term 2

I'm teaching Science & Technology 11 at my old school. Term 2 starts next Monday, so I am busy preparing everything that will be needed. It's great to be back and I love being able to walk to work. The crunching of the leaves and the Fall grayness appeal to me. I am getting nostalgic, but it's hard not to. I really enjoy teaching. As much as I liked teaching online, I am now teaching exclusively in the classroom (aka direct instruction). This is good; if a teacher spends too much time teaching online, they run the risk of losing their ability to work in a conventional classroom setting. I was told that my versatility got me the position. I am an elementary school teacher teaching high school courses to alternative education students.

strong communication key to online learning

New report sheds light on what works for successful virtual schools from coast to coast

By Meris Stansbury, Associate Editor

Primary Topic Channel: Instruction

Traditional colleges and schools of education will need to develop programs for virtual school teacher preparation.

Teaching in an online environment isn't the same as teaching in a traditional classroom, and online instructors need special skills and approaches to be successful. For example, communication can pose a challenge in online-learning environments, because online educators can't rely on visual cues as their colleagues can in bricks-and-mortar schools. Now, a new research brief from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) looks at this challenge in greater detail, examining how successful programs and teachers are ensuring effective communication.

The report, called "Examining Communication and Interaction in Online Teaching," reviews existing research and what it has to say about the keys to successful online instruction. It also reviews various policies and practices for communicating with students and parents during an online course, and it looks at the delivery model, course development, pacing, communication methods, and teacher requirements for 10 leading online-learning programs.

Owing to the rapid growth in online schooling and the current environment of accountability surrounding K-12 education today, traditional colleges and schools of education will need to develop programs for virtual school teacher preparation, because "although online teaching shares much in common with traditional face-to-face instruction, it has its own unique set of skills and requirements," says the report.

"While most universities and colleges have established programs to prepare their faculty to teach online," the report adds, "school systems are just beginning to address this need."

To help virtual educators and schools of education, iNACOL, with the endorsement of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), recently issued the National Standards for Quality Online Teaching, which are guidelines that form a research-based framework for effective online teaching. These standards are based on SREB's earlier work, as well as standards from the National Education Association, Ohio Department of Education, and Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

iNACOL's report also discusses four main skills or duties that every online teacher must have or perform, based on a review of existing research:

1. Be able to facilitate interaction: Teachers must use eMail, frequent telephone conversations, and collaborative tools, such as threaded discussions and synchronous chats, to closely connect with students. When done correctly, online teaching actually "enables more individualized attention than is actually possible in the traditional classroom," says the report. "Such an effective teacher would be seen as a motivator, a guide, a mentor, and a listener."
2. Be highly responsive: Effective online teaching practices must include quickly responding to student and parent inquiries. The report says developing a disciplined approach to "keeping the lines of communication open" is a part of the daily routine of a successful online teacher.
3. Know web-based technologies: Teachers must know, and be skilled at using, web-based technologies that offer students opportunities for collaborative learning. Online-learning environments, through the use of web-based tools, "...can offer a more active, constructive, and cooperative experience than classroom learning," says the report. "In addition to traditional teaching attributes and teaching with digital content, virtual school teachers need to be proficient at helping children acquire a skill set [that] includes autonomous learning and self-regulation."
4. Be trained in both synchronous and asynchronous instruction: Synchronous instruction brings teachers and students together simultaneously in virtual spaces, which "implies that virtual teachers need to become skillful at using chat room and collaborative software," says the report. Asynchronous instruction may be delivered without any specific timetable, "requiring teachers to become knowledgeable about offering postings online and discussion boards."

Online-learning communication policies

Besides looking the basic skills that online teachers should have, iNACOL also conducted a survey to see what communication practices and policies help shape a successful online school.

iNACOL surveyed 108 virtual schools about their communication practices and policies and received 81 responses. Responding institutions represented the full range of online-learning environments--national virtual-school organizations such as K12 and Connections Academy, state-level virtual schools, district-level schools, and individual schools (charter, independent, and public).

The survey asked about three types of communication policies: communication between teachers and students, between teachers and parents, and from student to student.

