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.

Elluminate discussion

I attended the session on whether or not we take mistakes on the internet as seriously as we would take mistakes in person (and whether we should). This sounded like an interesting topic—reading it made me wonder where I stand on the issue so I was curious to see what others thought, but I also chose it because the description said it would be in an open discussion format, instead of a presentation format. I've worked with elluminate before in my classes and managing participation is very difficult. Usually, students don't participate because they're shy or have technical problems with their mics and I can't call on them or encourage them with gestures and eye contact the way I would in a traditional class room. On the other hand, if people really did get into participating, it would be hard to control the discussion for the very same reasons. When students can't see me or each other, how would anyone know who's turn it was to speak? So, I thought, in addition to the subject matter, I could learn some practical skills about managing an online discussion.

It didn't work out that way. My theory was correct: uncontrolled online discussion can easily get out of hand. But I didn't get any tips on how to prevent it because the entire presentation was completely unstructured. The moderator did not ask specific people to speak or engage them in discussion. She kept talking about her own thing while people, more or less continually, typed comments in the chat box (we'd been asked to set up mics but nobody used them). Very occasionally, she would make a brief comment on one of the chat box entries, then go back to what she had been talking about previously. I was very confused the whole time and didn't participated in the discussion because I felt uncomfortable about “jumping in” and “interrupting” others. One of the things I like about asynchronous communication is that it removes this problem. However, a skillful moderator CAN still conduct a useful and coherent discussion synchronously, if it's done properly, which is what I had hoped but didn't get to see here.

As far as elluminate itself goes, I like the system pretty well. Since I've used it before, there weren't any difficulties, my computer was already configured properly to run it and everything. I've never had a technology problem with elluminate in a student type role. I admit there is a bit of a learning curve thought, especially if you're the moderator. I still hit glitches where I can't get my slides to load properly or forget how to turn on the students mics. Would some students have trouble using this technology? Probably. Downloading the Java support could prove difficult for those who aren't familiar with this process (I don't remember my experience when I had to do this the first time but I think I made my boyfriend do it for me). However, once inside the session the student shouldn't have any problems, if the moderator is doing their job right, since the moderator controls the function of all the tools in the system. The little icons next to the names of the participants do get a little confusing sometimes though. We were supposed to applaud at the end of the presentation and I accidentally raised my hand instead, since the icons for both actions are similar looking hands. Then I saw that several other people had done the same thing. Besides, the point of the presentation was to be accepting of mistakes so its all okay.

I really don't hate all technolog, I sware...

...though I realize my responses are starting to make it look that way.

I was slightly confused by this activity because there are lots of different ways to use a cell phone, not just polling. I already use my cell phone in the course frequently, whenever I am outside my home during office hours, to send and receive real time calls with students. However, I would never use it as polling tool A) because I don't use polls very often and B) my learning platforms all already have built in tools I can use to make polls as part of the class, if I was to desire one. So, when I chose “maybe” as a result on this poll, I meant I would be using my cell phone, but not in this particular way (I felt that was splitting the difference 50/50).

Why do I not usually use polls? Because they usually don't provide detailed information on either end of the poll. As a case in point, note how I found this poll unclear/overly limiting in its interpertation of cell phone use. My teaching style is all about targeted intervention. If a student wants help, they need to contact me and tell me specifically (within their ability to do so) what they need help with. Then I can personalize my response, targeting it to that particular student's needs, which I find to be more effective in most cases. If a poll told me six students needed help with subject verb agreement, should the whole class have to go through a lesson on it? What if all six students don't need help with the same aspect of the problem? A generic response might help only some, or none of them. What about different types of learning styles? In one of my classes there was a discussion board activity that was sort of like a poll, where students had to list their two biggest writing weaknesses. I did think this provided lots of helpful information but because it was a discussion board students were able to able to add a little bit more detail than one or two words. So, should the student who listed subject verb agreement contact me about it later, I could already have a clue about what their particular difficulty was and how best to help them. Further, students were able to back and forth with each other and with me in the forum about their lists so even more information was being generated. The one and done (and possibly anonymous as well) aspect of the poll seems limiting to me, like starting a conversation and then breaking it off right away.

