It's 3:00a.m and I'm Troubleshooting

Last week I began my second year of online learning with a 7^th grade class in Deerfield Illinois. For me, living in Israel, this means waking up at 3:00a.m. to teach the 7:00p.m. Deerfield class. But despite the challenge (it usually takes me through Shabbat to get my internal clock back on track) I enjoy the interaction with the kids who are engaged, curious and ready to explore new concepts and ideas.

My 2014 class started off on an awkward note. We are using the Webex conferencing software to facilitate the class and, immediately after I launched the class, I received a message from Webex to tell me that the "audio part of the conference is not working today." Since the class runs for half an hour, there seemed to be no reason to close the class and start it again which would have taken up more than half the class time so we decided to conduct the entire class on chat.

Luckily I'm a fast typist and I spent the next hour typing my heart out -- answering the kids' chat questions and comments, giving them directions and providing them with an overview of what subjects would be covered during their 9-week class on "Israel." 

The second challenge occurred when Facebook failed me. To show the kids some of the unique aspects of Israel I had planned to have them take a look at the Facebook "Only In Israel" page. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/OnlyInIsrael/). I created a username and password so that the students would be able to click in but Facebook doesn't like multiple sign-ins from multiple devices and they effectively blocked my activity.

Live and learn. We moved on to the next activity and I quickly located an appropriate video that would fill in the class time.

Lessons learned:

1.      There's more than one way to skin a cat. If something goes wrong, you can usually find your way around it and should be prepared to do so. In the future, I'm going to make sure that I always have an alternate platform available -- probably Skype. I don't like skype as well as Webex because it doesn't offer the same opportunity to post documents, videos and other materials directly on the screen. However, it would have been a lot easier to have moved over to Skype and continue the class there than to type like a madwoman for 60 minutes.

2.      Always have a back-up lesson plan. I've found that, for a half-hour lesson, we generally have time for 2-3 activities including preparatory activities, the core information that I want to present and follow-up activities. It's important to have one extra activity ready to supplement anything that doesn't work.

When you're counting on technology to facilitate your lesson plan, you might as well assume that something won't work. If everything goes smoothly, that's great. But I will, in the future, be preparing a back-up plan for all of my lessons.    

3.      The kids will give you the benefit of the doubt. I don't think that I could get away with a chat lesson a second time but here, the students were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. They participated fully and we completed the material. It didn't go as any of us had intended but no one took advantage of the technological lapse and they did their best to ensure that the lesson was, under the conditions, a success.

Online Learning -- Teachers Speak

Rhode Island's Commissioner of Education, Deborah Gist, recently held a digital learning summit in Providence with teachers and principals from throughout Rhode Island. The topic of the summer concerned the increasing shift in the public schools to elearning. The educators commented about the things that excite them and the issues that concern them about online learning:

Benefits of Online Learning

• Students can progress at their own rate
• Online learning allows for increased opportunities for customized learning, allowing students to find the learning techniques that meet the strategies that work best for their individual styles
• Students become more engaged and motivated by the available online tools and games
• Online learning offers more opportunities for collaborative learning
• eLearning makes it easier for students to continue a project at home after the school day has finished
• Using PCs, tablets and smartphones students can learn any time and from any location
• Students have more access to more information and more data when they use online tools
• Online learning offers more opportunities for different types of feedback and evaluation
• Parents can become involved in their child's education by monitoring their work 

Concerns of Online Learning

• Not all students have access to the same level of Internet and computer tools at home
• Teachers will need to manage and schedule their curriculum more effectively
• Some schools find it difficult to stay up to date with the new software and hardware needed to offer high quality online classes
• Some teachers don't feel prepared to create digital lessons that will require acquiring knowledge of significant amounts of information about sofware and etools, for which they feel ill-prepared. 
• Working online may make it easier for students to cheat. Other security issues relating to elearning are also of concern to teachers.  

#eLearningForTheTeachers

As the word spreads about the JETS eCom -- the eLearning Community of Jewish Educators new teachers are joining to learn and share. eCom began as a group of 20 educators who gathered together, online, one evening in September to discuss their needs and interests of attaining their goal of using elearning to enhance their classrooms, engage their students and create an ever more effective Jewish learning environment.

 

The educators focused on two main concerns.

1.      How can the group serve as a clearinghouse for learning about available online tools and opportunities especially in light of the fact that technology is always changing?

2.      How can each educator share his/her experiences and knowledge with his/her peers in an effective manner?

 

From this group the eCom community was born. eCom is a self-directed community in which teachers brainstorm, exchange ideas, trade experiences and share their knowledge as it relates to digital learning and online instruction. The group shares a Haiku Learning Management System in which teachers share and discuss ideas, present projects and explore new avenues in the field of online learning.

 

Some of the recent information that's been shared has included reviews of new online educational games such as quizlet , bitstrip, goanimate, equiz shows, puzzlemaker, Scratch story creation, word searches and more.  Participants explore these programs on their own and report back to the Haiku to share their experiences and their students' reactions to the new and varied elearning options.

 

The eCom community is an ongoing community -- new participants join weekly and can access all of the previous information via the Haiku LMS while they explore the process of elearning and the ever-changing role that elearning plays in our classrooms.