Eighty-four percent of respondents said they have at least one of these types of policies in place, and 41 percent said they have all three. While 80 percent of respondents indicated that they had policies in place regarding the kind or amount of teacher communication with students, only 53 percent reported having policies in place regarding the amount and content of teacher communication with parents, and 58 percent had policies in place regarding student-to-student communication.

Most policies regarding teacher-student communication covered both the frequency and the content of the contact, with 85 percent having policies about the frequency of contact via eMail, 77 percent having policies regarding frequency of contact by phone, and 54 percent having policies regarding frequency of contact through discussion forums.

The requirements for the frequency and methods of contact between teachers and students varied widely, the report said: Some online-learning programs expected a minimum of twice a month, others once a week, and others daily. Some required that this contact take place by phone, but for others the modes of contact included eMail, discussion forums, and synchronous platforms, and most schools require their teachers to use more than one of these methods. Although some policies do not stipulate the precise frequency of contact (simply indicating that it is expected to be "regular"), most required that teachers respond to students' questions within a specific time frame--generally 24 hours. Most also required teachers to get in touch with their students within one or two days of enrollment.

Online-learning programs tend to require more frequent contact with younger students. In terms of the content of the contact, this generally included wording that requires teachers and students to treat each other with respect, use appropriate language, have positive attitudes, and so on. This was often spelled out in the school's acceptable-use or "netiquette" policies.

In many schools, teachers are required to speak to parents regularly to review student progress, but the frequency varies widely. According to iNACOL, having multiple methods of disseminating policy information to parents is important, because "relying exclusively on digital distribution for parents is particularly risky. ... There is no guarantee that parents have access to the technology. Those schools with written communication policies seem to understand and follow this rationale by indicating that they use multiple methods, both printed and online, to disseminate information to teachers, parents, and students."

Practices and delivery

iNACOL's research brief also gives educators a glimpse into what instructional and communication practices work best for a wide variety of virtual schools, including the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation in St. John's, Newfoundland, in Canada; the Florida Virtual School in Orlando, and the Clark County School District's Virtual High School in Las Vegas.

"Virtual schools use a variety of ways in which to structure and deliver educational opportunities to their students," explains the report. "However, little is known about which of these are more or less effective in what specific contexts. Due to the localized findings, research is needed in a variety of locations with a variety of virtual and cyber schools."

In summary, here's what the report found:

- For content delivery, most schools rely on asynchronous technology to facilitate flexible scheduling and pacing, "enhanced by blending synchronous technology or face-to-face meetings in a few cases."

- Course development is predominantly accomplished at the local school level, with a few schools contracting with content vendors.

- Pacing typically follows a traditional school calendar, often with suggested pacing guidelines. Only a few schools operate under open schedules and paces.

- The role of the instructor is multifaceted, meaning that instructors must facilitate instruction using the school's synchronous and/or asynchronous technology, as well as provide tutoring to students, lead discussions, and evaluate student activities.

- For communications, most online schools use course discussion forums and eMail as the primary methods of student-teacher communication, says the report, "with many schools requiring an asynchronous text-based form of communication in courses." Some schools also require phone communication or other synchronous communication.

- For teacher requirements, all schools require teacher certification and most require teachers to have a minimum amount of teaching experience and online teaching preparation. Only one of the 10 programs surveyed requires online teaching experience, however.

SMART board

The SMART boards are now operational. I had a chance to use one finally and the kids loved it. It is no substitute for good instruction, but it is a good asset and so far, seems very capable of gluing the attention of the class. It is a big screen that you can write on, play games with, and project images onto. It is an overhead projector on steroids. Some schools have severely limited budgets, so some of their boards are attached to carts and can be moved throughout the school. Some teachers complain about this new product of technology but once you learn how to use it, it is a real asset. If you can operate an iPod, you can handle a SMART board – it requires about the same level of technical prowess. Here’s a video of one in use:

new face

I'm used to being the youngest teacher on any staff. Back in the 1970s and 80s it wasn't that uncommon to see a teacher that was 21 or 22. With standards as they are, the youngest teachers are seldom younger than 24. Every school I have worked at, I have always been the youngest, until today.

