This is a guest entry written by Jennifer Roland, formerly a staff member at International Society for Technology in Education.
I’d like to thank Michael for hosting me here as part of my virtual tour to promote The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology. Leave a comment at the end of this post to enter to win a copy of the book.
Jennifer Roland
Virtual Classrooms and Pandemic Prevention
The World Health Organization has been releasing all sorts of information about disaster planning related to the swine flu (H1N1). They cover school closure policies here.
Schools and districts have a great tool to help them ensure that students can continue learning even if the physical school buildings are closed: virtual classrooms.
In the May 2001 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology, we ran an article that discussed the use of a school website to provide educational continuity if violence closed the schools in an Israeli community. In “Online Education in a War Zone,” James Backer describes the steps his school took to provide learning opportunities to their students. (ISTE membership is required to access the article.)
That got me thinking, if Backer and his colleagues could accomplish that in 2001, we could definitely make it happen with the increased levels of Internet access and computer penetration we now have.
Most teachers have blogs or some sort of technology-based homework and information sharing tool. As long as students know how to access those blogs or technology spaces, they could easily get their assignments, read lecture notes, and participate in asynchronous discussion through comments.
Or, if teachers want something more robust and freely accessible, they could set up an area in Second Life to facilitate classroom discussion, information sharing, and learning activities. Students could meet with their teacher during specified hours and have a vigorous real-time discussion of the lesson.
What do you think? What technology tools do you recommend for educators who may need to server their students from remote locations?
What lessons could teachers from brick-and-mortar schools learn from teachers at virtual schools to help them support student learning if schools are closed?
How many will be converted to virtual school evangelists after experiencing that type of learning environment?
Answer one of these questions or ask a question of your own to be entered into the random drawing to win a copy of The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology.
About Jennifer Roland
Jennifer is a writer living in the Portland, Oregon, area. She holds bachelor’s degrees in magazine journalism and political science from the University of Oregon. Her education also focused on history, economics, linguistics, and educational policy and management. Before embarking on her freelance career, she was a staff member at ISTE. Follow Jennifer on her blog tour at http://edtechjen.com; each tour stop includes a chance to win a copy of The Best of L&L.
About The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology (link to http://www.iste.org/source/Orders/isteProductDetail.cfm?product_code=llbest)
ISTE’s flagship magazine, Learning & Leading with Technology, is where the organization’s members and industry experts share and discuss the latest and greatest in using technology to enhance education. This collection includes the very best articles from 2003-2008. Along with the articles as they originally appeared in the magazine, the book includes commentary and context introducing the articles as well as short essays from the original authors, who further discuss the issues and topics of their articles and how they’ve affected the ed tech world.
Thanks Jennifer! I thin this holds a lot of potential. One concern I have is in rural areas where students may have limited access to technology either at home or due to slow internet speeds. Wikis and blogs may be a good solution but a robust online experience would be a challenge.
Comment by Marcel Kielkucki — September 18, 2009 @ 9:39 am |
Great point, Marcel. We should all make sure that our technology solutions fit our students’ needs, whether their needs are dictated by their preferences, their socioeconomic status, or our school or district’s mandates.
What do you suggest as a low-bandwidth synchronous discussion medium?
Comment by Jennifer Roland — September 18, 2009 @ 12:53 pm |
That’s a hard call. I’ve used some LMS chat features,a nd the big problem that you can run into is that it looks like you’re active, but in reality your responses are so slow that the group havs moved on to another topic when you’re just getting ready to comment. Something as simple as AIM messenger or similar products might actually work the best.
Comment by Marcel Kielkucki — September 21, 2009 @ 9:27 am
This one is a hard call. I’ve worked on some LMS products where it looks like you’re in the chat with everyone, but in actuality, you’re a number of posts behind. AIM Messenger or similar products might work more effectively.
Comment by Marcel Kielkucki — September 21, 2009 @ 9:28 am
This is an idea that a group of K-20 education leaders here in the state of California spoke about a few days ago, though it’s an area I’ve been working on for several years. Whether it’s in response to a major epidemic like H1N1 or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or, in our state, the possibility of a major earthquake or fire, having an online classroom accessible for anytime, anywhere learning is a critical infrastructure issue that needs to be addressed yesterday. Many major businesses have disaster recovery operations and processes in place in case of local or regional disasters. Our state and local educational agencies should have a similar plan and process in place.
