I had a colleague who sent me the following message a few days ago.
I would like to tap your expertise if that’s okay. I am teaching a course in Online Teaching this summer and while I have plenty of resources/background for online teaching in higher ed, this course specifically covers online teaching in K-12, which I know you’ve worked in for years. Would you have a list of resources, seminal reports, papers, etc. that I *should* know about? If not, is there a professional organization of some kind that might?
My response at the time was:
I could recommend the following blog entries I have posted over time:
There is also a professional association, iNACOL – http://www.inacol.org . Although I will say that the organization tends to act more as a lobby group than a traditional professional association.
Upon reflection, I think the Travel Day – Top 12 Academic Articles might be the most useful of my three suggestions – largely due to the fact that I have broken it down into categories (two of which are focused on asynchronous and synchronous instruction). The Top Three Must Reads For Graduate Students might also be a bit more useful than the Top Five Reports, mainly due to the fact that the graduate student one is designed to provide an overview for those new to K-12 online learning.
What about from you dear readers? What suggestions would you make to my colleague who has a strong background in online teaching and that literature base, and is just looking for a few items to bring that K-12 focus?
12 Unique Blogs Are Written By Professors
Virtual School Meanderings 
I’m so glad you asked this question. I’m trying to learn as much as I can about what works – especially for middle school students as I prepare to teach my first online middle school class. After 3 “semesters” of watching our school trying to ‘discover’ the best way to provide our students a chance to participate in online learning opportunities, I’m noticing that many of the opportunities available to middle school students assume that the learning environment is similar to high school. For example, in the K-8 environment that I teach in, students do not have a “study” hall or “block of time” that can be designated each day as their “online line class”. They don’t have scheduled ‘free time’. The week is filled with such a variety of active learning activities that are based around ‘learning communities” that it almost takes more “executive function” or “responsibility” for a middle school students to figure out how to make it work in their week, than it does a high school student who might schedule a “study hall” every day to work on an online class. Also, there is a huge difference developmentally between a 7th grade boy and a 7th grade girl- so how do we structure online learning that takes into account that kids in middle school might be more diverse developmentally than you might expect. I also think that a 15 week class is a LONG time for a middle school student to sustain the pace needed to successfully complete an online class. It seems that 5 weeks would be a more realistics amount of time for an online learning module for that age group. I would love to hear how others are successfully implementing virtual learning in middle schools. We are having some great success stories, but for every “success” we have, we are learning at least 2 ways NOT to do it, and I worried that a child’s identity as a learner is being shaped by both our “successes” and “misses”. Scouting for advice that will work for middle school kids (Grades 5-7)
Comment by Lucie deLaBruere — April 4, 2011 @ 7:01 pm |
Lucie, you are right that there is little research on anything but the secondary students. I’ll take some time to think about this and see if I can find some resources for you and turn this into an entry sometime next week.
Comment by mkbnl — April 5, 2011 @ 4:55 am |
[…] week or so ago I posted an entry entitled Advice About Online Teaching In K-12. One of the folks who commented on that entry wrote: I’m so glad you asked this question. […]
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