As far as texting or sending messages via cell phone, I think online courses mean, for instructors and students both, that you should be able to go to class any time, not that you should be in class all the time. My google voice number gets turned off when I don't feel like talking to students (don't worry, they can still leave voice mails). I would feel texting students and sending things to their phones to be an invasion of their privacy. Their time is their own unless they've chosen to log into the course or contact me. The only time I would ever initiate syncronous contact with a student without their request is if they were in serious danger of failing the course—hadn't logged in for weeks, been caught cheating, etc. and, even then, I usual send at least one email first requesting a phone conference before jumping right into calling. My point is that, if I wanted to use a poll, I would put it inside the course so the student would access it as part of their class time, instead of on their phone where it might turn into a part of their work or personal time.

Creating my own grammar wiki

I wanted to find a wiki resource on grammar as this is what students seem to have the most trouble with and since wikis are (at least in theory) done by “ordinary people” it will help students feel confident that they do not need to be an expert on this topic. However, I completely failed to find anything of the sort. Almost any search for grammar+wiki, punctuation+wiki, or pretty much anything else +wiki is immediately over-saturated by links to wikipedia. So, I went to wikipedia to see if it would work, or if it had any links to other resources. No luck. It was very heavy on theory and light on practice, which is exactly what student's DON'T need when it comes to grammar. I also found a site called grammar wiki (http://grammarwiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page) which sounded promising. But, sadly, the site is pretty much an empty shell. It doesn't even have a page on subject verb agreement. I think the best plan would be to build a grammar wiki myself, or, even better, have the students build it. One of my classes already has assignments where each student has to teach a grammar concept to the class including examples of the principle in action and methods for fixing mistakes. Students could just post these in a wiki instead of (or in addition to) on the discussion board and gradually add to it each semester. The advantage this has over using a pre-built wiki is that students would get to feel they're doing some thing “real,” they're making a change in the world because their work will remain on the web and be useful to other students in future semesters or even at other schools. Really, I wouldn't even have to bother to build my own shell for this either. I'd have to poke around it a little more but, probably, my students and I could work to expend the existing, but mostly empty grammar wiki. The act of editing a wiki forces the students to own their subject and take the role of an authority which I find is very useful in the long run as one of the biggest difficulties in composition is that many students come in believing they can't do it. Taking the expert role usually makes them uncomfortable at first but, if they stick with it, they get a major boost in their confidence (and writing abilities) by the end of the semester.

Twitter Experience

My experience using twitter was similar to when I tried to run a personal twitter account. I will admit that this was slightly more pleasant in that I already had a pre set group of people to follow and follow me, so I didn't have to just go try to click on random people who would have no idea who I was, and some ideas for things to post. But I still really couldn't get into it because, for me, 140 characters is way too little to say anything useful. Come on, I am an English teacher. I am incredibly verbose. I am also a novelist and my favorite writing models are the ones who are extremely wordy. I honestly don't care about plot when I read. Hundreds of pages of nothing but beautiful description will make me contented and happy as a clam. Anyway, the point here is that for me, trying to write on twitter feels like wearing a straight-jacket. It's not enjoyable at all because I feel I have to turn out an inferior product in order to fit the site's arbitrary rules. Anything I post, I always think how I could have made it better if I'd gone on for another two or three paragraphs. Another thing that really bothers me about twitter is that you can't reply directly to something someone else has said (I use the term “said” loosely considering the character limit). You have to post something in your own feed referencing their comment, which makes it impossible, at least for me, to construct anything like a coherent conversation. Ideas should flow like a good essay, with each point connected to the previous one, even if multiple people are talking. This doesn't work if the ideas are on completely different pages so the participants must hunt for them. In fact, the participants many not even all be aware of each others existence or have access to each others contributions. If someone posted something in response to a comment you're reading, but you're not following that person, you may never know there's a whole different section of the conversation going on. As far as its usefulness in education, I think twitter would be more trouble than it's worth for the reasons I explain above. I would much prefer using a traditional forum or even a blog, where responses can be directly linked to the original post and where there is no character limit. In my eyes, these type of sites have all the advantages of twitter with none of the disadvantages.

