Teaching online is relatively new to the K-12 teaching space, however it is a proficiency that I believe will become increasing relevant over time. The opportunities that are afforded by implementing online and blended teaching are only beginning to be explored. I believe that professional development opportunities for all educators to explore the uses of online methods within and outside of classrooms should be afforded. Educators need to understand the technology that their students regularly use and how that prior experience with technology can be most meaningfully activated in order to enhance learning experiences. In addition, online education has the potential to open doors for equity that have previously been impossible. Student personalization of educational paths, pace, and timing allow for students with different abilities in different areas to work with material until they are able to reach competency/mastery of the content. These kinds of student opportunities are well supported through implementation of online teaching and learning methods. Online learning also allows for tools such as speech-to-text, closed captioning for videos, written word-to-speech software, and other resources that provided students with disabilities to be afforded more equitable access to class learning materials. These important uses of technology, available in online teaching, create opportunities for educators to design lesson materials in order to be optimally engaged with by diverse learners by multiple means of representation, providing for equity and increased support for all students. It is also critical to begin teaching students the competencies for the use of technology that are now being utilized within the workforce environment. Very few jobs available in today’s market are without a technology component, and in the future use of technology in the workforce will understandably increase as new technologies provide more efficient workflow. For this reason, it is important for all students to have basic proficiencies in working collaboratively in an online environment, using technology effectively, and researching/evaluating available online information for validity and reliability. All of these vital technology proficiencies can start to be learned by students through online learning and will better equip students for future employment. The importance of equity afforded by utilizing online teaching cannot be overstated. All students should be afforded the best support possible and there are a lot of resources available through online teaching to this purpose. Online teaching also affords the opportunity to teach students in a manner that many students find engaging and interesting. Technology is something that most students are familiar with and as such for many students, they have prior knowledge that can be drawn upon to form deeper connections to material. For students without these technological funds of knowledge, the use of technology within and outside of the classroom for online teaching can better prepare learners for the use of technology within employment. The use of online teaching can support diverse learners through a focus on competency-based learning, the use of tools that support learners with different abilities, the utilization of resources that students find engaging, activation of student prior knowledge, and the preparation of learners for future employment. Additional Resources
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![]() When I think about designing for student-centered assessment, I think about offering multiple means of demonstrating understanding of the material. I think about providing students with alternative options than traditional means in order to accurately measure learned content in ways that remove test anxiety and are set-up for all students to “put their best foot forward”. Student weakness in one area, such as test-taking should not affect student grading on a completely unrelated student assessment. For example if a student has a hard time understanding multiple choice questions due to wording or format, that student may be disadvantaged during a multiple choice test even though the material being assessed is completely unrelated to the assessment format. Additionally, many students have problems with test anxiety that might affect performance, which is unrelated to the material that needs to be assessed. ![]() In an online lesson project, I designed an assessment that incorporated student-centered assessment design features by incorporating student choice in the format their project would be submitted. The assessment is designed to gauge student understanding on general principles of stories: having a beginning, middle, and end, as well as to gauge student learning related to the differences between fiction and non-fiction. The assessment was for students to create a story whether fiction or non-fiction and present it in whatever format the student was interested in. Students were given explicit instructions on the elements required: a beginning, middle, end, character(s), and setting. Students were told that they were to determine whether the story was fiction or non-fiction, and what elements of the story led them to that decision. In this way, students were given explicit direction on the required elements of the project assessment, while also being given the student choice to determine how they would present their story. Students were given the freedom for creative expression in their storytelling as well as their means of delivery of the storytelling. Students were also given explicit instructions on required elements, so that students would know what was expected in their projects. ![]() Another element that I believe is important to student-centered assessment is the design of environments in which students are prompted to think through material learned and think through their learning process. In my online lesson project, part of the student requirements is for the student to demonstrate the reasoning behind why they classify a book as fiction or non-fiction. This gives students and opportunity to think through their mental processes and have a deeper understanding of why they think the way they do about a specific book. After the assessment students, are then asked to think about their favorite book and to categorize that as fiction or non-fiction and share that with others. The main concern of student-centered assessment is the growth of the student. Assessment can be used to encourage student learning and not be seen as a valuation of the student or the student’s intelligence, but rather an indicator of areas that the student can look for more growth opportunities in. Student-centered assessment is about rethinking what assessment’s purpose is for, and recognizing assessment should be constructed in such a way that it is a benefit to the learner and the learning environment as a whole.
