As we move to a more online world, it is important to balance digital use with other activities in order to ensure a healthy lifestyle. I feel that I am pretty good at this already. However, with my recently beginning an online course, planning an online course to teach in the fall, and actually teaching an online course in the fall, I will have to spend more time at my computer. This has made me thing about how to balance online time with other time and how to ensure that my online time does not lead to health problems.
Here is an image of my Google Calendar showing some of my upcoming activities for planning classes on the computer and time set aside for exercise and enjoyment away from the computer. Hopefully, taking the time to schedule such things will help me keep a healthy lifestyle.
A couple of things that I have found. I usually have good posture. However, after I sit at a computer for awhile, my posture starts to deteriorate and I begin to lean forward and hunch my back. To avoid this, I will make a point to sit at the computer no longer than 30 minutes straight. If I get up, take a break, do something else, walk around, and come back, my posture stays good. Sitting too long is bad for posture.
Second, sitting too long is bad period. When I take my breaks, I will be sure to do something active (even if it is just walking the halls at school).
Technology is a great benefit for my own learning, my teaching, and my enjoyment. However, I will limit my online time and purposefully take part in physical activity every day. I will encourage my students to do the same. This is more important for them to hear because many of them are gamers. Online school work plus extended time for game play can easily make for too much sessile time. I will encourage them to get up and about.
What is the most important step we can take in terms of ensuring our digital safety?
What strategies can we take to help our students consistently keep digital safety in the forefront of their minds?
Ensuring digital safety in an online teaching environment is the online teachers responsibility. To do so, he must make sure that students know what is expected of them and that they are aware of dangers online. Too many students don't think of online safety at all or only think "Safety Third!"
To ensure digital safety for students, teachers should set strict limits on what is allowed in his online world. He should emphasize what is expected and what is prohibited. This is of particular importance in forums where students should be taught to 1. stay on topic and 2. be respectful. The teacher can help students by having using different types of forums. For example, using Moodle, a teacher can have students post their own thoughts before allowing them to see any of the other students responses.
Students must also be taught to use online resources but to know how to vet those resources, both for accuracy and for computer safety. Addressing this early in a course and emphasizing it throughout will help students be cognizant of online dangers from malware to identity theft to copyright infringement.
Below is a link to my digital bookmarking sight with some resources that I think will help students be aware of digital dangers online.
Online teachers need to ensure that their students understand acceptable uses of digital material. To do so, teachers should take a little time to go over acceptable use policy at the beginning of the course. I teach for Floyd County Schools, at Pepperell High School and online throughout the county. Some of the concerns about acceptable use are addressed by school policy. I couldn't find a useful link to just the policy concerning technology use. I started to copy and paste it below from an online student handbook. However, very little of it applies to a truly digital community. This is about all that does.
sending SPAM, and/or harassing others by sending unwanted messages or using inappropriate language is not allowed. No emphasis is placed here on the positive (what a student should do). It is all on the negative (what a student should not do). As a teacher, I want to encourage my students to use technology as much as possible. I will have to instruct them in things that all teachers do - don't cheat, this includes not plagiarizing, do your own work, etc. However, with the digital world, plagiarism can extend into copying images and video as well as text. Just as a regular classroom teacher has to teach about citation, an online teacher has to teach about citation and fair use. I found the following link about Creative Commons very helpful in understanding fair use. Creative Commons link I plan to introduce my students to the world of open source, but I also expect them to use copyrighted material in acceptable ways allowed by not for profit use. A little instruction, and when necessary a little correction, will go a long way.
For my Teacher Online Open Learning class, I was tasked to make a quick guide to internet etiquette. You'll find a video below for your edification and viewing pleasure.
As part of my Teaching Online Open Learning training, I recently explored my access to digital resources. The training site suggested that I use a number of sites to do so.
The first it suggested was broadband.gov. This was a horribly designed website. Government sites might be trustworthy, but they are all too often poorly designed. I was supposed to use this site to analyze my upload and download speed. I couldn't find a way to do so on the site. I did find a link on the site that would take me to an a different, non-governmental website for the test, but I didn't use it. I wasn't the only one that had the problem. The comments section was full of similar complaints.
Fortunately, the TOOL training site provided another link to measure upload and download speeds, http://www.speedtest.net/. Being a nongovernmental site, this one worked.
My measured download speed was 25.85 Mbs and my measured upload speed was 6.06 Mbs.
The next part of my assignment had me look at another government website, the national broadband map. This one was also poorly designed, but fortunately my online class had given me clear directions on how to find what I wanted on the site. For my county, Floyd County, Georgia, the average download speed was 10-16 Mbs. My county ranked 99th out of 159 counties in the state in download speed. A number of broadband providers were listed for my county. The one I use, Comcast, supposedly provides download speeds from 100 Mbs to 1 Gbs. I use Comcast and my measured download speed is much, much lower.
Bad government websites and personal internet speeds aside, I was supposed to consider what barriers might affect access to digital learning and what might be done to eliminate such barriers.
I teach in Floyd County Schools. Many of the students in my school are poor. Some of them do not have internet access at home. There are programs in place to help this. Low income students can get free internet access from the cable company. However, they have to have their own devices to access the internet and many don't. They presumably also have to not be behind on their paid cable bill and the like. There are also programs in place to give the community access to the internet. The public library provides this service. Many local businesses have free wifi. The schools have free wifi with student access and computers are available for student use within the school. If a student wants internet access, he can get it. In fact, most all of the do get internet access. However, most of them don't use it for education.