Comment by Corey Gin — September 18, 2009 @ 10:59 am |
You are right on the money, Corey. Virtual classrooms can help deal with many issues that might close down a school. Here in western Oregon, we close down every time we get a tiny bit of snow, and our school year extends to make up those days. I wonder if we could institute some sort of virtual solution to keep our kids safe and home but also learning. Or would the kids just get mad that they lost their snow day?
Comment by Jennifer Roland — September 18, 2009 @ 1:08 pm |
What technology tools do you recommend for educators who may need to server their students from remote locations?
Having a common list of reliable links for core subjects that brick and mortar teachers could access would be helpful. Where could a list of that nature be posted?
Comment by Sharon Johnston — September 18, 2009 @ 11:42 am |
I recommend a stable, scalable learning management system as a general starting point. You can go open source with Moodle or hosted with Desire2Learn, Moodle, or Blackboard. However, if your school or district doesn’t offer that kind of service, you can certainly begin with a Google Education account. Uploading your documents into a Google site is a quick start to taking the journey towards a more robust and interactive classroom site.
Comment by Corey Gin — September 18, 2009 @ 12:32 pm |
Jennifer:
So glad you posted this! Your question is relevant and very timely. (!!)
It invokes multiple complex issues. I’ll “try” to be parsimonious.
(1) Broadband access in the schools?
(2) Broadband access in student’s homes? (Which students?)
(3) Which virtual learning environments (VLE’s) might work best and why?
(4) Do America’s teachers have experience using the various VLE’s as participants and what percentage of those has experience facilitating and supporting their use by others for instructional purposes?
That last one (4) is a corker. It’s probably the single biggest factor limiting scalability of synchronous and asynchronous delivery solutions with any potential for filling the void if and when our public school need to close during a pandemic crisis.
NUMBER 1: There is reason for “guarded” optimism. There are still some persistent inequities in access affecting the rural and urban districts, but we’re doing better on both those very year. For details, see This NCES “Fast Facts” summary: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=46
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NUMBER 2: According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, this appears to be an area for “some concern.” http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Home-Broadband-Adoption-2009.pdf
According to the Pew survey (2009)respondents living in homes with annual household incomes below $30,000 experienced a 34% growth in home broadband adoption from 2008 to 2009. In 2009, 46% of African Americans had broadband at home, compared with 43% in 2008. The Pew survey also reports that adults who reported annual household incomes over $75,000 had broadband adoption rate change from 84% in 2008 to 85% in 2009.
In summary, the good news is that despite the downturn in our National economy, broadband access in American homes continues to increase, However, it seems clear that economic “have nots” statistically tend toward also being broadband “have nots.”
This suggests to me that it would be VERY PRUDENT for the USDOE, possibly through our State Department of Education to use some of that 100 Billion Dollars Secretary Duncan talks about being in his windfall ARA budget to support creating some ubiquitous and scalable broadband solutions NOW, that might be employed to provide heavily subsidized (free?) broadband home access to low income students that might otherwise be “left out.”
WiMax is just about to finally roll out in the Chicago market. Supporting very low cost (or free) Wimax access in lots more urban and rural locales seems like a good way to invest some ARA $$. Also, equipping a whole lotta “low cost” Netbooks with Wimax receivers and stockpiling them for distribution to low income families might not be a bad idea either.
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NUMBER 3: Rather then writing a lot of words here, I’ll share a list of links where our colleagues can download some of the best “open source” and FREE programs that create powerful and flexible virtual learning environments that could all be used to extend that work of teaching and learning into students homes using the broadband access discussed in items 1 & 2.
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Asynchronous Open Source VLE’s (LMS/CMS)
Moodle (http://moodle.org/)
Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org/portal)
There are others, but these two are gaining acceptance with educators in the US and even more so educators in other parts of the world.
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Synchronous Open Source, and free or very low cost online classrooms & online conferencing tools:
There is an excellent, fairly unbiased review of the available options here: http://idealware.org/articles/fgt_online_conferencing.php
My personal pick of the “free” conferencing tools is DimDim.
Any educator interested in trying the FREE (Trial) version of Adobe Connect should know in advance that it is only usable by 2-3 persons at once and the VOIP has seemed unreliable when I’ve tried it.
I personally think it would be a great thing for Adobe to make the FULL FEATURED version of Adobe Connect available to educators in schools with documented “needs” from serving large numbers of high risk, low income families. The “good karma” gained would SURELY benefit Adobe as a company after the crisis is over.
