for 2nd grade gen-ed!
Unfortunately, for this post I had to upload the Bitmoji classroom as a JPG so you cannot click the dogs, however, clicking the dogs in a PDF or other format will take you to YouTube videos for a break. This can be super helpful to young learners who need to refocus or feel overwhelmed.
Introduction to Asynchronous Learning: For those who are unfamiliar with the idea of asynchronous learning, this term relates to a class in which there is no structured meeting time. Therefore, students are able to complete assignments and communications at their own pace with fewer deadlines or checkpoints. This method of learning can be especially popular in higher-level courses where participants may have many outside commitments or jobs that prevent them from attending structured class times.
It can be quite difficult to create a sense of belonging community in an asynchronous academic environment as students are unable to meet in real time. With this challenge in mind, educators must find ways to create a sense of belonging- which may be correlated to students’ success and motivation to complete coursework. One way to create this sense of community, as discussed in an article from Duke University, is for facilitators to use the course’s homepage to display a welcome message or even a picture resembling a classroom in order to make students feel as though they are entering a brick & mortar classroom. Although this seems quite simple, small subconscious aspects like this can influence students without their conscious recognition of such. Another way to accomplish this- particularly for younger grades- would be to create a “Bitmoji Classroom” like this one that I made in a prior course (see below) that can even have clickable links to their coursework or other digital classroom materials.
These welcoming strategies can remind students that their course is still an academic class and should be taken seriously, despite the fact that there may be fewer boundaries due to the asynchronous method of learning.
I have taken many online classes throughout my educational career and one thing that I dislike about these courses is that discussion boards always seem repetitive and uninteresting. However, something that my English teacher did with discussion boards during asynchronous learning for the COVID-19 pandemic was having some informal discussion boards in which we were encouraged to share pictures of how we were spending quarantine or things that were important to each of us. Sometimes, she would ask us to share pictures of our pets or things that each of us was doing to take care of our mental health. Regardless of the theme of the posts, I always enjoyed having these ways in which to catch up with classmates and see what they were up to or what mattered most to them. In younger grades, informal discussion boards can also be used as practice with social skills, vocabulary words, and informal writing contexts. This information can be valuable for teachers to assess the development of writing conventions and vocabulary and gauge what students need assistance with.
If students feel comfortable doing so, you can encourage them to upload a profile picture OR a picture of something that matters to them (example: their pet, favorite sports team, or favorite food). This is so simple but it can be beneficial for students to see each other’s profile pictures in discussion boards as a subconscious reminder that they are communicating with other learners and need to be respectful, as well as making them feel supported and sociable. By creating an environment that emphasizes one’s personal interests and passions, and allowing each student to see that they are in a class with other learners like themselves, the environment becomes much more inviting to each student’s ideas and personal attributes.
I absolutely love the idea of informal discussion boards because it is an idea that has stuck with me for years at this point. I really just found it interesting to see how other people were making the most of their time in quarantine. It also gave me an opportunity to share my passion for photography and post pictures of my dog- which I always hoped would brighten my classmates’ days. This concept can also have so many academic applications or be used as an attendance activity to ensure students are interacting with the course every so often. As with all aspects of teaching, however, teachers must monitor their own classroom of learners and try different evidence-based practices in order to find what works for their students.
Welcome to my first blog post! In this post, I will be exploring a variety of online learning methods and theories, as well as the impacts of online learning on one’s school experience.
The first learning theory that I would like to discuss today is behaviorism. In the model of behaviorism, emphasis is placed on outward behaviors, rather than internal mental and physical processes. Managing an online classroom from the perspective of behaviorism would be fairly difficult due to the fact that students are not in-person and therefore cannot be as closely monitored for behavioral actions and their outcomes. This difficulty especially holds true in situations when students are experiencing a variety of learning barriers or disabilities. For example, it is widely known that early diagnoses for students with ADHD and similar conditions can dramatically change their educational outlook. However, from an online behaviorist’s perspective, it would be quite difficult to see outward markers and behaviors that are characteristic of those with ADHD, prolonging the undiagnosed period of this disorder.