I also looked at a site from Georgia Tech about making internet access more available to handicapped students. There are some good ideas there, but some physical handicaps do place limitations on internet access that are hard to overcome.
In order to prepare for teaching an online course this fall, I used https://delicious.com to compile links to a number of sites that I plan to use throughout the year. Most of these are websites that I've used in the past, but a couple are new sources that I plan to use this year. The course I will be teaching online is AP Environmental Science. I've never taught this course before. I will also be teaching physics, AP Physics I, and chemistry in a traditional classroom setting this fall. I linked a number of resources for those as well for use in and out of class.
I'd never used a social bookmarking site before. I feel that it is a bit unnecessary, but it is cool that other science teachers can look and see what I am using and that I can look and see what they are using. Also, in getting sites to bookmark, I brushed up on embed code which will no doubt be useful for online teaching.
Since I'm writing about embedding videos, I'm going to link a video here.
The clip goes over the Coriolis Effect, so it has both physics and environmental science applications.
Three useful tools
Three useful tools that I found in my web walkabout are this online data plotting service, Plotly. It is great for quickly plotting real world science data and easily accessible anywhere with web access.
A second useful tool I found is this screencasting service, Screencastomatic. It can be used to make screencasts but is also great for taking clips from longer videos.
A third useful tool I found is The Howard Hughes Medical Institute site. I actually learned about this at my AP environmental science training and can't wait to explore it.
Teaching students to collect useful sources
It is often said that todays students are the tech generation. Teachers often assume that they know how to use technology to find useful resources. This may be true in some areas (video games, social media sites, etc), but it is not generally true that students know how to search for or how to evaluate sites for education.
Students actually have to be taught the basics - how to perform a simple search engine search for the topic. With this they need to be taught the importance of knowing the correct vocabulary. If you just search chemistry, you'll get lots of hits for a chemistry student, but most of it won't be useful. If you search stoichiometry of acids and bases, you'l get much more focussed results.
As to evaluating sources, student should be taught to pay attention to the primary domain, the web address stem (.com, . org, .edu, .gov, etc) to learn where the information is coming from. They should also be taught the importance of crosschecking there information from multiple sources, including nonelectronic sources.
One problem that students at my school (and no doubt at others) encounter is that their web-searches are restricted. You'd think this wouldn't be a problem, but lots of useful information is blocked along with material that is meant to be blocked. For example, students can't watch MIT OCW videos because they are hosted through Youtube. The school blocks Youtube sites for students. That policy needs to change.
There are a number of good digital learning communities already in existence. None of them are ideal.
The ideal digital learning community must offer high quality instruction covering the same subject through different media (print, audio, video, lab simulations, demonstrations, etc.) A number of sites already have this.
The ideal digital learning community should be organized with links to prerequisites subjects and future learning opportunities. The former is particularly important. I think that many students try digital learning on a subject they find interesting, but realize that the subject is currently beyond their ability. They then give up because there is no convenient way for them to go back and fill in knowledge gaps.
The ideal digital learning community must be free and open access.
The ideal digital learning community must provide the opportunity for teachers and students to interactive live. Hangouts and chatboards are not enough. There must be real, face to face, interaction like a classroom. This can be done with videochat, but a way to instantly video chat with several people at once in real time is needed to make online learning as fruitful as it can be. This will require faster internet connections, a larger digital learning community, and willing participants for discussions.
As part of my Teaching Online Open Learning training, I recently explored a number of digital learning communities. I was least familiar with the social bookmarking sites, though my sister-in-law, a local spanish teacher, uses them and has told me about them. I didn't really care for any of the bookmarking sites I came across, but maybe if I followed the right person I would.
I did explore Jeff Giddens social bookmarking page. He had a number of interesting links, many of which I was familiar with already. Here is a link to Jeff's Delicious page if you are interested.
Below are five of the digital learning communities that I explored.
Khan Academy - This one has the most name recognition. The academy covers lots of information, but I've always found the presentation style of Khan Academy to be boring. I hate screencasts.
MIT OCW - This is one of the first open learning communities that I discovered. I found it from an article linked on lewrockwell.com. I've used this extensively, both for my own learning and for teaching chemistry and AP Physics.
Open Yale - This one is like MIT OCW. I like it, but have used it less.
University of the People - This was a new one to me. It looks like it just organizes many of the other online education options, like OCW consortium
OCW consortium - I've browsed this before and still like it.
I'm already a member of a couple of digital learning communities. I love EdX, both for my on learning and for recommending to students.
www.edx.org
I am also a member of the AP Teacher Community.
https://apcommunity.collegeboard.org/
I will explore the bookmarking sites more in the future.
In learning about online education, I pause to think about proper behavior of a user in a digital community. Here are what I consider to be the three most impressive traits of an exemplary digital citizen.
Trait 1 - An exemplary digital citizen is courteous. The anonymity of the internet often leads people to write things that they would never say to someone face to face. This should not be done. Treat others the way you want to be treated is a rule for life and communication in any medium.
Trait 2 - Discretion is the better part of valor. An exemplary digital citizen will not take the time to respond to every criticism, point of disagreement, or rude comment. Many digital users do not have trait one. Therefore, whether by accident or on purpose (as a troll), some people will post things looking for a pointless argument. An exemplary digital citizen will refrain from dignifying such destructive comments with a response.
Trait 3 - An exemplary citizen will protect a community that he moderates. Some digital communities are not meant to be moderated and are free for all. Many others though, particularly those meant for education, should be focussed on a task. Comments should be controlled and disruptive and malicious posts should be removed.
