How have your past experiences with
online/blended learning impacted your goals for your future students?
As a student, I have
been taking online classes over the past 8 years, using three different
platforms. Overall, it has been a very enjoyable experience and has allowed me
to learn ways to incorporate online learning activities into my elementary classroom.
These experiences as an online student encouraged me to move to blended
learning in my classroom. While my school is not 1:1, we have a Chromebook cart
to share with our grade level. This cart was stored in my 3rd grade classroom
so I utilized it whenever it was available. This coming year, I will be moving
to 5th grade where I have 10 laptops in my classroom, plus the use
of the grade level Chromebook cart. My goal is to continue with and improve
upon the blended learning model established by the previous teacher.
How do you hope to engage your students
effectively in online learning?
To engage my students effectively
online, I design learning activities that are fun for them. They are young and
easily distracted, so it is crucial that they are excited about what they are
working on. I use Google Classroom to share links and post assignments. My 3rd
graders quickly learned how to navigate the platform and loved being able to
collaborate with their classmates. They enjoyed web quests, online scavenger
hunts, digital task cards, and research projects. With my 5th grade
students, I will continue with designing various online activities. Since they
are a little bit older, I am excited to find new ways to challenge and engage
them.
What has been (or do you anticipate being) the
most challenging aspect of online/blended teaching for you? What solutions have
you considered to this challenge?
When considering a full
online class, my biggest concern is not being able to establish a connection
with students as I do now in my face-to-face classroom. Seeing the students
daily, getting to know their personalities, being able to read their
expressions or body language, knowing that something is wrong just by looking
at them, gauging their level of understanding by the look on their faces are
all visual cues that I use every day in my classroom. Without this personal
connection, I worry about being able to engage students in an online environment.
For some of these aspects, there is not
a solution, rather just a different approach. I am learning techniques to still
engage my students without those visual cues.
For blending teaching,
especially with my elementary students, the most challenging aspect is keeping
the students who are working on Chromebooks on task when I am working with
another group. With 20+ students in the classroom, it can often be challenging
to continually check all of the screens while engaging in a small group lesson
with another group of students. With my 3rd graders in the past,
there were a few kiddos that would sneak to another site or stare at the same
screen, doing no work. My solutions to this issue are to ensure the online
lesson is engaging, so the students are not tempted to stray. When setting up
my 5th grade classroom for this coming year, I put the computer
tables across the back of the room and my small group area in the front so I
can easily glace up and check screens.
