Thread: online classes ideas

Hi and welcome to Teacher Focus! You might want to check out what professional development providers are writing and teaching for universities in online courses for teachers. Most of these are in education technology areas since that is what colleges/universities seem to request these days. I have contracts with several universities (some through professional development providers) for online teacher education courses. Every single course I will be teaching from April through summer (about 6-8 courses) and the courses I have been contracted to design are educational technology.

Take a look at what your university offers in the way of ed tech for teachers. There is no end to the courses you can design and teach in ed tech areas

Leslie

We currently have classes offered in our district for gifted cert. that are online classes. I am hearing a lot of negative feedback about those classes. The teachers are saying it is mostly reading and responding. Is this how most classes are set up? I would think a WebQuest for teachers would be more fun!

How do you both arrange your classes?

There is definitely a lot of reading and definitely assignments and projects -- and sometimes more than in a traditional class since there are not 3 hours wasted every week sitting in a class listening to some prof drone on and on about his/her favorite subject. That is time spent on learning through text-based communication in online classes.

Properly designed, online classes are NOT correspondence classes Online classes should be very interactive with ongoing discussions in every unit. There also should be group collabortive projects and other interactive learning activities such as debates, guest lecturers, presentations by students, etc etc -- just like in effective traditional classes.

If these elements (and there are lots more -- these are just the tip of the iceberg) are not incorporated into an online class then the class is nothing more than a correspondence course and will be VERY boring.

Another issue is instructor skill in facilitating text-based online learning. If an instructor has not been an online learner and has not had proper training to build online facilitation skills -- then no matter how well the class is designed, it WILL FLOP big time.

I noticed you are an advocate of webquests -- that's a great tool for use in the K12 classroom. However, it is not something that kids make (although they can create other online activities through the use of teacher-designed webquests as the instructional tool) and there are entire graduate courses on exactly how to design and create effective webquests for classroom curriculum. Webquests must be properly designed to be effective just as online classes must be.

A webquest in a graduate teachers' course is too simplistic frankly. There are much more effective learning activities for professionals taking courses for either a degree or professional development.

Leslie

I was thinking more of the teacher gives a topic and students come up with activities that would facilitate the learning and we also use the web to add background knowledge, but perhaps you are correct that this is more of a "Teacher Thing".

I wanted to do something with the kids other than Robotics that involved the web.

As for the teacher class - I had meant more of an inquiry based learning approach for teachers based on a web quest model - which it sounds like you do, not just the read and respond method!

I would agree that someone must have the skill of keeping the conversation going. I don't think I would be good at that type of teaching, but I think I would love taking those classes if I had the right teacher.

One of the things I teach in my K12 interactive design class is online activities for K12 students to do AND to make. I think I gave you some websites from that class in another thread somewhere here. If you don't find it let me know. Take a look at some of the neat activities that kids can do online. One example is making treasure hunts -- they can be taught how to do this in a step-by-step procedure and then they can take the content topic and make treasure hunts for their classmates Just one of a GAZILLION ideas

I printed the sites you gave me on the other thread. Thank you for the good ideas. I like the make it and take it projects too because sometimes you can't get every child on a computer.

I also really like the treasure hunts, but I call them background knowledge pages because I use them to build that info on a topic, but I have seen the word treasure hunts used often, and I am sure I need to get with the right term

Thank you for all your help and ideas!!

anytime I'm around almost 24/7 LOL

A key element to an online class is creating discussions amongst the participants. Many discussions revolve around an article or sections of a book. Universities want the online courses to maintain an academic atmosphere, thus the readings. I like to have a combination of interesting applicable articles with projects that can actually be used in the classroom. For instance, in one of the modules in my online assessment class the participants read articles on how to develop an effective test, and then they create an online test that goes with their curriculum. I want them to leave my class with something practical they will use.

I think there are so many other places to get good info other than a book. Look at this forum as an example! We exchange such wonderful ideas - including book titles, but I feel I have gained some powerful info/activities/websites from this forum and I did not read a book to get them.

Just thinking aloud