One of many challenges we face whenever we teach - but especially when teaching over distance or online - is creating a supportive, nurturing community of learning. As we argue in Planning Powerful Instruction, we must prime our learning environments to create community because all effective teaching and learning are relational and occur in relationship - whether this is a near relationship where we learn side by side, or distant relationships with an author - or something in between as we probably have in online environments.  It's a tenet of socio-cultural theories of teaching and learning (the theory and teaching model behind this course and behind the methods in our book - you'll be learning all about these shortly!) that knowledge is socially and culturally created.  That's why you can't go out and discover math lying about somewhere, or how to read by being locked in a library, or how to do science by playing around in a lab; you cannot learn on your own because knowledge is cultural; you have to be socially inducted into the cultural ways of knowing, doing, thinking, and being through apprenticeship into a community of practice.  

Like many of you, we've worked with online teaching and learning but are still learning about it.  We'll be making some moves in this course to create community and provide social support for learning.  Your feedback will be valued so we can continuously improve this workshop/course in this and all other regards.

As an initial activity prior to starting the course, we're going to ask you all to post a brief introduction to yourself outlining some of the most important things for us all to know about you personally, and then to share what is most important to know about you professionally. Finally, you will share why you are taking this course and what you hope to get out of it.

Please use this Get To Know You Survey (make a copy- click here to learn how to copy and save this document- and share to your Google Drive folder) to help you think through your personal and professional interests and share the responses with your mentor and thinking partners.  Or you could develop your own survey (that you might want to use with your own students) and respond to it. Providing this kind of survey to learners and sharing the results with peers can be one way to get to know each other, think about how to co-create curriculum together, extend and build on student interests, and build community. Next, we'd like to get to know you in person, so please click here to visit our EMPOWER Flipgrid. (Click here if you need some help getting started with Flipgrid. Here is a cool video with an introduction to Flipgrid and ideas to use it in your class.) You can get to know the mentors and teachers in the course and tell us a little more about yourself.  You'll also experience an application that can be used online to help students engage, interact, and share ideas.

**Just a note about technology: if you are having trouble posting videos to Padlet and/or Flipgrid, read on! Apparently, the Safari browser in Macs isn't fully supported in either of those platforms. If you have a Mac and you are having trouble with either of these programs, it might help if you install Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as a back-up browser. This can be helpful when you are having trouble with a platform or website-- just switching browsers will often solve the problem.