Week 11 Reflection

Key Points

The reading on ‘Preparing K-12 Teachers to Teach Online’ by Kearsley and Blomeyer (2004) explains the importance of preparing online teachers to enable them to do their job well. According to the reading, online teachers should:

• ·        be able to dedicate 2 hours at least every day online (teaching presence)
• ·        respond frequently and supply frequent feedback to students’ postings
• ·        be flexible and accommodating in her teaching approach
• ·        be confident to do online teaching
• ·        know the appropriate workload a course should have
• ·        know where to turn to when challenges are face (technical, administrative, etc)
• ·        be able to develop and design online learning materials that would best suit their students
• ·        etc., etc., etc.

In a nutshell, I think before a teacher is engaged in online teaching, training is paramount. The facilitator needs to be made aware of what online learning encompasses; how to develop an effective online course; what is out there that she can use in her online class to enhance the learning. Without prior knowledge of these things, the online course or learning will surely fail, and I am talking from experience. With my EL001 course, it was a failure because there was zero interaction and/or student engagement mainly because

“the facilitator had no awareness or idea of what encompassed online learning when she was asked to put her course on Moodle in 2010; neither were there any pre-training as to the use and benefits of online learning. The facilitator was made to believe that all that mattered was the content, and as long as there was one on the Moodle shell, everything was fine” (Laupepa, 2012; 5).

If an online teacher knows what online teaching and learning entail, she would know what activities to use that would best get her learners engage more with each other, with the content and with the teacher; what tools to use that would best relay course content and information to learners, and those also that would best obtain optimum results from students.

Doing ED403 course sheds light into the many things, ideas, tools, activities, etc, etc, that I can use in my online course (future). An example is a story that I created this morning using the Storybird online tool, which can be accessed from this link http://storybird.com/books/my-experience-of-ed403/?token=5rp48d. I think this is an excellent tool to promote language learning in particular.

I also came across this link http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/janehart/toptools2012/2 where we can access many online learning tools, scrutinize them and use them to our advantage.

Looking forward to learning more!