Virtual classrooms are shared online spaces where the students and teachers can work simultaneously. It allows for live interaction between students and teachers during learning tasks. A virtual classroom provides an experience that is very close to traditional face-to-face teaching albeit the physical presence.
There is the potential to provide significant added value to online learning by addressing the needs of the learners as they relate to social interaction in synchronous virtual classrooms. It creates a new standard in the learning experience that goes above and beyond the physical space of the classroom and traditional teaching methods.
Virtual classrooms allow teachers to view, edit, mark students' work online. As an example, Google Classroom allows the teacher to generate the Google Meet link in the Google Classroom itself. Google Classroom also allows the teachers to send messages to students who can reply and respond.
In virtual classrooms, teachers and students can work synchronously in real time. There is an option to collaborate in Collaboration Space in One Note. Students can work in groups online at home based on the tasks given by the teachers. Teachers can check individual work in their folders. Students can only see their own folders but not their classmates'. The teacher can see everyone's folder.
Apple Schoolwork allows the flexibility for students to work on individual assignments and submit to the teacher upon completion. The teacher will then go on to mark student's work and the markings can be viewed by the students without the need to resend. Apple Schoolwork works best in iPad classes where students already have apps like Pages, iMovie, Keynote on their iPads.
In Classkick, teachers and students work together based on a task. Students can peer help each other online and groupings can also be done for students to work together. As the teacher is teaching using Classkick, students are able to follow what the teacher is doing on that particular task.
Although teaching and learning in a virtual classroom provide an experience similar to the physical one, it requires new pedagogical approaches and a T & L redesign of the instructional model. The article below also mentioned about digital revolution where the education scene goes beyond what one can imagine and how we can reflect on our teaching and learning approaches. With the full HBL ongoing and thinking further beyond that even after the HBL, how do we as educators embrace the modern way of teaching and learning? Only by overcoming the challenges, learning from the way we find solutions to help in our learning as educators as well, do we really emerge as a more cohesive digital society.
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