Learning Activity 3-2

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 3^rd grade classroom so I utilized it whenever it was available. This coming year, I will be moving to 5^th 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 3^rd 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 5^th 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 3^rd 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 5^th 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.