Wow! This week has sent my wheels a spinnin' as I attempted to plan my first asynchronous and synchronous discussion. As I have never taught an online class or course, I think planning would truly be the greatest hurdle to overcome. Just as I struggled with planning for classroom lessons in my early years of teaching, I found myself going over and over and over (you get the idea) the synchronous portion of our assignment. Do I have enough for 15 minutes? To much for the time frame? Will my classmates participate? Will I stutter and stumble? Is my lesson idea ridiculous? Is there any sort of engagement for my classmates whom I'm facilitating? I am working on making a list of ideas that fit with
my prompts for the lesson as well as a list of questions I can ask my classmates to help encourage critical thinking and/or participation if necessary. I hope that being prepared helps to alleviate my nerves as well as assists with the fluency of my lesson. Some things that I feel are really important to consider about synchronous and asynchronous facilitation as I prepare to facilitate my threaded and web conference discussions are what questions I can ask to jump-start thinking, what I can use as an anticipatory set to begin the lesson, and ways to allow my classmates to interact during lesson with each other and the whiteboard.I chose my discussion topic--Skills and Strategies Online Facilitators Should Possess in O
rder to Meet the Needs of Students and Parents--in order to satisfy my own curiosities about online teaching. I'm quite confident in my abilities as a classroom teacher and am interested how much of what make and effective classroom teacher crosses into the land of online facilitation. Additionally, upon uncovering what skills and strategies are necessary as an online facilitator, I'm hoping to re-energize my classroom teaching practices as well as be better prepared to teach online should the opportunity ever present itself.
Developing the rubrics for the asynchronous and synchronous portions of my lesson were probably the easiest for me as I have a lot of experience building rubrics and feel pretty confident in my ability to do so. As I developed the rubric for the asynchronous portion of my lesson, I included a conventions and fluency value. As an English teacher, I couldn't let it go... As a result of making that choice, I weighted the contributions column double that of the conventions/fluency column. The synchronous rubric was more difficult to construct than the asynchronous. It seems strange that that was the case, but how do you determine criteria that's general enough to cover the specifics of participation? The big question I kept in mind the entire time was "What objectives am I assessing?"
