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PolskiUNIT 2: Managing the chosen digital learning solution
2.2.1 Managing your resources to become a better online educator
Online teaching has numerous unknown facets and comes with many challenges, because it is so new and had to be adopted so abruptly. It can become a powerful and useful tool if done properly and mindfully. Here is some advice that can help enhance your teaching with digital tools. This will not only be useful for your students, but will also make your teaching easier.
First of all, students should feel you are present digitally, even if you are not present physically. You can use many communication methods, such as forums, emails, announcements and online meetings. It is very important that the students know exactly when you are going to have the online class and how often you respond to messages. You want your students to not feel alone and supported in their learning so you should answer their questions as often as possible. In giving feedback, you should think about crafting your response, as written text can often lead to misinterpretations, thus you should use a simple, clear and polite tone.
The online classes can sometimes feel unstructured, therefore you have to give your students a very clear set of expectations before they start their studies. These expectations should contain what you expect from them, what they should expect from you, what is required of them to do well in your class, what sort of evaluation you practice, the way you are going to communicate, the required attendance, and any other information that will help your students feel that online learning is well organised.
You should also keep students involved in their learning, because the more they spend researching the contents on their own, the more they will learn. You can thus require of them to find and debate information online, on forums or during a live meeting, to grade their own homework. Also, you should combine group and individual projects to enhance their learning abilities and teach them that both group work and individual accomplishments are important.
To keep your students engaged you should use as much as possible the media they are familiar with. Rather than just sending your class written documents or textbooks you should incorporate in your teaching online videos, educational blogs, interactive content and have students use their mobile phones as much as possible for education.
Finally it is recommended that you end your learning modules with an extensive summary and have different tools to revise and practice what your students have learned.
2.2.2 Managing online assessments
In education, the term assessment refers to the ”variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students.” (https://www.edglossary.org/assessment).
Assessments are crucial tools for effective learning. More than giving you information about the progress of your students, about the level of understanding of the entire class and potential educational imbalances among your students, assessments also help students have a goal in their learning and helps better organize the way they study. During the Covid-19 pandemic, fair assessments were even more important because of the limitation of not observing your students in class.
Even though online school has brought about many challenges in the evaluation of students, among which the most important is usually students cheating on their tests, digital tools also offer new opportunities for assessment. Educational platforms and apps offer a lot of statistical information quickly, and you should plan in advance how to use that knowledge to create a genuinely formative evaluation. Moreover, you can personalize assessments to suit the educational path and needs of each individual student to ensure their proficiency in a certain topic or competency. To tackle the problem of cheating, you can use open-ended tasks, thus being able to evaluate more than one educational standard.
You should first get acquainted with the possibilities of assessments of different apps and learning platforms before choosing to use them in your class. If your organization has already choses a learning management system, you can complement its limitations by using other learning apps to improve assessment. It is important to use all the statistical capabilities of a digital evaluation tool in order to try to identify how students are thinking and correct what students have not understood well. You can also anonymize the assessments and present them to your class to present common problems faced by students or different, but correct ways of thinking to help them learn from each other.
It is also important to communicate your expectations and progress to your students and their families and to use online platforms that allow parents to check on the advancements of their children. Also try to provide your students with a variety of feedback options, a more personalized one being the recording of a voice memo, rather than just written comments.
2.2.3 Practical Activity: Creating a personal database of resources
Fill in a table as shown below, containing the digital tools you are currently using and the tools you know about and plan to use in the future, listing their advantages, disadvantages and when and how they are best used:
| No | Name of the tool | Type (app/ lms) | Link | Short description | Pros | Cons | When and how to use it |
2.2.4 Glossary
Assessment – the variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students.