Through the perspective of cognitivism, importance is placed on the mental processes that occur in one’s mind. This means that logic and reasoning are focused on as the main elements of cognition and learning. This theory can be pretty well-integrated as instruction and guided thinking can often be used in an online learning environment. For example, a teacher using cognitivism for a math lesson could include short-response questions prompting thoughts about how and why the order of operations works in a given context. This prompts students to think deeper about the methods that they are using and the way these processes impact other connected topics. Although one’s cognitions cannot truly be consciously and outwardly explained, prompting students to slow down and think further into the methods that they use for solving all kinds of problems is quite important. In doing this, teachers can aid in their students' brain development and higher thinking processes overall.
Constructivism when used as an online teaching practice certainly has some pros and cons depending on the way in which it is used. The theory of constructivism is largely based on prior knowledge, where the teacher is focused on providing an environment for the student to explore educational topics- rather than lecturing over basic procedures or concepts. For some higher-ed classes where students are expected to have prior knowledge (usually from prerequisites), this model of learning can be highly efficient as it eliminates much of the instruction over content that is already learned. However, using constructivism to teach an online class of first-graders by expecting them to already know how to count would simply not work. Knowing the specific context in which these theories of learning are to be used is critical when deciding which theories to use in the classroom or online classroom.
A few other terms that are used frequently in regard to online learning are synchronous and asynchronous. These terms can essentially be thought of as opposites of each other as synchronous means that instruction is given at a certain “meeting time” in which students and teachers connect virtually, often with online video-communication technologies such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams. The latter- asynchronous learning- means that there is no structured meeting time and assignments and communications are completed at one’s own pace, or with fewer paced deadlines or checkpoints. While asynchronous learning is more flexible in terms of allowing students to manage their own time, this can also be a downside for students that are not as motivated and cannot manage their time in order to successfully complete their assignments. Both learning models, however, offer flexibility and promote some degree of self-guidance for one’s own unique learning experience.
If you ask any current high school or college student to discuss their experiences with online classes, it is almost certain that they will make reference to the way that the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the world of online learning. Through my personal experience during the pandemic, I was one of the students that did not necessarily thrive in the online learning model. I found that many of my teachers’ constructivist teaching styles left me with so many questions throughout assignments with no way of getting help. This was especially difficult because of the intense course load that I was taking, especially in the areas of math and science in which instruction is pivotal in mastering concepts. Despite my past experiences, many of my peers now find that these online modes of learning can fit their schedules better while balancing outside commitments like jobs. Also in regard to jobs, children practicing digital citizenship skills and using online technologies while learning can better prepare them for a variety of careers and more formal online interactions in the future. Since society is moving towards a very digital world, I anticipate that the prevalence and successful integration of online learning will only get better with time.
Welcome!
My name is Morgan Rutledge and I am a college freshman studying Early Childhood Education.
Probably the most obvious thing about me is my passion for hockey. I have been a diehard Columbus Blue Jackets fan practically since I was born. I also love the Colorado Avalanche and named my puppy after one of their star players- Nathan MacKinnon. On that note, I have two Dalmatians- Mac (short for MacKinnon) who we rescued last spring and estimate to be around one year old. Our other Dalmatian is Louie, which is short for Lieutenant, like the rank in the fire department. When he was a puppy, I ran an Instagram account for Louie in which we did some modeling and brand representative work for some time. For me, that was an amazing opportunity to practice my photography skills. This experience also allowed me to gather experience in marketing and social media work, which I was considering minoring in during college. Another very important experience for me was my work at a local summer camp as a camp counselor for many years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, I have been employed at a large chain company for a little over two years, where my best friend also works.
My biggest goal as an educator is to hold an important and meaningful role in my students' lives, specifically as my second-grade teacher has done for me. She is the reason that I am pursuing an Early Childhood Education degree and her kindness is something that I will carry with me into my own classroom. As a human being, I truly believe that people may forget what you say and do, but they will never forget how you make them feel. In order to truly make an impact on children, especially young children, strong and loving relationships are key. Ensuring that a child is comfortable in the classroom through the lens of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is something that I feel strongly about in my teaching philosophy as a whole.
Between my personal passions, strong inspiration to pursue teaching, and educational philosophy, I hope to make my community a better place by influencing the next generation for the better.
