Thing 19 - Virtual Classrooms

1. I have been working on extending my classroom beyond just the walls of my room. Over the years I have continued to make progress in this area. First, I started out by placing my classroom materials online for students. I currently use Blackboard to connect students to the materials. Next, I began to use collaborative projects within my classes with shared resources like Google Docs. From that point I began to have students collaborate with other classes within my building. However, I now think that I need to widen the scope to outside our building, our state, or even the country.

Next year I plan to create a project in which my classes collaborate with another school somewhere around the world. I am not sure what the project will look like just yet because our class offerings and my preps change quite a bit from year to year, but I am sure that I can either design a project or sign up for a project that is posted either on the Skype for Education site, CapSpace, or some similar site.

In the past I have done collaborative projects where one class in our building would write a script and create storyboards for a video and then another class would film and produce the video. I am thinking that this would be a cool project if I had our students and students from another school swap scripts and then produce each others' videos. Then each group could view the results of the project that they created together. This project would allow students to collaborate, work with content area, and achieve several National Standards. Specifically, this project would cover the Communication and Collaboration Standards (NETS: 2a,2b,2c,2d) through the collaboration of teams, development of cultural understanding and global awareness, and the completion of a digital media project.

2. For students to be successful in an online learning environment there must be support measures in place. First off, students will need to be able to get connected to course materials. Therefore, they will need a computer, internet access, and possibly even access to the school network from home. Second, students will need a good support team. They will need information about the courses. Counselors will need to explain the course expectations, how the courses are setup, what type of credit is received, penalties for withdrawing, etc. Students will also need mentors with clearly defined roles. Students need to know who is there to help them through the process if they have academic or technical difficulties. They will also need someone to help with pacing, learning, and grading tasks. Students, also need the support of parents. Questions about the costs of the course, technology neededed for the course, and Internet access needed for the course will directly affect the entire family involved.

As you can see, online courses take the coordination and cooperation of many parties. Feedback can be very helpful in this process. It is often a good idea to have students help in the planning process.