23 things

These are what I consider the most important things an online teacher should know/do, to ensure their courses run smoothly.

1.

Be comfortable surfing the web and emailing
2.

If possible, try using some online content in a current ground class
3.

Set up and learn to use a Google voice or similar service for talking with students
4.

become familiar with the procedures and policies of the school you're teaching at
5.

cultivate a good relationship with your content author/department head or whoever go to with questions or problems with your course
6.

If using a course or part of a course written by someone else, always at least skim all the material before beginning to teach it so you know the structure and flow of the course.
7.

Get training in and test run any technology your program expects you to use well in advance of using it with students.
8.

Familiarize yourself with the most common technical problems student encounter and know how to answer them or where to refer them for assistance.
9.

When responding to students, quality should be more important than quantity.
10.

Grade assignments and post results as quickly as possible—the sooner students get feedback, the more time they have to improve.
11.

Recognize the limits of asynchronous and text based communications. If you're emailing back and forth with a student and they're still not getting, go to phone or elluminate and see if voice improves communication.
12.

Time management it key—especially when teaching multiple online classes. Practice “rolling grading”--grade and give out feedback on assignments as they are submitted throughout the week, instead of waiting until after the due date to grade everything.
13.

Be patient—very, very patient, both with students and with technology. It usually takes a full semester teaching at a given school to get the “feel” of a given class.
14.

Keep your cool. Technology screw ups are inevitable. No matter how well you prepared, something can always go wrong. The key is to keep going and find a way to deliver content to deliver content to your students even so.
15.

Get a feel for troubleshooting. Learning to be comfortable tinkering with technology so you can fix things “on the fly” is crucial.
16.

Cultivate a good relationship with someone you know with good computer skills or, if you don't know anyone with this description, at least get to know the ins and outs of your schools technical help.
17.

Remember that your students are people even though you never see them. Always act with compassion and try to insert a human touch whenever possible, as in discussion posts.
18.

Watch all communications carefully. Faceless text communications, either from you or from other students, can sound much harsher than the author intended. Try to sooth any misunderstandings, hurt feelings, or potential conflicts as quickly as possible.
19.

Protect your own privacy. Turn off your google voice, don't answer emails, etc. when you don't want to work on the course. Always respond when you are at your best so your responses can be best too.
20.

Learn everything about cheating and plagiarism online that you can. Find out what, if anything, your school does to prevent these and what it's policy is if cheating is discovered.
21.

Model proper online behavior for your students. Post good responses as examples for them to follow, spell and grammar check everything, and read over before clicking post or send, to encourage them to do the same.
22.

Use your internet search skills to find other content that might be helpful to students. Either keep a collection of URLs to share with students as needed or, even better, find them as needed to answer the particular concerns of your students.
23.

Don't get too distracted by technology. Yes, there's a lot to know in order to make a course “work” online but, despite all the fancy new toys we have, the end goal of online classes is, just like any other class, to deliver quality content so make sure everything you do works towards that end.


Bonus 24. Consider getting an ipad. Get the correct software and become comfortable using it as nice way to make the course more "portable."

Diigo is not my thing

As can probably be seen. I'm not a big Diigo enthusiast. In fact, I haven't visited the site since the day I created it. Part of this has to do with the fact that you have to install a special toolbar to be able to use Diigo and I really don't want to clutter my browser with a bunch of extra too bars. I installed the Diigo tool bar on my copy of internet explorer, which I only use in emergencies to get around this problem. The other reason is that I don't really see the application of Diigo for either personal or educational purposes. If see a site I want to save, I already have a bookmarking feature on my browser that is quicker, easier, and doesn't require me to register, log in, or use a special toolbar. As far as sharing sites with students, most of my courses already have a “useful resources” page of links which students usually don't bother to investigate anyway. In light of this, I rather doubt the would take the trouble to visit an external site to get the links. Besides, since there is already a way to share links with them, why come up with another method that would be more work for both I and them. Actually, if I want to share a link with a student, I email it to them, if multiple students, I put it in a course announcement. That way I can be certain they will at least see it and know its important and, in any of the above methods, I can include a test description of the link as well, just like the feature in Diigo, to let them know what the link is for. No offense to anyone who likes Diigo but it really isn't for me.

