The goal of the class today was to facilitate a student discussion with minimal teacher input and to introduce discussion roles. For our warm-up activity we played a video about basketball and had students answer discussion questions as a group. I thought that the warm-up went very well. The students seemed to enjoy the video and talked a lot during the discussion. Unfortunately, I do not think that our main activity went as well. For the main activity we assigned each student an interesting point in Canadian history and had them read a short paragraph about it individually and then summarize what they learnt to the class. We underestimated how long this would take and ran out of time and because of this not all students were able to summarize their learning. Additionally, I think that our discussion roles need some work. I don’t think that they all worked as well in the online classroom as they would have face-to-face. I think that figuring out what works in the online classroom will take some trial and error. I am also beginning to wonder what it will be like to be teaching in a face-to-face classroom. The thought of stepping into a classroom with no practice or experience makes me a little nervous. I think in the future I will try to seek out volunteer opportunities in a face-to-face classroom, so that I can gain some experience.
I am having a hard time telling when students understand the material and the instructions and when they need more clarification. For me, I rely heavily on nonverbal communication in the classroom and not being able to see all their faces is a challenge. Next week I plan on utilizing the set status function in Big Blue Button to do quick surveys to check for understanding.