How should an online lesson begin? Generally with a warm and gracious greeting and a teacher’s smiling face. Students should feel seen and cared about. They should see their teacher’s face and also be seen. Then we should get down to learning. And the first step in that is often making sure students have everything they…
Good online instruction will probably always involve a combination of synchronous and asynchronous methods. After all they have different strengths and limitations. Synchronous instruction allows us to connect with students and build relationships. And it lets us understand and support their learning in real time. But asynchronous instruction deals better with technology problems: it resists glitchy…
I’ve been writing a lot here lately about the synergies between synchronous and asynchronous lessons- about how they balance each other out and how a good lesson could actually be a hybrid, moving back and forth between synchronous and asynchronous activities…. it needn’t be one or the other. After Darryl Williams put together an amazing lesson…
A colleague who’s in charge of a large district wrote me recently to ask about scheduling teacher and student time this fall with her district most likely going online. At first I almost said, “Honestly, I just don’t know.” Because really I don’t. I don’t run schools directly and therefore don’t have to weigh all the…
I’m happy to post another really useful example of a video with some good ideas for online instruction. This one comes from Chloe Hykin and her colleagues at Marine Academy Plymouth, in Plymouth, England. The opening of Chloe’s asynchronous lesson is a really well executed example of some things we’ve been describing on this blog: Warm,…