Diigo site

Elective--embedding things in blogs

So, we've all done the blog thing (or the wiki-thing) but, to fully exploit this as a teaching tool, some of us may want to go beyond the basics of using a blog to to type entries. Especially if one wants to reproduce a sort of scrap book like this assignment in their own class, they may want their students to embed other media into their blog. Blogger has a built in method for embedding images and videos but other media prove rather difficult. I recently started a blog for my personal writings which I wanted to attach as PDFs. No luck. Eventually, I uploaded the PDF to my google docs account and then programmed a link to this and then I had to adjust my privacy settings so readers could view the document from the blog link but not in any other way. The pros of this method: Every one can easily get and some students may already have a google docs account, which it could be used for many other course activities as well, the process is relatively uncomplicated. Cons: Minimal coding is still required which may be too much for some students, the PDF doesn't look as good in google docs and it would have if it were an openable attachment.
But that was nothing compared to the problems I had trying to put my podcasts up on blogger. Even though blogger lets you attach video and the podcasts play in windows media player, it still would not accept them. What eventually did was upload the podcasts to one of my personal websites, then write code linking from the blog. Pros: it worked. Cons: This method is horribly complicated. Uploading to a free-code website and coding the correct path to link to specific content on such a site are fairly advanced procedures and I had to get my partner to help me. There is pretty much NO way the average student could do this and stay sane. Even if they could, it would certainly distract from the course content. Plus, I'm sure a lot of students don't even have a website to host things on.
So, since then, I've been researching alternate methods of getting audio into a blog. I know, I know, there are literally hundreds of free podcast hosting services. Why did I give myself a huge headache instead of just using one of those? I have this privacy issue about my stuff being displayed out of context—I don't want people listening to my podcasts without reading the blog post to give them context. This may sound weird but it is. Podbean advertises that it has privacy settings but I don't know if you can externally link to them if material is set to private, the way you can with google docs. If you set something to private, I think you need a password to access it, which could get messy, especially if each student has their own account which means you could be juggling 20+ passwords. I also found a site which contains a list of podcast hosting sites which claim to be similar to podbean. If I ever get really serious about using podcasting with students, especially if blogs are also involved, I will consider it a duty to go through everything on this list and find which tool has the best features for education. There isn't an easy solution to this issue, I think. In my searching, I also found several posts on yahoo answers asking about private podcasts and none of the responses were very helpful (the most detailed suggested hosting the podcast from your own website, which is what I did but, as I said, this isn't a great solution for the classroom). The fact that a number of the people asking this kind of question identified themselves as teachers goes to show that I'm not the only one being plagued by this problem. Even if I could find a podcast hosting site that allowed linking to privacy protected uploads, there's still the problem of students potentially having to program the links. As unsatisfying as it may be, I don't have any easy solutions here. However, I can definitely see how being able to imbed different technology tools in blogs could have important educational uses. Other tools that could have similar uses and pitfalls include surveys, prezi presentations, and power point files (though I'm pretty sure at least some of these could be added using the google docs trick).

Plagiarism teach-back

I had so much fun making a podcast last week that I decided to try it again. Here I explore one of the most common forms of cheating on the internet, certainly the most common I encounter: plagiarism of essays. I look at the pros and cons of some of the most common forms of plagiarism detection software as well as situations in which the software doesn't work and common sense is a better option.

Click here to listen to the Plagarism podcast

subject verb agreement podcast

I made this podcast using audacity and it wasn't too difficult as it combined skills I've used before, though I've never put them all together in one. I already had audacity installed since I've used it to edit music files before, which also gave me a basic understanding of how it works but I had never used it for live recording. I also have experience using the mic and headset for real time conferencing in elluminate and, yes, world of warcraft, but had not recorded through it either (okay, well I did try to record my elluminate session once but gave up when I learned my school's account doesn't support recordings so I couldn't access it). So setting up the mic and a new project in audacity were no problem. But I had to look at an internet tutorial to find the record button. After recording, I was also familiar with the playback and editing functions but there was one snag. In audacity, every time you start recording, it opens a new sound track so, when I finished, I had a bunch of little sound snippets in separate tracks, instead of one continuous file, so I had to play around for a while to figure out how to move everything into the same track and the delete the extra ones, saving every couple second to make sure I was safe if I accidentally deleted the wrong thing.

