Remote Skills for Next Semester
As the new semester approaches, K12 teachers should review all their synchronous and asynchronous online remote skills. While educators have learned so much, there are increasingly new ways to apply those skills. COVID-19 variants are still able to disrupt public life, educators can expect individual to large-scale educational disruptions and should plan accordingly to harness all the collective wisdom we have learned since March of 2020.
Synchronous Strategies
Educators still need to consider Technical Tips for Zoom Teaching and Teaching Activities within Zoom. K12 educators want to consider how their traditional lecture can be reimagined with interactive notetaking online. Educators should limit trying to replicate the classroom, but still meet the needs of their administrator’s requirements for the current school year. Consider using modern tools to replace many of the classroom discussions with online discussions.
The future still holds potential schedule disruptions and increasing demand for asynchronous online K12 education. The best place for classroom teachers to dedicate their efforts is to build up their asynchronous learning resources to free up time to meet with smaller groups of students {Read: Be an Online Teacher to be Proud of!}.
K12 will continue to normalize synchronous in the online teaching and learning space until families are better able to articulate how K12 online can meet their needs. Look for future disruptors to K12 online teaching and learning to offer more self-paced, asynchronous opportunities for learners and their families. K12 who do not adapt to those evolving demands will lose families to non-public options.
Online Platforms
As online teaching and learning evolve, online platforms will standardize. Expect schools and districts to purchase one learning management system either independently or through a state consortium. Online content will be produced at a state level by vendors in a more customized way than textbooks were twenty years ago. The upsides of this trend os that individual teachers will customize content versus working with a text approved by the states of Texas, California, or New York and content can be updated as needed/available.
Learning Management System
The leaders in K12 learning management systems (LMS) are Canvas by Instructure and Schoology. As online teaching and learning continue to grow, online activities will move from synchronous to asynchronous within LMS. Watch for more LTI tools and Common Cartridges to work with these two LMS {Read: P.S. About Google Classroom}.
Web Conferencing
The LMS can offer a stable asynchronous setting that makes the synchronous settings, such as web conferencing more effective. Web conferencing can transition from a replication of the ineffective instructional practice of whole group lecture with interactive note-taking/scaffolding of small intervention groups for instruction.
Design Strategies
In HLT’s Instructional Design category many versions of independent ways to design your online classroom. When designing within an LMS, components, such as a course, elements of a lesson or just a stand-alone online experience consider the project from the smallest unit of design. But the instructor that designs the learning environment instead of only reacting to the ever-changing online teaching and learning landscape uses the lessons already learned to craft the future online classroom.
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