use a combination of higher-order
thinking and digital age teaching
skills. I decided not to use the synchronous approach because I felt the
motive behind virtual school enrollment is the desire for a flexible learning environment. With that in mind,
I divided my courses into weekly
modules that opened on Sundays and
closed on Saturdays. Students engaged
in various tasks throughout the week
and submitted their assignments by
Saturday.
Setting up a weekly routine cultivates organization and peace of mind
for online teachers. Even though there
was a prepackaged curriculum, I
wanted to frame my lessons and activities according to my teaching philosophy. I planned lessons on Mondays
and Tuesdays, graded on Wednesdays
and Thursdays, and contacted students on Fridays. Contacting students
sometimes overlapped with grading,
and grading would overlap with lesson planning, but I found that setting
up a schedule was helpful even though
each week could be different. If you
choose to set up a synchronous classroom using software like Elluminate,
communicate with your colleagues to
avoid scheduling conflicts.
Student–Teacher Communication
The most important element of virtual
teaching is maintaining effective and
regular communication with your
students. Because you are physically
separated from them and social interaction is limited, a virtual teacher
must send emails, make phone calls,
or Skype with students as much as
possible. To collect contact information, one of the first assignments for
my students was to complete a contact
log that included their email, parents’
emails, phone numbers, and any other
necessary form of contact information, such as a Skype user name.
Once I had compiled the contact
information, I created a spreadsheet
that included a miscellaneous notes
column to keep track of who each stu-
dent was and what was going on in his
or her personal and academic lives.
Lesson Planning, Delivering
Content, and Grading
At the beginning of the school year,
I was thankful to have some items to
use from the prepackaged curricula,
but I still had plenty of work ahead
of me. I had to modify a plethora of
the prepackaged tasks that revealed
lower-level thinking and inauthen-
tic learning strategies. For example,
during week four of my American
Government course, the prepackaged
curriculum instructed the students
to read a chapter and answer ques-
tions. Instead, I had my students act
as Florida Congress members, create
a piece of legislation related to a social
problem in their state, and provide
evidence and a rationale for creat-
ing their legislation. When finished,
they posted their assignments on a
discussion board, and I asked them
to comment or pose a question about
another student’s work. This is just a
small example of how virtual learning
can offer authentic, digital age skill
development (research for real-world
application) and higher-order think-
ing skills (problem solving). This as-
signment also directed my students
to interact with one another and take
ownership of the content rather than
memorize abstract concepts that do
not apply to their lives.
