Translating Old School Techniques into Online Instructional Strategies: Repurposing strategies that we love!

Streamed Session

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

Traditional teaching methods often seem useless when it comes to online learning. With tweaking, we can transform some familiar techniques into our digital classrooms.

We will take a few old-school, in-person instructional methods and translate them into interactive, online teaching strategies that will increase student engagement and active learning.

 

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Kelly Jackson Charles, The University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus

Dr. Kelly Jackson Charles serves as a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus in Antigua and Barbuda. She has a PhD in Higher Education Administration from Morgan State University, and Masters degrees in both Special Education and School Administration from Fayetteville State University. She has teaching certifications from Harvard University in Higher Education Teaching and Learning and Media and Technology in Education. She is currently enrolled in the Masters of Computer Information Technology program at UPenn. She has taught K-12 for over 15 years and served as a building principal and district administrator in the USA. She also served as a tenured Associate Professor of Education, Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Director of Accreditation and Assessment in higher education institutions. She conducts professional development sessions in assessment and accreditation for international audiences. Her research interests include integrating media and technology in the classroom, differentiated instruction, teaching exceptional children, student learning outcomes assessment and specialized and regional accreditation. Dr. Jackson Charles has a number of books, articles and successful grants on Online Teaching and Learning, Students with Disabilities in Higher Education, Teaching Exceptional Children, 21st Community Learning Centers, and Assessing Student Learning Outcomes. Dr. Jackson Charles currently serves on the Teacher Education Board for MERLOT, as a newly invited peer reviewer for the Caribbean Journal of Education and is a longstanding member of the Council for Exceptional Children and The National Science Teaching Association. She has also received a number of awards for teaching, public service, mentoring and research in higher education. She lives in Antigua and Barbuda with her husband, Curtis. They have four adult children and four grandchildren.

Co-presenter: Nicole Arrighi, Tennessee State University

Professor and Educational Technology coordinator in the Department of Teaching & Learning at Tennessee State University. In addition, she serves a senior member of the National Education Association’s Content Quality & Review board recommending online professional development courses to the NEA Academy. Dr. Arrighi also works as an online instructor for the Tennessee Board of Regents – TNeCampus (including 8 years as a faculty mentor) and taught five years as an educator for Metro-Nashville Public Schools. Honored as a 2015 Women of Distinction in the field of education, Dr. Arrighi trains teachers and students on how to incorporate technology into the classroom, presents nationally and internationally on topics such as classroom management, Millennial learners, and digital citizenship, and continues to work diligently in her field preparing pre-professional educators for teaching, learning, and advocacy of children and public education. Her higher education online training and consulting involved several historically black institutions, K-12 school districts, and internationally in England, Senegal, and most recently the United Nations (UNESCO) 2014 mobile learning week. Dr. Arrighi, an eighteen-year member of the National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliate, the Tennessee Education Association (TEA); displays her advocacy through service as a faculty advisor for student members at her University and previously held a position as higher education board member and president of the TEA-Department of Higher Education. Dr. Arrighi consults as a technology, classroom management, and student advocate trainer. In addition, she has been featured in Association publications and commercials for which she hopes “individuals we see the true spirit all educators who give so much to educate today’s youth!” As a member of International Forum for Women in eLearning, Phi Delta Kappa, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated and other professional organizations, Dr. Arrighi encourages mentoring and networking as a means of building community, developing citizenship and responsibility, and promoting a society in which everyone's role is valued.

Additional Authors

Loretta Driskel, Clarkson University

As the senior instructional designer at Clarkson University in New York State, my passion is creating engaging, diverse teaching and learning experiences for students and faculty. I am recognized as an Open SUNY Fellow Expert Online Instructional Designer and am also a certified Quality Matters Master Reviewer; I have reviewed or observed hundreds of online and blended course using various checklists including the OSCQR. I am the editor of the MERLOT Teacher Education Editorial Board and a MERLOT Peer Reviewer Extraordinaire. Since earning my NYS teacher certification and a Master’s degree in Educational Computing from Buffalo State College in 2000, I have enjoyed teaching in higher education. Also I have had the pleasure of using my entrepreneurial skills to start several businesses, the most recent being Mobile Tech Mentor, computing services for those who need a little help. I have presented at a wide variety of venues over the last 15 years or so, such as Moodle Moot, Quality Matters, ADEIL, Online Learning Consortium, Sloan-C International Online Learning, Sloan-C Blending Learning, eLearning Consortium of Colorado Conference, SUNY Online Learning Summit (SOL) (DOODLE), Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference (TLT) and the Conference on Instructional Technologies on topics such as Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale: Development of an interactive, baseline professional development initiative ; Our Moodle Template: Who, what, why and how?; Building a Bridge to Success: Meeting Your Students Where They Are; Enhance Your Online Course and Engage Your Students with Video; Add Zest to the Final Project!; Adventures in Energy Course Redesign: Can You Say Solar Photovoltaic?; Online Course Quality; Emerging Technologies for Online Learning and Opening the Gate: How You and Your Students Will Benefit from Open Educational Resources; Course Redesign Made Easy with SoftChalk; Using Macromedia Captivate to Create Online Tutorials, and Small Business Development &; Online Environment &; Program Level Quality and more.

Extended Abstract

Technology use has an influence on the students’ scope of teaching and learning; yet its presence in the education sector is varied amongst tools, resources, and implementation. Teacher education candidates are participating in preparatory programs that require 21st knowledge and skills; yet the modeling amongst higher education faculty and their K-12 practitioner mentors are skewed. The ideas of effective technology integration are faced with challenges on teaching philosophies, user gaps between digital immigrants and natives, teacher performance evaluation indicators, and access to the appropriate tools in the instructional setting.

National education organizations and accrediting agencies endorse practitioners (at all levels) to demonstrate technology-rich knowledge, skills, and dispositions for a generation of Millenials and their digital successors. Professional educators make thousands of decisions in a face-to-face classroom environment that together contribute to the learning progress of students, from direct instruction techniques to the development of classroom culture to student support strategies. In an online or blended learning environment, a lot of these instructional decisions must be reconsidered and more explicitly communicated.

Do traditional teaching methods often seem to you to be difficult to apply when it comes to online and blended learning? For example, did you discard the socratic method, group games, and learning stations unless your students were sitting in your classroom?

With a little tweaking, we can transform some familiar techniques from the in-person environment into our digital classrooms. In this session we will give you the “Sam’s Club” approach by showcasing a few of the strategies that with a little adjusting, can be taken from the brick and mortar classroom straight into the virtual environment.

You can expect to be asked about methods you have used in brick and mortar classrooms and actively participate in a sampling of these strategies and take away a list of others you can customize to your online teaching needs.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

  1. Use questioning techniques specific to the online learning environment

  2. Create a word wall

  3. Design  a digital carousel of learning