Actively Engaging Online Students

By Michael Surran (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

I recently had the privilege to attend the iNacol conference in Palm Springs.  For the next few blogs I will be summarizing my learning from some of the sessions I attended.  Please feel add any comments or suggestions below.

Session 1: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor:  Igniting Students’ Hunger to Learn

This was presented by the staff at Treca Digital Academy .   I encourage you to look at how the WeeblyPages for their connections staff are set up for student and parent support the information in their websites on note taking and study skills alone is worth the look.

There was great information about how to engage with students with surveys that are used frequently to gain a bit more information about the students and then using that information to engage and respond to students interests throughout the course.  Some surveys included:

·         A parent survey

·         An initial contact student survey

·         A Future story survey (quite a neat idea to get students connecting what they are doing now to what they want to do in the future).

·         Multiple IntelligenceSurveys

Some of my favorite quotes from the presentation were:

Relationship Building:  all learning is double-coded, both mentally and emotionally.  How you feel about something is part of the learning and your openness to learning.  Most learning is in essence emotional.  Virtually all learning starts with a significant relationship.

                Stanley Greenspan and Beryl Benderly

and

Family involvement strengthens student learning and improves academic achievement.  Students with active family support have better attendance, pass more classes and earn more credits resulting in higher grade point averages and higher test scores.  As a result, they are more likely to continue their education beyond high school and learn social and behavioral skills that help them at home, at school and throughout life.  We want to keep parents actively involved in their student’s education by giving them needed resources, involving them in student activities, asking for their input, as well as, keeping them informed as to what is going on…

Which lead me to question how can I/do I  build relationships in my classes with students? And how can I build better family engagement with my students?

At the beginning of all of my courses I have my students e-mail me with the time they have scheduled for their classes and then I send back a Welcome to the Course e-mail encouraging them to contact me any time.  I also have a discussion board at the beginning of each class where the students need to upload a picture of them selves, share a bit about themselves, and welcome other students to the class who are posting as well.  I like this initial approach as it gets them engaged with me and lets them see that they are not the only one's in the course. I don't use the 'coffee house' approach with the discussion boards anymore, mostly because I rarely had any students use them so I removed it to clean up the front page a bit.

I could certainly do more incentives for my students such as sending out prizes for reaching certain goal points and I could showcase more student work on the main page of the course.

 Below is a list of ideas that I would like to try that wouldn’t take a huge amount of time as suggested at this presentation:

·         Student and Parent Goals through Surveys

·         Multiple Intelligence Preferences

·         Incentives: send out prizes for reaching certain goal points

·         Future Story survey

·         Remind 101

·         Parent Survey
 

Please add you comments below about you engage your online students.  If you are a student please post any suggestions that you may have about how we can engage you in the courses you are taking, and finally if you are a parent I welcome all of your suggestions on how you would like to be involved in your child's online education.