Stardate: August 10, 2010

Image by ~Xu via Flickr

How late is too late?  The struggle for teachers is always how much time do you allow a student to complete assignments. Especially for summer High School summer school classes which I have been informed are "all about credit recovery." Even though I was given a standard grading rating system directly onto my online home page I am directed to score papers rather generously. Whatever, I'll adjust, I'll adapt. Hopefully the students are learning something. At the very least they are learning if they don't do it no one will do the work for them.

Navigating the Moodleverse

Image via CrunchBase

Star date: Wednesday, July 28, 2010

OK, this is my third week as an online classroom "teacher" and I doubt if I have done any real teaching. I have, as I have whined before, done a boatload of grading.

On a cool note, I have begun to us a feature called "Elluminate." An Elluminate session is sort of a chat session that I, as the teacher, moderate. Of course, the first few attempts were just learning the ropes and figuring out how to use the different features. I think the greatest challenge so far has been getting the students to correctly log in and participate. What I have resorted to doing is having net-books on site and having students come in and showing them face to face how to navigate the Elluminate session.

What I envision is to be able to have set times for students to log in and ask questions live and I can go over specific elements of upcoming assignments. One baby step at a time, I guess.

That's all for today. See you in the Moodleverse.

Online Adventures in Learning: Stardate July 13, 2010

Image by takomabibelot via Flickr

Today is day 5 of my online teaching experience. So far it has been more about getting the kinks out of the system than about actually teaching.

 The startling thing is that most of the students, high school age, are not very tech savvy. I guess it's a bit of a myth that all humanoids under 20 something innately know and understand all things Internet.  Of course this is a summer school class for students who did not earn a passing grade in English need to take. So, maybe this is the not-bound-for-MIT crowd...

I will say this, as the students have come on site to pick up their textbooks they have all been polite. I guess the online environment at least takes out the class clown element.