A wide-eyed 24-year old teacher came to me in a panic as his classroom door was locked. He was a TOC (Teacher-On-Call), so he didn't have a key. There was still a solid fifteen minutes until lunch hour was over, so I didn't rush with him to the office for a key. I wanted to take some time to listen to this guy. Although intensely nervous, he was intelligent and tried to be positive. This was his first call-out this year and he wanted to start right. Although his mind was racing and he might have been annoyed by my slow pace down the stairs, I thought it important to reach out to this new teacher. He might not remember (or care to remember?) our exchange, but I told him the number one thing is to enjoy teaching. Move a little bit slower in the hallways, move a bit happier in class, and joke around with the kids. Be like a younger Bill Cosby. I told him he has the best job in the world and that within a short time, he won't have to panic. He'll be able to pull lessons right out of the air and mistakes will be entertaining rather than a nuisance. He doesn't have to be such a stuffed shirt - call the kids munchkins without fearing the consequences...oddly enough, the kids will start to appreciate such designations as they know it is meant endearingly. Kids are very forgiving and like quirky teachers who sometimes lock themselves out of rooms.

It was refreshing to see someone younger. I hit a milestone. In a way I enjoyed being the slow walker, as much as it tormented this fresh face. He did a great job today, by the way.

online post secondary future

A friends forwarded this to me. If it means totally 'killing' the conventional post-secondary experience, I'm not game. As it is now, online education is a suppliment to what is currently offered. In this capacity, it is great. But the homogenization of education, as this article suggests, will make our society less creative and far from being the bastions of critical thought, post-secondary institutions will become like factory outputs, manufacturing types of students rather than creative individuals. Having worked in online education, I am a big fan but to rely on it exclusively is dangerous.

A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

By Zephyr Teachout
Sunday, September 13, 2009

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke.

This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters' pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise -- a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.

But the demand for college isn't just about the yearning to learn -- it's also about the hope of getting a degree. Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition, and even before the recession, there was substantial evidence of unmet demand for cheaper college degrees. Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.

You can already see significant innovation in online education at some community colleges and for-profit institutions. The community colleges are working with limited resources to maximize their offerings through Internet aggregation. For-profit institutions appear to be capitalizing on the high demand for low-cost degrees and the fact that few public schools do much traditional marketing.

These entrepreneurs are a little like the early online news sharers -- bloggers, contributors to mailing lists and bulletin boards, profit seekers, tinkerers. Just as the new model of news separated "the article" from "the newspaper," the new model of college will separate "the class" from "the college." Classes are increasingly taken credit by credit, instead of in bulk -- just as news is now read article by article.

Of course, a cultural shift will be required before employers greet online degrees without skepticism. But all the elements are in place for that shift. Major universities are teaching a few of their courses online. And the young students of tomorrow will be growing up in an on-demand, personalized world, in which the notion of a set-term, offline, prepackaged education will seem anachronistic.

Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators have taken over from the newspaper as the entry point for news consumption. Already, half of college graduates attend more than one school before graduation. Soon you'll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. Every major paper once had a bureau in, say, Sarajevo -- now, a few foreign correspondents' pieces are used in dozens of papers. Similarly, at noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States.

When this happens -- be it in 10 years or 20 -- we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

Not all colleges will be similarly affected. Like the New York Times, the elite schools play a unique role in our society, and so they can probably persist with elements of their old revenue model longer than their lesser-known competitors. Schools with state funding will be as immune as their budgets. But within the next 40 years, the majority of brick-and-mortar universities will probably find partnerships with other kinds of services, or close their doors.

So how should we think about this? Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century. But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk.

If the mainstream of "college teaching" becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts, we'll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.

lessons for second year of teaching

Going into my second year of teaching, I re-enter the classroom with the following knowledge that is beneficial to students:

1)Competition is not beneficial. To think it is, is to believe an unsubstantiated myth. We, like all creatures, are overwhelmingly cooperative. The image of two bucks bashing heads for the right to reproduce takes up most of what we see on TV about nature yet constitutes less than 1% of the reality (that is, what animals are doing the rest of the time). Students have enough trouble trying to be without being told by their teacher that they must strive to be better than everyone else. This is the gated community mentality – the notion we must strive to be and then to live better than everyone else. This might explain a lot of the feelings of isolation in this culture.

