Last semester I started teaching online. Learning how to get the same content in the face-to-face classroom into the online classroom and still get the message across was a challenge, to be sure. I had the students do two presentations, and offered both of these to be done as group work. I also encouraged students to try Zoho. Zoho is a site that allows students to create Web 2.0 PowerPoint presentations as well as having a lot of other functions, but I thought Zoho might be ideal for people working remotely to put together their presentation online. It worked great for some, while others found it difficult to edit. I think that creating a wiki might be a more efficient way to go.
I also started teaching in a Tegrity enabled classroom last spring. Tegrity is a software program that will capture what is on the instructor computer or the document camera, as well as showing an image from a ceiling camera, which is normally focused on the instructor. Learning how to operate and produce quality Tegrity presentations is something I still need practice with, but these presentations are a great Web 2.0 tool. I found that students were ignoring these Tegrity recordings, so I stopped putting up the effort to create them for a while. Then I had a student who couldn't attend class because of her baby's health, so I started again. The other use the students found for these was review. When I gave a review session for the class before their midterm, the students did enjoy reviewing the class session to be sure they understood the major concepts. It was a great way to display visual pictures, notes, and have the animation of the classroom come through at the same time.
Another great success I had was learning the weekend that the Note Taking assignment was due in the online class that the link I had to the lecture was down. I was able to quickly take one of the Tegrity sessions from the ENG061 class and upload it into the online ENG140 class. Success! Most students could view this recording and were able to finish the assignment. The other great part of this technique is that students got to see me, their online instructor, teaching a class. I think it gave them a little better feel for who I am.
The final lesson I created with Tegrity last semester was a lecture on how the religious background and the sacrificial lamb story from The Kite Runner affected the people in the story as well as in our culture today. I was able to show the lecture notes online as well as have a small box with me lecturing in the corner. That was exciting. I sincerely want to pursue making more of these for the online students.
Another Web 2.0 activity I want to try is to take some of my PowerPoint presentations and put them up as photosharing documents to turn them into slideshows on the wiki. This is something I need to continue working on because I was not getting all layers of the slide. I was sometimes just getting the background. It would be really helpful to pull the PowerPoint presentations from the classroom up onto the Internet so we are not dependent upon Blackboard for everything. Sometimes Blackboard goes down, and then students could still access the content to do their homework.
Putting materials in the wiki is also a great way to keep students connected. Once the semester is over, all the content in Blackboard is off limits. Anything we have posted in the wiki is still viewable. Perhaps our students will be taking another class and will want to look back to see how we described, explained, performed something in our class. What a concept!
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