And here are some more negative things I wrote about twitter in one of my discussion posts

Do you feel that social networking tools, when used in education, will improve interaction between students?  Between the instructor and students?  Give some specific examples of tools that might improve each of these types of interaction.

I actually think social networking would make communication more difficult when compared to, say, a discussion board. The reason for this is that instructor and students will have to move from web-page to web-page, to find out what each student thinks, instead of having all the material gathered together in one place. For most of my classes students submit their assignments as threads in a discussion board and the other students join the “conversation” by posting responses to the thread. In one class almost all of the assignments are posted in private research journals and I find this much less pleasant and effective because I have to visit each journal individually to read and comment on each assignment. Not only does this make grading take much longer but the dynamic back and forth of the the discussion board, one of my favorite things about online classes, is lost.
If each student had to post up their paper on their Face book page (for example) and other students would have to visit each page to read and comment on the papers, I would be concerned that they would not make the effort to comment on as many papers as it takes a lot more effort (at least mentally) to go to a new web-page than to more to a new discussion thread in the same forum. The other thing that I feel is lost here is the idea of the entire assignment as a whole. Even though each thread in a discussion is an individual conversation, in a forum, different threads can interact with each other. For example, I or another student can refer in one thread to some thing that was discussed in another thread or, if someone gives one student a suggestion a suggestion for avoiding run-on sentences, other students with the same problem can also read and benefit from it. I'm not saying these things couldn't happen on social networking pages, but I do think it would be more difficult see and make use of connections since the conversations are more spread out.
Another issue with communication on social networking sites is privacy in that these sites are not created and administered by the educational institution, unlike a traditional online course. I know that I'm finding myself being more wary about what I post in my blog or twitter feed that I would be about posting in a course forum because I know this material would be available to people outside the course. Yes, I realize most of these sites have privacy settings but this is still problematic. Each student will have to personally “friend” every single other student in the course to get them past the privacy settings. In a learning management system like blackboard this is done automatically by the software when the student registers. What if student conflict develops? Instead of coming to the instructor, students may take matters into their own hands, un-friending each other and thereby depriving the disliked student of participating in discussions (and the points for doing so). Students could hide or delete posts they don't like on their pages which, again would give them the power to deprive others of grades.
Finally, what happens at the end of the semester? If one teacher is using Face book for a class, it is safe to assume others are doing so as well and most of these social networking sites only allow one site per email address (My personal twitter account was bound to my primary email so I had to scrounge for a second email to make my course site on). Since there is a limit to the number of such sites a student can make they may end up having to double up, using the same site for multiple courses, which means potentially confidential information will then become available to students who weren't even in the original course—unless the student takes the time to manually delete or hide all material from a previous courses (Needless to say, the instructor using these sites, faces the same issue on a far greater scale). There is also the issue that a student can freely change their privacy settings during or after a course without the instructor knowing or being able to do anything about it. In my own classes, I feel free to say whatever I want in the understanding that “what happened on blackboard stays on blackboard.” A student's face book page may be set to private when I write something but, at a latter date it may not become private which could cause all kinds of problems. (Incidentally, these problems become even bigger when a student or instructor is trying to manage material for multiple courses on social networking sites at the same time).
I realize I did sort of the opposite of the question above by writing about how social networking could limit communication rather than enhance it. In my defense I simply what to say that I've used social networking extensively in my personal life (I have multiple accounts on My Space, Face book, and Twitter as well as some more obscure sites, like a social networking site specifically for belly-dancers, so I'm not someone who decided to bash this stuff without even giving it a try) and I've hated all of it. From my experience, these sites simply do not work to establish any kind of connection between people and every time I try I feel like I'm going to go crazy.
PS. A final barrier to communication on social networking sites is that they may prove distracting to students. If a student is already on Face book it becomes much more tempting to chat with their other friends on the site than to go comment on a classmate's paper. Even if this only happens once it awhile, it will still reduce the number of comments in the discussion, which is never a good thing.