So this blog post is slightly later than usual as life kicked in and some things get kicked to the curb.
I’ve been teaching online for the past 6–7 months, however this is my first time participating in an online course myself. I will say it has given me an insight into how a student can perceive online learning, the excitement and the doubts throughout the process. Nevertheless, my perspective has changed as I have also become a student again for the next 12 weeks.
Meeting new people is often scary for me. As I always play some sort of movie in my head of how the introduction is going to go down. But once I muster up the courage to get on with it, I find that this is one of the things I love: meeting new people. Yes, this is all online but the process is still the same. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with not only new people but new people from around the world (mostly Sweden and Finland).
Most people reading the course know how the weekly process works. We come together around a scenario and discuss ways on how to solve that problem. I learnt a new way of problem solving with the FISH model. Something that I will definitely take with me from this course. Our scenario was this:
“I have just signed up to do an online course and I am excited to be there. But I have little experience of online courses and it feels really challenging to get started to connect and find my way with all these new sites and tools. I guess that other participants will be more experienced than me and I feel stupid asking about things. We are asked to create a Learning blog on the web; it feels a bit scary to do this. I do share things on Facebook with friends, but here, in the open? I want to keep my private life separate from my professional life. But on the other hand, my students seem to share and discuss all sorts of things in social media and use all kinds of tools and resources.”
This scenario is from the perspective of a teacher overwhelmed with the thought of sharing too much online and the lack of competency when it came to using online digital tools.
We unpacked the scenario and squeezed every last detail we could from it. Our method going forward was that we crafted 4 questions related to online participation and digital literacies. These 4 questions were:
- How to support teachers to acquire digital competence?
- How to involve/engage students in online learning?
- What are the literacies needed to engage in digital spaces?
- How to help teachers transition to the Resident/Institutional quadrant?
All these questions were unpacked in a Coggle mindmap design where we further broke down those questions into solutions and if further informations/steps for those solutions.
Our goal as a team is to use a different collaborative tool each week so it’s going to be interesting to see what tool we end up using next.
I’m really enjoying my time on this course so stay tuned for more updates!
