Given all of the various resources, programs, techniques, and skills that I have covered I wanted to create a brief summary of all I learned and how it has altered my teaching philosophy. To start, everything I have learned thus far was to attempt to integrate technology into the classroom. As the Coronavirus swept across America, it became even more clear just how important technology integration into the classroom was. So although I was learning how to prepare for online instruction, I very quickly found myself also having to participate in online instruction for my other classes during my teaching preparation course. This gave me some unique insight into what online instruction looks like.
As a general observation, I think that offering online instruction while in class could be extremely beneficial for students. Technology has been so integrated into society that it’s important to make sure we teach students an ethical and responsible way to use technology while also gaining skills that they can use later on in either their academic or professional career. I found that assignments and skills that work the best are ones that are able to combine critical thinking with design. Some examples of the assignments that do this are the infographic, 5 picture story, and the digital story. These assignments are also very easily adaptable and can be used by various different teaching instructional strategies such as collaborative learning, self-guided teaching, and others. My favorite assignment that I intent to use is the podcast assignment. This assignment offers the greatest degree of flexibility and creativity while also focusing on some incredibly important skills and integrates technology use. This assignment literally gives students their voices and the opportunity to talk about social justice issues and their relationship to media and literacy. The podcast assignment also teaches students how to better anticipate future conversations, how to craft and design conversations, how to conduct research and use it during the podcast, and many other skills depending on how the podcast assignment is set up. For my classroom, I want to use this after each book read to have students discuss the ways in which they can tie the topics, characters, themes, events, and other literary devices related to modern media and modern society. As for my own personal experience with online instruction, I have had lot of online instruction over the years and I’d like to offer some insight and tips on how help students who are taking online instruction for any reason. First, time management is key to successful online instruction. Without the structure of having to go to class each day, the burden of managing enough time for the instruction and assignments falls on the students. For this reason, consider doing the assignment to see how long it takes you and then double it for your students. If the amount of work exceeds an hour a night, expect students to fall behind because students will have other classes as well and may not have that kind of time depending on their family life, internet access, or other reasons. Second, make sure that your instructions are extremely clear. If possible, have someone who is not a teacher read your instructions. If they are confused by the assignment the students will be as well. Teachers will not be around to provide assistance or support to students as easily or immediately as they do in a classroom. So when designing lessons for instruction, try make sure that the information is concise, but understandable and that you provide amble modeling, examples, and elaborate rubrics or instructions to help students. Lastly, offer students variety of options. Online instruction offers a great deal of flexibility for students to explore various programs, conduct meaningful research, and create digital art. Have students take their reading, writing, and analytical skills and apply them to various technology based assignments. This helps students stay engaged as it reduces the monotony of instruction, integrates the use of their own technology, and it helps students better understand different forms of creative expression and knowledge demonstration. This is also beneficial if a teacher is using a portfolio grading approach as it offers a variety of choices for the students to select the work that they believe demonstrates their knowledge and skill the best.
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