This week in EDU 643 our focus was all about our students social presence and how we are providing them with opportunities to create a social presence in online learning. We examined this idea through readings and interactive work during synchronous learning over Zoom. This topic aligns with many of the ISTE standards for both students and educators but I feel mostly aligns with the educator standard; Citizen 3a: Create experiences for learners to make positive, socially responsible contributions and exhibit empathetic behavior online that builds relationships and community.
Our main assignment for the week was to analyze a few different tech tools and rate them for effectiveness when it comes to applying the social presence model. Then we picked a tool that we felt was the best for fostering social presence, took a face to face learning task and translated that learning task to online using the tool. To present our work, we created a 5 minute webinar highlighting this lesson and tech tool. I feel that this best aligned with the educator standard Leader 2c: Model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation, and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning. When looking through this weeks activities, I struggled to find something that did not align with ISTE standards in some way. I feel that the standards for both students and educators are flexible enough to be adapted to blended, flipped, and online models that the work that we did seemed to fit well to many different standards. I would say the activity that I initially struggled to see how it applied to our learning was the comment on the student empathy entry. It did not seem to apply to social presence or how we create a community of learners through online learning. However I started looking through many of my peers journals and noticed almost all of our journal entries said the same thing, that our students missed being with their friends. This activity highlighted for a lot of us how our online classes lacked opportunities for students to create their social presence. Not to mention we were creating community cohesion within our own EDU643 class commenting on each others work.
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You clearly know your student well and were able to provide concrete examples on how she was feeling. I noticed how both of our students that we picked had the same feelings about playing the games, missing their friends, and needing family help to do the activities. I struggled with video chats as well but I did one once a week. I think if we are to go back to full online learning I will have to schedule more video conferencing times.
-Comment to Elaine Bundy about empathizing The way you write about Kenzington is absolutely spot on especially your comment about knowing the purple group was the best at reading and math. My students felt the exact same way about DreamBox and missing their friends. Even though they liked Seesaw for some things, they sometimes didn't do the activities but would always use DreamBox! Hopefully iReady will be as successful for us as DreamBox was. I only did video conferencing with my class one time a week because I struggled to envision how learning in kinder would translate over to Google Hangouts. I definitely know I will need to increase my usage of video conferencing again if we are to do virtual learning and use it for more than just social/emotional activities. -Comment to Lena Oliver about empathizing One important skill that students must learn in Kindergarten is the ability to summarize and retell a story. The f-t-f activity that I am moving to online is students being able to retell a story to a partner and the partner asking supporting or clarifying questions. For Instructor Involvement I would be circulating around the room taking notes and providing feedback to the partners.
This kind of activity fosters high use of affective association and community cohesion as this whole activity requires students to verbalize their thinking and take social cues from one another. As a teacher I can observe their facial expressions to determine how they feel about the story and the activity. The students will feel like they are a part of the community when they are able to have their thoughts be affirmed by the listener. The amount of interaction intensity on this assignment will determine the job I have been able to do as a teacher to model proper questioning and responses to questions. This type of activity is not something that I would give to my students without first having many mini-lessons on asking and answering questions as well as listening to story tellers. When it comes to knowledge and experience, this activity allows for the students to become “experts” on a particular book and for them to share their knowledge with their partner. I chose to translate this activity onto the LMS, Seesaw. The reason I chose Seesaw was for the flexibility of how students can present themselves, and the ease on which the different elements of the Social Presence Model can translate into this platform (see SP Rubric). The assignment would be each student would be required to retell a story using the various tools that Seesaw provides. To foster Community Cohesion, they would be required either to make a video or use a mixture of the audio and drawing tools retelling a book of their choice and it would be visible to the whole class. They would also be required to ask one supporting or clarifying question by making an audio comment on another student's posted work. To increase the intensity of the interaction, I would make sure to provide concrete examples of what good open ended questions are and discourage the students from asking yes or no questions. This activity supports Knowledge and Experience as they have the flexibility to show their thinking in different ways. To make sure they get the full Affective Association in the assignment I would record a video of myself retelling a story as an example as well as providing audio examples of how to ask a proper supporting question. To foster Instructor involvement, I would provide that same feedback to each student through audio commenting on Seesaw just like I would when I circulate around the room during the sharing. |
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