2)What is good practice for those with learning difficulties is good for everyone. The methods used to teach a student with autism or hearing difficulties are amazingly beneficial to those without the aforementioned conditions.

3)Letter grades and percentages are subjective not objective. Tell me, what is the difference between a 94% on a paper and a 95% on a paper? Simplest way to avoid this and similar problems is to use a scale marking system (e.g. 1 = inadequate, 2 = minimally meeting expectations, 3 = fully meeting expectations, 4 = exceeding expectations). Trouble is, too many post-secondary institutions are insistent on the letter grades and the percentages that accompany them. Time to school the (D)ean!

4)Show respect at all times. Do not get angry. Do not take things personally. Find ways to vent aggression and insecurities but do not do them in front of students. Anger is too easily interpreted as hate. Students lose respect for those who do not show them respect.

5)Involve the parents and/or guardians whenever possible. Let them know what you are doing. Invite them in. Be courteous even when they are not. Listen to them and speak less.

6) Don’t talk about education or teaching all the time. When with friends or outside of school, join the herd and talk about herd topics (e.g. the insufferable game, camping trips, yard work, girlfriends/boyfriends, the taxman, abstract concepts – anything but school!) You need to charge your batteries and to have a world a part from teaching.

7)Be a facilitator. Do as little instruction as possible. Let the students play with materials and ideas, re-directing as needed. Create conditions where you are the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage…unless you need to be…I have to work on this.

8)Create conditions in which students are indisputably the expert. This gives them a sense of confidence when learning. From there, much is possible.

the Algebra Project, solving real-life problems

- a passage from a problem with memory: stories to end the racial nightmare by taylor sparrow (pages 115-116):

“It's important, first of all, to understand that the language of math is not a language that anyone speaks. It's a formal language...We don't speak this conceptual language, and our students certainly don't. But we can learn it. The experiential learning model helps kids create a conceptual language by first grounding mathematics in the daily life and culture that they understand. Instead of asking students to memorize equations and formulas, we take students on the subway and show them, step by step, how to transform their trip into a mathematical equation.”
- Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project

Just like the Mississippi sharecroppers that not only wanted to read, but who wanted to read in order to vote, the Algebra Project, Moses insists, “allows people to really learn from their own experiences, to develop their own language, learn from their own language and look at more regimented or constructed language.” The starting point for all Algebra Project curriculum is an event that the class shares. Through the course of the class, the students come to understand key mathematical concepts through their understanding of the event. This process began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where students took a ride on the subway together. Bob Moses explains:

The teacher teases out the key features of the event: What was the start station? What was the finish station? How many stops in one direction did you travel? What is the position of the finish relative to the start?
The students then create their own symbolic representation of the event. They have to describe and justify the formula to their peers. The subway rides help demystify the symbols and help students understand how symbols and formulas and rules are developed. Then, later, if kids get lost, they have this grounding to stand on. The teacher can say, 'Well, remember when you went on the subway rides? Recall what you learned then.' This is the new floor, the basic understanding of mathematics that all children need to have.

This subway ride can be adapted around bus rides or walks for students who live in rural areas or places without a subway system. The basic process remains the same:

a) Participate in a physical event
b) Make pictorial (graphic) representations or models of the event
c) Discuss and write about the event in intuitive (natural) language(s)
d) Discuss and write about the event in structured language (identify key features)
e) Develop symbolic representations for the key features of the event, make presentations to the class and apply these representations.

In other words, first the class talks about the event and then they talk about it mathematically. Students move from 'people talk' to 'feature talk' to 'symbolic representations.' Tiffany Edmondson, a woman who has worked with the Algebra Project for years, explains the difference between the different concepts: “'People talk' be like 'this is bigger than this.' [Using] feature talk you would say 'the width of this case is greater than the width of this,' and your symbolic representation would be actual bars to represent what you're talking about.”

Top Fifteen Virtual Schooling Books

Forwarded to me by a friend:

http://virtualschooling.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/top-fifteen-virtual-schooling-books/

working on a new course

I'm currently designing a paper-based Communications 11 course. In addition to this, I've been catching up on some reading and visiting the gym every morning. The plan is to be fully rested and sharp for September.

last video blog this school year