My highest priority for taking this course is to refresh my comfort level with teaching and interacting with students strictly online with no face-to-face interactions. Due to various health and scheduling needs, I am the becoming the “go to” person with regards to providing independent study for students for economics and potentially for students in need of other social studies related courses (once I complete my supplemental credential). As the state of California and the UC System as well start to recognize, legitimize, and eventually regulate the requirements for both providing online learning through course requirements, the writing is on the wall there will eventually be a corresponding credentialing requirement. I want to be sure that I am staying current with the rigor, the relevance, and that I am using tools that my students will be able to quickly become familiar with and/or will be encountering in their pathway through the educational system.

I have been using online learning in my classes since the earliest days of Blackboard.com starting at the middle school level to ensure that my students would be comfortable with the types of actvities and skill sets that they would need to suceed. This exposure, planting the seed, was designed to allow my students to make rookie online mistakes -- like asking questions before reading the assignments fully (like what I did on Tuesday when I couldn’t find the description for this assignment because I didn’t allow myself enough time to look around) before they “count”. I lament the loss of the technology courses at the middle school as students now will rarely encounter the requirement of submitting and keeping track of assignments independently through an online learning environment for many of them until they reach the high school and since many of our educators do not use an online learning environment like Moodle or Haiku, I fear that they will be in for a rude awakening when they head to high school. I feel that we are doing our students a disservice to not require them to participate and take at least part of some of their classes via an online learning portal just to prepare them for the rigors that they will encounter in college. Again, better to practice and learn how to format documents for posting, embed links, post on a discussion board using online etiquette, etc. now before it will really “count” so you can focus on the content rather than the process of interacting through the online portal.

Also, knowing that the state, especially with technology, likes to follow rather than lead, taking this course and being able to show some sort of certification with regards to online teaching seems the next logical step towards being able to differentiate my teaching in positive way. With more and more students needing to be placed in courses without the corresponding rise in revenues to support those students, online courses are going to become more and more the norm in order for students to be able to meet graduation requirements at the secondary level.

Some strategies that I would like to focus on include: improving interactivity - what types of new tools are used by other teachers to ensure that students are actually interacting with the site as intended, i.e. reading the articles, watching the videos, etc.

grading - online grading takes so much more time -- how do you manage this and balance screen time with life time? I love getting items sent to me electronically, but the time that it takes to grade them (all the clicks and separate comments that are needed) sometimes outweighs the old style of just having the papers and sitting anywhere to grade them. Feel that paper sometimes is more 24-7 for assessment than the online work.

use of video/tools for student portability and access - I used to love to be able to embed videos into blogger then have students respond to questions. This was my favorite substitute assignment. Now that embedding is restricted, still looking for ways to again, have students access the content in ways that are familiar to their use of social media, but with an academic focus that is not a management or grading debacle.

what tools and tips and tricks that other online teachers have come up with that I might incorporate. I have glogster, voicethread, prezi, edmoto, moodle, poll everywhere, collaborize, tapped in accounts -- just would like to know how other teachers are already using them to get the feedback from the students on a more formative level, so that I know that they are ready for the next step with the material.