Online Teaching Techniques

In week five we discussed different online teaching strategies. The discussion surrounded how were going to engaged our audience using methods from Benders book. Some people were interested in how they were going to team teach the Web Conference together: have some people monitor certain activities? Or take a more collabrative approach and manage the discussions and activities together?

One topic that I gravated towards was chats. Specifically, how could chats be both reflective (to move learners up Bloom's cognitive objectives) at the same time not so overwhelming that people would have a difficult time keeping a focused conversation going all the while other people are trying to do the same thing but with another topic. Basically, too make people can spoil a learning opportunity just as too may cooks can spoil a receipt, if too much is added things can get confusing.

Bender devoted an entire section to synchronous learning, which was my Web Conference topic. I was inspired by the concept of using chats to display best practices in onlince teaching and so that learners could join conversation with others who were also interested in the same topic, thus to avoid side-bar conversations. My post was regarding that this might not be possible. Chad wondered if it could be? Dave Young said we could do it in Moodle but it might be challenging. I took this back to my team and we thought it was best to not use Moodle but keep everything within Breeze, since this is where we were going to present the synchronous event.

With this in mind, my team delivered a synchronous event in Breeze in which we had break-out discussions. This was easily accomplished with some planning. We introduced different types of synchronous tools and how they could be used using a PPT and VoIP. Then we build pods that displayed questions about the tools. We asked the participants to vote on the topic they'd like to join to make sure the number balanced out per discussion. Then we opened up the pods and have people chat for about 10 minutes. It was a great interactive experience and fun to faciliatate.

I enjoyed week's five topic discussion. I am not sure we would have had such a great interactive Web Conference if it wasn't for the threaded discussion of week five.