“How To Teach Online” With Online Music Teacher Andrew Mercer

Andrew Mercer is a music teacher with the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.  He’s been teaching music online with the CDLI now for well over a decade (probably coming upon two decades in the next year or two).  Recognizing that many of his colleagues across the province were going to find themselves teaching using online tools during the Fall semester – at least for portions of their time – he’s been creating these three to six minute videos that provide advice based on his year’s experience that he was posting to Facebook.

Anyway, I reached out to him and he was willing to add them to YouTube as well, so I could embed these videos below, along with the descriptions for each.

How to Teach Online – Episode 1 – Student Cameras On or Off – Zoom-Google Meet

Student Cameras On or Student Cameras Off – Here are some of my thoughts on the use of student cameras during Google Meet/Zoom class sessions. Please share your thoughts and strategies below :)

One caveat, many communities have HORRIBLE bandwidth. There will be some students who will not be able to use video during their classes. We need consider this during class planning. There are strategies we can use to engage students in these low-bandwidth situations. We can chat about these as well.

How to Teach Online – Episode 2 – Dealing with Glitchy Sound and Video

Music Teachers: Are you getting glitchy video and sound in your Google Meet/Zoom/FaceTime sessions? Here are a few thoughts on how to get rid of those glitches

How to Teach Online – Episode 3 – Planning for September

Episode 3 – Music Teachers: What do we teach FIRST in Sept? I suggest that you do not jump right into the curriculum in Sept. Take some time to let the students get comfortable with the medium (you too). Push back the curriculum for a little bit and start the year by focusing on getting everyone comfortable with the new learning environment. :) Please share your thoughts?

How to Teach Online – Episode 4 – Student Engagement

Episode 4 – Keeping students engaged in Google Meet and working with individual students while in a group session.

When teaching online we need to use synchronous (G-Meet) and asynchronous (G-Classroom) together to maximize student engagement. When covering a topic in Meet(synchronous) with a full class have supporting materials in G-Classroom that students can work with during the class(asynchronous). Plan times during your Meet session when you can asks student to work on this asynchronous material. During these times you can work 1 on 1 with student who need some extra help.

To work with an individual student in private you just need to open a new tab in your browser and start a new Meet session. Send an invite only to the student who needs help. This will create a private break-out room. Both you and the individual student will be in both rooms. When you are done helping the student you can just close the room and return to the full class.

How to Teach Online – Episode 5 – Taking Attendance and Promoting Engagement in Virtual Learning

Episode 5 – Taking Attendance and Promoting Engagement in and Online Class
Using the Record feature in Google Meet creates a text document of all the texts made by yourself and your students during a Meet session. This text document is automatically saved in your Google Drive for you. You can use this feature to not only complete your attendance but also systematically keep your students engaged throughout the session.

K-12 Online Learning and Music

This came through my inbox via the iNACOL group on LinkedIn a while back.

iNACOL

	January 25, 2012 Latest: Discussions (1) Online Music Education’s Elephant in the Room Started by Mark Burke, CEO and Innovation Planner at viaEdTechnologies

This caught my attention because of some work that Elizabeth Murphy has done in the past.

• Teacher Tube – Learner-centered teaching with technology 
• YouTube – Learner-centered e-teaching:Part 1
• YouTube – Learner-centered e-teaching:Part 2

Anyway, you can access the group link directly from http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Online-Music-Educations-Elephant-in-100728.S.90987004

Video: Learner-Centered E-Teaching – A Discussion

In an attempt to “create and publish a post that includes one embedded piece of media… [and] try to engage your audience by including a discussion question after you have embedded the media,” as was the task for the Day 4 – 7 Days To A Better EduBlog, I wanted to discuss one of the videos posted by Elizabeth Murphy related to her work on K-12 online teaching.

The video was created as a part of the Killick Centre for E-Learning Research (note: you can view all of their videos here), and it is described as:

Can you teach music over the Internet? How? Can you teach with Youtube? Nirvana? Piczo? Audacity? Billboard? Newsfeeds? Can you teach in a way that is engaging for the learner?

What does it mean to be a learner-centered teacher of music in a technology-mediated context? I created this video to answer this question. The video is a knowledge mobilization outcome that is part of of a collaborative inquiry in which Andrew Mercer(the teacher profiled in the video) and Andrea Rose, School of Music, Memorial University are participating.

In listening to the music teacher, Andrew Mercer, talk about how he uses technology to engage his students in the online environment I was impressed by the range of tools being used beyond the virtual classroom and the course management system – from Piczo to RSS feeds to podcasting to YouTube.  However, what I didn’t hear was much beyond the typical notion that teachers need to be where the students are already.  I find this idea that we need to meet the students where they live an interesting one, because it assumes that somehow the environment they inhabit is one that is better for learning or that it is better for teachers to teach in their world than for the teacher to expect them to learn in “our world” (and I put “our world” in quotes because somehow the world of the teacher has become an old, antiquated and even useless space).  My good friend Darren has made several videos focused solely upon this premise – that teachers need to inhabit (or at least teach from) the world’s their students inhabit (see Top Education Videos of 2009-2010 for some recent examples).