I was very frightened of doing this project because every recording of my voice I have ever heard sounded horribly nasal. I hate the way my voice sounds on tape or over the phone so recording my voice and playing it back was not something I was super comfortable with. But it turned out much better than I thought. I don't know if it's because I have a good mic (I doubt it) or because audacity has very faithful sound reproduction, but the voice came out very clear and normal sounding (still doesn't sound like me but since it also doesn't sound like a five-year-old with a cold, I'll take it). I did learn by looking at the sound wave diagram that I take a lot a breaths when I speak, which can create overly long pauses, but these were easy to edit out. I'm very happy I did this project because it convinced me that creating audio recordings is quick, easy, and doesn't mutilate my voice. As I said, I was leery about this but it was so painless, it's something I'd certainly do again. In the future, I might want to get creative and sync the audio file with a screen capture program so I can include a video of a word document or power point presentation to include visuals as well.


Click here to listen to the Subject/Verb podcast

podcasts on iTunes

I've had no prior experience with pod casts but my boyfriend is a big fan of them so I asked him to help me out on this one. He said that anyone who is anyone has their podcast on iTunes so that's where I went to search which may or may not have been a good idea. The reason it may not have been a good idea was that the searching on iTunes was not easy. When searching for “Thesis Statement” one of the first results is an explicit song with that title by the band Hot Pink Karma....I guess you learn something new every day. For another thing, there was too much over choice and very little information was provided about the contents of the individual entries. Trying to click for additional information usually resulted in the system trying to download the item so I had to mostly guess and had a few false starts before I found a semi-decent podcast. To make matters worse many of the pod casts on the site are no longer available but are not removed for some reason. Thus I would spend a lot of time finding a pod cast that looked promising only to find that I could no longer access it. What I eventually did find was a producer called Stone Writing Center which releases two pod casts called “Essay to Go” and “Grammar to Go” which are designed to provide students with concise chunks of English instruction they can listen to while moving from class to class. It seemed like a good concept and, information-wise, the content is spot on, covering exactly what students (at least freshmen which is basically the level I teach) would need to know. However, I highly doubt I would actually use them in a course because the narrator speaks in a very annoying and condescending tone and interjects comments like “Now I know this seems hard,” or “A thesis statement probably seems like the kind of think only a graduate student could get right” which I fear would make the students feel talked down to (it sure made me feel that way) which is exactly what they DON'T need in their first college level writing course. As far as what instructions I would give to students, iTunes still seems pretty easy to use. If I supplied the name of the pod cast, that should eliminate the search issue and, once the item is found, you just click and it downloads. However, iTunes DOES need to be downloaded and installed so, if I were to use it as a podcast source for my classes (which I'm not sure I would) I would include instructions on how to do these things. This would probably be too much work for the student though, unless I was going to use it more than once or twice in a course.

YouTube citation videos

In one of my classes students are having a lot of trouble with citations and, a couple weeks ago they were complaining about how the online format makes this particularly difficult because it prevents them from being “shown” how to do this, several of them citing the fact that they are visual learners so text learning doesn't work for them. I suggested they see if they could find any instructional videos on YouTube to help them out (with the caveat that not everything on the site is exactly...um...high quality) and did a quick pass myself to see what was there. What I found out was that it is very easy to find masses of videos on this topic. However, as I discovered when I decided to pursue this topic in more detail for this assignment, finding videos of good quality and/or that answer the specific questions my students are having trouble with, proved much more difficult. For one thing, labeling of YouTube videos are often mislabeled so that videos that SAY they are about citations or bibliographies are mostly about general formatting tips. Still it only took me about twenty minutes to find what I wanted (largely because I got lucky and happened to click on the right one). However, the good feature of YouTube is that, when you find one video, it links you to other videos by the same person and so I was actually able to find several videos at once. The videos I found were “Embedded Citations or In-Text References “ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssgJ2fnZPc and “Bibliography Dos and Don'ts” (actually a whole series of videos) http://www.youtube.com/user/loots1964#p/u/62/jzc9Ny9wQ1g which were both produced by loots1964 which I discovered is the channel for New Canaan High School Library Media Center. This explains why they were actually quality videos: they were made by experts who actually know what they are doing. In the future, I would definitely refer students who are having trouble with this topic to these videos as they seem very detailed and clear to follow. I don't think this would require any special instructions for students since YouTube is pretty user friendly (at least in terms of playing videos if not of finding them). It doesn't require you to register for anything or download or install anything in order to use it. All you have to do is click on the video. In this regard it is perfect for student use as the risk of frustration is kept to a minimum. I would, however, recommend pre-selecting videos very carefully if you plan to make this a major part of your course.