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OTHER useful open source VLE’s that educators might not know about:
Elgg – http://elgg.org (This is nominally a social networking environment. With the right free “plugin’s” it can be made entirely “school safe.” Anyone interested in seeing a “safe” Elgg containing project-based online assignments developed by a class of teachers I worked with this last summer, first have a look here (http://www.onlineteachingassociates.org/elgg/) and then contact me about a log-in identity so you can go inside and take a look.)
MidiaWiki – http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki (MediaWiki is arguably the most internationally accepted and mose frequently used Wiki program in the Open Source world. Online Teaching Associates Ltd. has a .org MediaWiki here. (http://www.onlineteachingassociates.org/wiki/) Visitors can look, but you can’t edit or create new records without a legitimate user identity. To get one of those, ask me and I’ll create on for you.
WordPress Blog Shells – http://wordpress.org/download/ (Configured with the right plugins, WordPress installations can be deployed as almost ever type of web-based, interactive environment most of us can evan dream of. There’s a new plugin that was very recently released that turns WordPress into a fully-featured “content management system.” If you understand what that is, be impressed! WordPress changed my life! Go here for a look at OTA’s webpage, which was done with a WordPress Blog Shell using the “Office Revolution” theme. See the bottom of the homepage for credits. http://www.onlineteachingassociates.com/)
I could on, but I won’t. Apologies to the many devotees of Drupal and Joombla, two more very robust and elegant, open source content management systems: http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/joomla-and-drupal-which-one-is-right-for-you/
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NUMBER 4: Are enough American teachers ready to use these VLE’s for “bridging the void” that will occur in our national educational system in the even our schools must be closed?
Cutting directly to the chase, probably not at this time. And the answer is further complicated when you stop and consider that providing professional development for the teachers has never proved to be a very effective way to support more and more effective technology use in our schools. The reason is simple: WE’RE LEAVING OUR LEADERSHIP OUT OF THE PICTURE.
For the use of VLE’s of all shapes and sizes to offer solutions that can be moved to “scale” and enable providing educational services to our students in their homes, BOTH OUR TEACHERS AND OUR STATE, DISTRICT, AND SCHOOL-LEVEL LEADERS NEED TO COME UP TO SPEED VERY RAPIDLY.
Instead of going into a long narrative about this subject, I’ll offer two links to pieces about (1) preparing effective online teaches, and (2) preparing school administrators for becoming effective leaders for online programs.
About preparing online teachers – http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/TeachingOnline.htm
About preparing online leaders – http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/MOLarticle_Oct04.htm
A caveat about the Online Teaching Facilitation Course (OTFC) and the Management of Online Learning (MOL) courses that were previously provided as online professional development services by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. Those courses are no longer available and no longer exist in the form discussed in the two articles linked above.
Greg Kearsley and I took what we learned from the Federally sponsored R&D we did together at NCREL, created our own co-owned small business, and built entirely new courses that are at least one order of magnitude better the courses we built and tested together at NCREL. The broad objectives for the new OTA courses remain true to our original intent. But the technical execution and content are DRAMATICALLY IMPROVED.
Our courses for teachers and educational leaders work. If you want to learn more about them, check the resources posted on our nifty “WordPress” website: http://www.onlineteachingassociates.com/
That’s enough! I hope something I’ve contributed will be useful.
Bob Blomeyer (BobBl)
Business Manager and Chief Technology Officer
Online Teaching Associates, Ltd.
http://www.onlineteachingassociates.com/
Comment by BobBl — September 18, 2009 @ 1:56 pm |
Great questions and resources, Bob. Each school or district will need to make choices based on the level of technology access in their district. If half of the students have no technology access at home, it would be really hard to make it all work.
Comment by Jennifer Roland — September 18, 2009 @ 7:22 pm |
I am glad that this is being discussed much more at the beginning of this new school year. I wrote about this very concept late last spring on my blog after our region suffered through Hurricane Ike, H1N1 school closures, and days missed due to city-wide flooding during spring rain storms (I’m located in Houston, Texas) during the 2008-2009 school year.
Here are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head to address your first question: What technology tools do you recommend for educators who may need to serve their students from remote locations?
1. Get teachers to use some sort of LMS to created blended learning on a regular basis. This helps the students and the teachers to develop familiarity with the online system over time. If used regularly then the students already know where to go to get information and assignments from their teacher. Students would just have to be made aware that the system would be in place in the event of an emergency. Additionally, the LMS would provide a place for students to submit assignments and to communicate with one another regardless of where they are physically/geographically located. This helps not only during a natural event or disaster (flooding, hurricanes), but also in the case of pandemic school closures or absences due to student illnesses.
