Creating Connections with Students in an Online Course

1. Faculty Showcase – Instructional Technologies Support Kathryn Lee, Curriculum & Instruction, KL10@txstate.edu; Friday, March 23, 2012 Creating Connections with Students in an Online Course The critical challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures (USDE, National Technology Plan, 2010).

2. 12:00-1:00 pm agenda 15-minute Presentation context of teaching & learning online pedagogy related to communication building online community examples of 2 communication tools criteria for excellent online instructor 45-minute Q & A

3. Welcome! Kathryn Lee, Secondary Graduate Program • 8th year of online teaching; 6th year of all online • Redesigned 2 courses CI 5363: Strategies for Improving Secondary Teaching CI 5306: Evaluative Techniques for Classroom Teachers • Mix of practicing teachers & post baccalaureate students seeking initial certification • Authentic, collaborative, & project-based, co-creating learning artifacts related to routine teaching activities • Development of 21st-century skills such as expert thinking, complex communication, and new media literacy (Reich, Murnane, & Willett, 2012)

4. Online Pedagogies • Transmissive • Dialogic • Constructionist • Co-Constructive (Bower, Hedberg, & Kuswara, 2010)

5. Co-Constructive Online Pedagogy • Groups of learners complete a series of authentic tasks to produce an artifact (content area design teams collaborate in semester-long project) • Peer-assisted elements of dialogic pedagogies (students negotiate meaning via forums & PB Works wiki) • Productive component of constructionist pedagogies (creation of instructional unit in content area & series of lesson plans illustrating the various models of teaching) (Bower, Hedberg, & Kuswara, 2010)

6. Camtasia Relay Week #2 overview http://camrelay-stream.its.txstate.edu/users/kl10/5363Wk2Overview_-_Flash_%28Large%29_-_20110830_04.03.46PM.html

7. Building Online Community Intentional development of instructor presence Meet Dr. Lee video Require intros & photos (Week #1) Welcome each student, modeling POSITIVE and respectful communication Always use student names in all correspondence Phone reluctant students (TRACS site info) Team charters & collaborative scripts (Palloff & Pratt, 2005) *Weekly overviews via screencasts (Camtasia Relay) *Timely feedback (Jing; free Web 2.0) Praise & encouragement!

8. www.techsmith.com/Jing CI 5306: Evaluative Techniques for Classroom Teachers; Week 5>Assessing Prior Knowledge>Ledbetter & Jimenez> http://screencast.com/t/Avs12oFH84Ub

9. Screencast Overviews & Feedback (Camtasia Relay & Jing)

10. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Author: Samantha Penney, samantha.penney@gmail.com http://www.usi.edu/distance/bdt.htm

11. Criteria for the excellent online instructor include… Visibility Compassion Communication Commitment Organization (Palloff & Pratt, 2011)

12. Q&A Kathryn Lee KL10@txstate.edu (512) 667-0619 between 9 am & 9 pm; 7 days a week

13. Collaborative Script This semester you and your content area design team will be investigating various models of teaching and developing lesson plans illustrating each of the models. Early in the semester, you and your team will create an instructional unit that is broad and rich enough to develop a variety of lesson plans illustrating the various models of teaching over the course of the semester. The content of your team’s instructional unit will be the starting point for the weekly lesson plans. Since you will be determining the most appropriate content in the unit to illustrate each teaching model, your lesson plans do not need to be sequenced in any particular order. And, if your team is interdisciplinary, you will want to ensure that each content area is acknowledged and create at least one lesson plan in each team member’s content area over the course of the semester. For example, if your interdisciplinary team consists of social studies, music, and language arts, your team will want to develop a lesson plan that emphasizes each of the content areas, such as one week developing a lesson plan specifically on language arts, another week developing a lesson plan specifically on music, and another week developing a plan focusing on language arts.

14. Start with the end in mind Course Management: Course Design: Backward Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005)

15. References Bower, M., Hedberg, J. G., & Kuswara, A. (2010). A framework for Web 2.0 learning design. Educational Media International, 47(3), 177-198. Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: Learning together in community. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2005). Assessing the online learner: Resources and Strategies for Faculty. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2011). The excellent online instructor: Strategies for professional sevelopment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Reich, J., Murnane, R., & Willett, J. (2012). The state of wiki usage in U.S. K–12 Schools: Leveraging web 2.0 data warehouses to assess quality and equity in online learning environments. Educational Researcher, 41(1), 7-15. Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA : Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.