This week, I have explored many resources related to the importance of equity and Universal Design for all Learners. While watching a video on the importance of viewing student Funds of Knowledge as assets in the classroom, I learned that the graduation rates among migrant students are very low, about half. This information struck me as a testament to the lack of support students from different cultural backgrounds must experience. It is clear that supporting learners from diverse backgrounds is critical in the educational environment. Online and Blended Learning brings with it potential for great good to be done in providing equitable access to education for all learners through Open Education Resources such as the OER Commons website, OER Commons . However, this structure for learning also brings with it a number of challenges that must be addressed. The largest challenge for learners and educators is access to content in a Blended & Online format. Learners can be provided with tools that enhance their learning and exciting opportunities to explore content in new ways impossible without technology, but if learners cannot access that content due to lack of resources, existing inequality is greatly exacerbated. Lack of access could be caused due to lack of the tools needed to interact with the content: reliable technology devices- computers or tablets, internet, community resources-library device access. Another challenge that can limit learner access is the technology history of the learner. With each device or resource, there is a learning curve for a user to familiarize themselves with how to use it. If learners are expected to use technology resources that they are unfamiliar with in order to learn content, what is required to participate for that student is unequal to what is required for a student already familiar with the tech. As this is the most critical component to providing a learning environment for all students, these needs must be addressed before the first lesson begins in the online learning environment. For myself, learning about individual student needs is of the highest importance. Students from every cultural background with diverse experiences and individual strengths should be supported and afforded the greatest opportunity to learn and grow as possible. Diverse learners have vast cultural resources that will enrich the classroom as a welcoming classroom environment opens up to them. Therefore, identifying diverse individual learner needs and providing necessary supports in order to provide student-centered teaching to support all learners is my personal goal. Other Resources
Teaching in online and blended environments allow for personalization of a student learning path that optimizes the time spent by both the teacher and the learner. Despite its many benefits, utilizing blended and online environments for learning also requires understanding differences from the in-class structure, in order to navigate possible pitfalls and provide learners with an environment in which they can connect with content, the teacher, and their peers.
Another important aspect that differs between online and blended environments and the face-to-face classroom is the way in which discussions and collaborations take place. While in a face-to-face classroom these activities can flow very easily with little direction from the teacher, in an online or blended environment, learners may require specific prompts, clear expectations delineated, and time frames for responses to be made explicit for students. Discussions and collaborative activities in an online and blended environment create the opportunity for participation from all students, not just vocal ones, and allow students time to reflect before posting comments. These aspects of such discussions and collaborations can be an asset for learners provided that activities are designed appropriately by the teacher.
As a pre-service teacher, I look forward to utilizing the benefits of online and blended learning that allow for greater student personalization in learning paths, flexibility that allows for competency-based learning, and the benefits of utilizing online discussion and collaboration aspects of online and blended learning. I have already been able to see individualized learning path activities being used in a 3rd grade classroom for math enrichment that is geared towards students individualized needs. I have also been able to create technology tutorials for use when creating my online lesson project. Tutorials such as these could support students with using technology that they aren’t comfortable with yet, as well as demonstrating to student’s parents how to use different technologies to support their child. I find the flexibility that is demonstrated through student individualized learning paths to be exciting for student competency-based learning. My professional development goals are to explore the ways in which utilizing online and blended learning experiences can enrich student learning through personalization, collaborative activities, flexibility, increased time for one-on-one teacher/student interaction, and improved accessibility for the student to the teacher. Other resources
As a student in the education department at Indiana University, I have learned that effective well-informed teachers are both designers and researchers. As a student, I have been provided opportunities to engage in both design and research myself. I have been able to use resources such as Piktochart to create Infographics, to create informational tables that represent specific chunks of material in easy-to-read organizational structures for optimal retention. I was able to design this graphic depicting different animal families and the
Incorporating important characteristics of a researcher, I have learned about interactive online books, project-based learning application in the classroom, and different instructional designs. I have also embodied aspects of a researcher by having a student use the W204 lesson that I created on fact and fiction categories of books, and evaluating what aspects of the lesson that I had created would need modification to be more well designed for student use. The multimedia principle of minimizing extraneous load, not overloading the students’ senses and so overwhelming what the student is cognitively able to process, is something that I need to work on. There were portions of the online literature lesson that I created that were overwhelming in the amount of text that was utilized. I tried to use the principle of Universal Design in creating the lesson and so I included audio as well as text for most sections of the lesson, including project instructions. The sheer amount of reading that was required to understand the instructions