2. After putting the LMS in place and requiring regular use in all classes, hold once-a-year or once-a-semester drills to practice using this in an emergency.
Comment by Stephanie Sandifer — September 18, 2009 @ 3:18 pm |
Related to my comment above about the regular use of a Content Management System, please see a post that I stumbled across today that discusses how to use a WordPress blog as a CMS: http://www.andrewcullison.com/2009/09/wordpress-as-a-replacement-course-management-system/comment-page-1/
Nifty idea and much easier for teachers/schools that may not have access to a full CMS installation.
Comment by Stephanie Sandifer — September 18, 2009 @ 5:33 pm |
Good point, Stephanie. I use WordPress for my blogs, and I found it very easy to use. I think it will make a nice tool for teachers–it can be as robust as they need or want.
Comment by Jennifer Roland — September 18, 2009 @ 7:20 pm |
I would caution against using blogs exclusively. Although the author of the referenced blog makes some good points for using them, in my role as an administrator, I think about the unintended consequences for using a public forum to share learning that is supposed to be private within a learning context. There’s more than enough student information out there through their FaceBook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts that has the potential to do more harm than good, specifically when it comes to students trying to sort out their thoughts and feelings on a number of topical ideas. Having that reflection out in the open doesn’t give the student and teacher much of a safe place for learning.
Additionally, there is a matter of fair use and copyright of materials that, at least within a password-protected environment, allows users access they would not normally have. If you put it on your blog, then you are inviting litigious trouble.
Finally, a learning management system is most useful for keeping all of your content and course materials in one place. Why should a student go to multiple storage places to get their content. One can not so easily get their discussion board assignments graded along with a discussion rubric and additional supporting evidence if the teacher uses a blog exclusively. And if not exclusively, then you are going back to many different places. Have an LMS, while in some cases may see clunky, can actually be a dynamic learning and communication environment that, when designed well, can provide a much more integrated learning experience.
Comment by Corey Gin — September 18, 2009 @ 7:42 pm |
I would agree that an LMS is a great choice if your school or district uses one. And if they do, then a lot of the set-up and testing and access issues will likely have been worked out already, which makes things a lot easier when you are in a crisis situation.
A blog is a free solution that just about any teacher could pick up easily. And WordPress blogs can be password-protected so that only authorized users could get in. I believe other blogging platforms allow that same level of privacy, but I don’t remember about Blogger, and I haven’t used other platforms.
Comment by Jennifer Roland — September 18, 2009 @ 7:54 pm |
Well, it appears that the day has come to a close (as least it is 12:21am here in Windsor, Ontario, Canada). I want to thank Jennifer for this guest entry and for her interaction with those who commented. I’d also like to say a particular thanks to those who joined in the discussion. I cautioned Jennifer before we began this process that while the blog statistics tell me that I have a substantial number of readers they can be quiet silent most of the time, preferring to lurk rather than discuss. So I want to let everyone know how much I appreciate the fact that you all have taken the time to respond to Jennifer’s question prompts and interact with her here. Thanks to everyone!
Comment by mkbnl — September 19, 2009 @ 12:23 am |
I’d like to second Michael’s thanks to all of you who commented here. We had a great discussion, and you all gave me some great food for thought.
Now to announce the winner: Marcel Kielkucki was the lucky commenter selected by the random number generator. Please email your address to me at jennifer AT jennifer-roland.com so I can send your copy to you.
Comment by Jennifer Roland — September 20, 2009 @ 8:12 pm |
Hong Kong closed schools due to this epidemic for six weeks in June and Peter Woodhead, studying at the University of Hong Kong, undertook his masters thesis on “The millennial versus swine flu”. The young people used a range of tools effectively and they wished that they could get back to school! Skills levels varied enormously. It is interesting to note that, due to its very high population, Hong Kong also had a prior experience before 2009. Schools opened last week and, if swine flu hits more than 20% of children, the school will close again.
I the external examiner for this Masters in Information Technology in Education and also teach on this topic. With Rick Ferdig I edited the current special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education on professional development for virtual schooling.
Good luck everyone with your adaptations to this crisis. Niki
Comment by Niki Davis — September 21, 2009 @ 6:45 pm |
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