I’m taking a class through the Ingham Intermediate School District. It’s about how to facilitate online courses. I’m looking at ways to incorporate more online aspects to my 7th grade English class, as well as thinking down the road to when I may actually teach a class online.

The class overview caught my eye. I’m about half way done with the class and I’m feeling more competent all the time. I’m in a small group so I feel more connected than the other two times I have taken online classes. This one actually started out in a face-to-face classroom, but the majority of it is done online. We just finished our first group project and it was a collaborative wonder. I liked how each of us had a job (notetakers, timekeeper, coordinator). We each read a section of an online article and took notes. We came together and discussed three things in a chat room: the purpose of creating group projects in an online class; general strategies for creating the group projects; and the importance of creating community in online classes. During the chat, we used bits and pieces of what we had read and summarized, but it wasn’t a regurgitation of our summary by any means.

For an earlier project, I made a digital reflection on the notion of a facilitator having four pairs of shoes: the shoes of an instructor, a social director, a program manager, and a technical assistant. Check out my digital reflection on Teacher Tube.