was overwhelming and would need to be modified for student use. This is a pervasive characteristic of my design, to include too many words and very formal language. In order to design with multimedia principles in mind, I believe using simpler language and bulleted points when providing instructions would be beneficial for learners. My goals to improve my skills as a designer are to minimize wordiness within text for students, keeping language simple and to the point, and using bullet points when it seems appropriate. Also, I would like to improve my skills with creating resources that are engaging and visually appealing for the students the material is being created for, while also striving for Universal Design to Support all Learners. My goals in regard to research within education are to pursue professional development in areas of competency-based learning and assessment including: the benefits and challenges of the design, real-life examples of how this is carried out within the classroom, and accommodations for learners with special needs. As a future educator, I would like to deliberately reflect on teaching practice within my service-learning, student teaching, and future teaching experiences: daily, weekly, quarterly, and yearly, to look back on which teaching practices lead to better outcomes for student learning. Related Videos
Computational thinking is a set of skills that a student and educator can utilize to break down problems into manageable steps in order to fully explore possibilities and create solutions. Computational thinking is a great resource when thinking creatively. I would like to explore possible uses for computational thinking in the classroom. One skill in computational thinking is decomposition. Decomposition is the breaking down of a problem into smaller more manageable parts. One use of decomposition could be for an educator in an Elementary classroom to break down individual sounds in a word in order teach students to learn how to read it. When the educator utilizes decomposition in this way, and teaches their students to do so also, students learn to read larger and larger words building from smaller building blocks of sounds. An educator can teach students to use abstraction, the taking out of unnecessary bits of information, when teaching story problems. Students can learn to remove the outlining information and focus on the Math, English, or Social Studies questions that are being addressed. Abstraction is also necessary in the teaching of Digital Literacy by teaching students to find the important, relevant, verifiable information relating to a topic and discard that which is biased, unimportant, or unverified. A teacher can teach students the computational thinking skill of pattern recognition by teaching students to recognize that certain combinations of letters make certain sounds when together in a word.
When creating my Online Lesson Project, one of the objectives is for students to develop the ability to analyze the characteristics of an animal and based upon those characteristics, accurately categorize the animal families it belongs to. Part of the lesson is to teach students to use pattern recognition, one aspect of computational thinking, to recognize the patterns between different animal families, and the distinguishing characteristics. Students will then be able to recognize the characteristics that are similar across all animal families and use abstraction to eliminate unnecessary information. Students will then use algorithmic design when creating their final project. By determining which steps need to be performed first, second, and so on, students will create their project. Computational thinking is a great way for teachers to teach building blocks for all other learning. Computational thinking can be applied within all fields of education, by teaching students techniques for addressing questions that don’t have ready solutions. This encourages creative problem-solving skills and for students to incorporate these techniques when faced with any number of different challenges. Computational thinking can also be used when teaching computer science in education. Computer science is an ever-growing need for workers in our country. The teaching of computer science within education is important due to the increasing use of computers, programming, and robotics being incorporated into work environments. As work environments incorporate new technology, the developing workforce, students of today, will face new challenges that other generations did not. As educators, it is necessary to equip students with the skills necessary to navigate these changes. By being taught computer science, students will be better equipped for the work environments they will be working in. When learning about educational robotics, I was struck by the many different uses that the robotics afforded. One such resource was the Bee-bot which can be programmed to move according to coding. The Bee-bot could be used for a number of different learning or assessment activities. One such activity for a formative assessment would be to use the Bee-bot to conduct a spelling bee, providing a visual/tactile hands-on review with students for spelling words. This could be conducted using an Alphabet mat designed for the Bee-bot. The Bee-bot could also be used with a mat of numbers to teach Math concepts, and conduct checks on student learning. Different robotics afford different opportunities for education, these are simply a few opportunities that could be utilized using one type of robotic in the classroom. Robots can be used in any number of different ways, limited only by the imagination of the individual using them. Educational robots can be very beneficial by providing hands-on learning activities. Educational robots can be helpful to enhance student learning and to engage students with the content. The only down-side that is apparent to the use of such in the classroom, would be possible distraction from the material to be covered in the interest elicited by the robot itself. The use of computational thinking, computer science, and robotics within the classroom is an asset to the learning process. Students are able to engage with material in new ways, learn to process challenges creatively, and are actively being prepared for the use of technology in developing work environments. These fields are ever-evolving as new technology develops and as educators it is important to have proficiency in order to best support students in their learning journeys. |
AuthorHello, I am Katrina Stancombe, a senior at Indiana University finishing up an Elementary Education Degree with an additional license in Blended and Online Learning. Archives
December 2022
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