Learning with and from Faculty…
This past week I had the chance to learn a lot from our faculty. On Friday we held the second Faculty Talking Circle. While the first Talking Circle focused on “Making a Community Online” (Belonging), the second circle dealt with “Learning about Teaching – courtesy of COVID” (Mastery). Eighteen faculty participated in the exchange of teaching ideas, tips and tools. A business instructor said that she builds community in her classes through the use of WhatsApp (instant messaging). Many of our students are already very familiar with this app and creating groups so you can share ideas, remind students of deadline, and just chat has proved invaluable. As one participant remarked: “Email is something that old people use to communicate, if you want to connect with students - you need something instant”. Several other instructors suggested just picking up the phone and calling individual students; the time investment pays off in the relationships built. One nursing instructor shared that she promotes engagement through Mentimeter (an interactive presentation app). She said that Mentimeter was easy to use and was not as competitive in nature as some other programs like Quizlet. Other applications and tech tools shared were Jeopardy Labs, VoiceThread and Loom. If you don’t know what these are or how you might use them, just google them. Or send me an email and I will connect you to a faculty member using them! But a significant part of the conversation just circled back to practices we know to be effective in both face-to-face teaching and online environments. Connections are built and interest sustained when you engage emotions, inject humor, and promote creativity. And the care and attention paid to setting expectations, clarifying roles, giving intermediate and overall deadlines, and ensuring contributions are just as important when putting student into online groups, as when we put students in group in our classrooms. In fact, perhaps even more important. It is easier to “supervise” groups in a classroom than it is to do so online. Joan shared that it is helpful to develop some simple “participant guidelines” for many different online tasks (wikis, forums, breakout groups, group project work, etc.), in order to avoid confusion and promote effective, on-task work. Last week I was also able to participate in Allison Fieldberg’s “Teaching Wheel” presentation for FSCS. Allison used the four main characters from “the Golden Girls” (a sitcom from the 80’s) to explain four different zones of online teaching. While teaching synchronously using Blackboard Ultra, Microsoft Teams, or other presentation programs seems to be “sexy” (like Blanche Devereaux), it can be difficult to get full participation, it can be hard to schedule, and it takes a fair bit of preparation. Alison advocated a more balanced approach so that teaching isn’t just concentrated presentations and Moodle assignments. Students can be supported through layers and levels of activities such as independent readings, online activities, collaborative documents, group chat, asynchronous discussion (forums and blogs), and pre-recorded audio and video. These activities were compared to the other three golden girls (Sophia, Rose and Dorothy), they may not be sexy, but they are golden all the same! Taking the challenge extended by Allison’s presentation (not everything needs to be sexy and synchronous!), and the need to “engage emotions, inject humor, and promote creativity” I decided to make a simple little music video using PPT and saving it as an MP4. The task would allow me to explore how best to share recordings (Dropbox, Google Drive or YouTube) and, at the same time, act on the Culture Q our that team was focusing on for the week (“Work at play and play at work”). The result was “Empty Chairs & Empty Classrooms” my cheesy interpretation of a song from Les Miserables. Here’s the link, https://youtu.be/9IfE_PiPoLs. Let me know what you think! I hope that it brings a wistful smile to your face. By the way, the best way that I found to share a big file like this is through personal YouTube accounts and making sure that students control their links. Other ways can work, but this is simplest.
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AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
March 2024
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