The Power of Conversations

An English teacher from one of our area schools used a public setting to teach her students
writing skills… but not just a public forum within the classroom or school. She literally used the public, customers at coffee shops, to teach students about collaborative journaling.
Here is how it worked. The instructor, Ellen Stackable, left the students’ [...]

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Be Findable

Do you have a favorite author? I know I do and most of them have blogs or websites. To find them, I run their names or their book titles through a Google search. And voila there they are! Sometimes, though, they don’t have an RSS feed in place or, because they are extraordinarily busy, do [...]

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Thanking Students for Their Work

When was the last time someone from outside your school thanked your students for the work they were doing?
An eighth grade English teacher, Jessie Thaler, says that being thanked was the most surprising effect of having her students blog. Her students weren’t used to being appreciated for what they do. Being visible and findable online [...]

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Do you have what it takes?

During September we have looked at Online Teaching and Learning, hopefully, from potential students’ and teachers’ perspective. Beginning with misconceptions and determining what it takes to learn OR teach online. Do you have the skills to be successful?
April made us think about the message we are conveying when we use humor. She gave us concrete [...]

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VOCAL Online Facilitators

No, this isn’t about how loud or outspoken online facilitators should be; it’s a model for successful online teaching. One of the first reading assignments in our Facilitating Online Learning Communities course is “BE VOCAL: Characteristics of Successful Online Instructors.” VOCAL is an acronym for

Visible
Organized
Compassionate
Analytical
Leader-by-example

Visibility is about social presence, how much participants are aware of [...]

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Yeah but is it HaHa Funny?

There are hundreds if not thousands of guides on how to be a great online student or teacher. As a matter of fact, PLS offers a course on how to be a better facilitator (DFS). Therefore, my post will be brief today.
Thank you.
…
…
…
Or not.
You see, what we forget is that to interact, diffuse tense situations, [...]

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What is it about online?

When I tell people I work online and work from home, the first reaction is usually “Oh, I would love to do that!” Followed by “You get to work whenever you want AND in your pajamas! That’s challenging to my thinking given I am more likely to be working in a suit jacket than a pajama [...]

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Online Reading Resources

You don’t have to be a reading teacher to include reading activities and strategies in your classroom. If a student has to read content, whether its computer languages to zoology, they’re reading. Period. The PLS online course Reading Across the Curriculum addresses the issue of, well, reading across many topics, not just in “reading” class.
To [...]

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Igniting the Math and Science Buzz in Kids

During most of the twentieth century, the United States dominated the math field with its output of important mathematicians and its great strides in engineering, science, and finance. But the depth of the country’s decline is apparent in some frightening statistics: Less than one-third of eighth-grade students and fewer than one out of four seniors [...]

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The World Didn’t Explode

CERN’s Large Hadron Collidor was turned on the other day and amazingly enough the world didn’t explode nor was it sucked into a black hole. If that’s not enough to excite science teachers, and the world population in general, a very ingenious young lady, Kate McAlpine, has created a rap to explain the physics behind [...]

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