1. Have you ever used online communication in your classroom before? If so, detail your experiences. If not, what has prevented you from using online communication tools?
2. Identify one online communication tool you can use in the classroom and discuss how you will prepare your students for using this communication tool.
First, let's start with question one. In my classroom, I use various forms of online communication on a daily basis. I established a website that is equipped with a guest book which serves as a "mini forum" for the students to use. On this guest book, students, parents/guardians, and I can communicate back and forth in an asynchronous fashion. Secondly, my website features a blog where I post about various activities taking place in my classroom each week. I feel this really helps the parents/guardians get involved with their student's education by seeing what the students will be learning and completing in school. Also, students can check the blog on Sunday nights to see what they'll be learning about throughout the week to get mentally prepared for the instruction.
There are a ton of other forms of online communication that are available for me to use on my website. Some examples include a forum, an instant messenger chat program, a wiki, and a VoIP. I plan to incorporate more of these functions at a later date.
Another way I've used online communication is by setting up student email accounts. Our district setup a program where students in grades 3, 4, and 5 are given an email account through the school. Each student is responsible for his/her password and must change the password every 30 days. Though I didn't use this online communication to its fullest extent, I feel I made the students more familiar with using electronic mail and constructed the support for future use.
I also briefly experimented with a website called "Epals" where students could create accounts and post messages on a forum. However, after allowing students to browse the site and post a few times, I concluded that the software was too difficult at the time to continue using it. The students had trouble locating others' posts and responding to each other, so I decided to pursue other avenues for communicating online.
Question two asks me to brainstorm ways that I can use one type of online communication in my classroom. On my website, there's an application I can utilize that allows the students and I to make video blogs using a web cam. Also, coincidentally, our school has an abundance of barely used web cams available for me to check out from the library. I think it'd be neat to have the students create mini video blogs explaining concepts or processes they learned in the classroom. I would then keep all the videos organized in an online archive that could be accessed on my site.
Not only would this help struggling students better understand the content by watching and re-watching videos of interest, but it would also help the students making the video blogs internalize what they've learned. I strongly believe that a student who can teach a certain lesson has a pretty good grasp on the material. Lastly, by incorporating this form of online communication and strengthening the level of technology in my curriculum, I feel I will have motivated students and differentiated instruction to support them.
To prepare my students for creating video blogs, I will have to show them how to hook up a web cam and how to use it once it's ready to go. I can introduce terms like USB to them while doing so. Secondly, I'll need to teach my students how to create an account on my website so that they may post video blogs on it. Like with setting up the web cam, this should be a simple procedure to explain. Lastly, I'll need to show my students how to locate and use the video blog application installed on my page. This may be trickier than the first steps but shouldn't be an insurmountable task. In order for the students to make the video blog, they will need to practice what they're going to say and can even script out their procedures. I believe the students may be nervous at first but would eventually become more accustomed to being recorded.
Before using this form of online communication, I would make sure to go over our district's acceptable use policy with the students so that nobody does anything inappropriate on the website or on a video blog. I would also attain parent/guardian permission before recording or publishing any blogs from students. Lastly, I would make my website private to where it could only be viewed from site members like parents, students, and other educators in the building. By taking these safeguards into consideration, I feel I would provide the best possible online experience for my students.
To sum it all up, it's easy to see that the "way of the world" is changing and things are becoming more and more reliant on online communication. For instance, how many newspaper companies do you know that don't have an online version of their product? How many companies can you find that don't sell merchandise online? The answer: not many. Since the world is evolving and technology is becoming more prevalent, we, as educators, must instill a level of technological literacy in our students to prepare them for the "real world" and life outside of school. Isn't that our ultimate goal anyways? Using forms of online communication is just a small step in the right direction but every journey must start with a first step.
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