I often discuss with my colleagues – both teachers who are proficient with technology and with other educational technology faculty – why technology has had so little impact upon education.  Some would argue that it is because many school’s haven’t had access to technology, although I think the work of Larry Cuban has called that notion into question.  Others have argued that it is because teacher’s haven’t been trained to integrate technology effectively into the classroom, but that would essentially means that all of the technology integrations courses in all of the teacher education programs across Canada and the United States were ineffective (which I’d suggest was highly unlikely).  More have argued that it is the older teachers that don’t use technology and influence novice teachers into following the same patterns, but the recent research from Walden University seems to blow that myth out of the water.

So there are two questions here in my opinion…  Should teachers make the effort to teach using the technology today’s students are using?  If so, how are we going to get them to do that? Some will say that the nature of today’s student demands that we do.  I’d remind those folks that the vast majority of research points to the fact that generational differences are largely overstated – and the ones related to technology and how students think or learn are total fabrications.

I know that there has been a persistent argument within the K-12 online learning field about the need for online learning because of the students’ pervasive access to and use of technology.  If you’ve ever heard one of the opening address that Susan Patrick has given at any of the last three or four Virtual School Symposiums, than you’ve heard that line of reasoning.  Personally, I believe in what the research tells me.  The research indicates that students don’t learn differently today than they have in previous generations.  The research is also fairly consistent in telling me that computer-assisted instruction (from technology integration to online learning) has minimal effects on student achievement.  The research has shown that teacher effects can have a significant impact, which means that a good teacher – with or without technology – can have a meaningful affect on their students.

Some time ago, I attended a conference on teaching and learning held at the University of Windsor.  One of the staff at their Centre for Teaching and Learning gave me a button that read: “Pedagogy before technology.”  And that is something I fear we have lost in this quest to teach where the students live.

At about the four minute mark, Andrew says, “I’m not interested in incorporating technology into my teaching practice unless there is a valid, pedagogical use for it.”  For me, this is the question we should be asking – not “Should teachers make the effort to teach using the technology today’s students are using?  If so, how are we going to get them to do that?”  What is the pedagogical value of using that shining object?

But that’s just me.  What do you think?  As you watch this video, what are your first impressions? After you’ve had a chance to sit back and mull it over, what about the video touched you the most?  Why?

Note: To see more of Elizabeth Murphy‘s videos, visit http://www.youtube.com/user/elizmurphy#g/u.

More International K-12 Online Learning Articles

First of all, for those of you in higher education that have an interest in educational technology, educational psychology, cognitive science, or teacher education – really education in general – you should make sure that Educational Research Journals – http://edresearchjournals.blogspot.com/ is in your RSS reader.  As this blogger simply posts the table of contents of dozens, maybe hundreds of different journals as he finds/receives them.

Anyway, following up on yesterday’s Some Virtual School Articles entry, one of the table of contents that he posted yesterday was ScienceDirect Alert: Computers & Education, Vol. 53, Iss. 3, 2009.  Some of you may remember that one of my dissertation co-chairs and I published an article with Computers and Education earlier this year.

Barbour, M. K., & Reeves, T. C. (2009). The reality of virtual schools: A review of the literature. Computers and Education, 52(2), 402-416.

Anyway, in the most recent issue of Computers and Education they have continued their K-12 online learning focus:

Finnish high school students’ readiness to adopt online learning: Questioning the assumptions
Pages 742-748
Teemu Valtonen, Jari Kukkonen, Patrick Dillon, Pertti Väisänen

‘Evaluating a music e-learning resource: The participants’ perspective’
Pages 541-549
Frederick Seddon, Michele Biasutti

I’m not positive the second one is about K-12, as my university’s online database is one issue behind the current one, but it looks promising.  If someone has access to these let us know how they are, or if someone reminds me in about three months I’ll take a look then.

E-Teaching In The Virtual High-School Classroom

I don’t know if I have posted this before, as I’ve talked about Elizabeth Murphy a number of times in over the past year and a half (see Spotlight on Elizabeth Murphy, Virtual School Project in Newfoundland, K-12 Online Learning Research Being Done In Newfoundland, Second Language Learning Online, High School Teachers’ Beliefs About Learner-Centred E-Learning, Learner-Centred E-Teaching, and TeacherTube Videos).

Anyway, I came across an item a few days ago entitled, “E-teaching In The Virtual High-School Classroom” – which is a two pager outlining her work on a project that was looking at online teaching in a provincial virtual school through the lense of activity theory