Online, Blended and Face-to-Face

The Online, Blended and Face-to-Face (F2F) classrooms overlap in several key areas. The Florida Virtual School, Hawaii Technology Academy, Carpe Diem Collegiate and USC Hybrid High School characteristics are show below via a Venn Diagram. Click on the links to compare and contrast each similar yet different learning environments.

Reflection 2.2: Methodologies of the Online Instructor

For middle school 8^th grade students, algebra is, for the most part, the first exposure students have to an abstract “language”, the language of Algebra. It is, for most not concrete, and some students have a difficult time grasping its concepts of variables as “place holders”.

Algebra requires lots of “head-scratching”, practice and review. This is a challenge that we (teacher/student) struggle with each year. Some students are ready for the abstract and some aren’t. Scaffolding of struggling students could be achieved with peer coaches in an online, anytime environment.

Teaching middle school math for the past 9 years has allowed me to fine tune my face-to-face curriculum. However, with this week’s lesson, I realize now that an online curriculum needs to be much more scaled down into smaller “bite-size” pieces. No matter real-world or online, the 10 minute student attention spans of middle school students will require me to present a program that scaffolds the textbook, lesson by lesson, chapter by chapter (as organized by me, slightly out of order) but in smaller increments. I will modify each lesson into 2 sub-lessons of quick instruction and 2 or 3 problems with guided practice. Algebra fluency is built up with practice, lots of practice and students could use their peers as mentors, coaches and soundboards.

The work involved in parsing the lessons into those “bite-sized” pieces now seems monumental to me. The work necessary has just increased one order of magnitude, argh! But, after that, the tweeks and changes to enhance it even further, will only strengthen the program.

Improved/Expanded Skills and Strategies

Based on my face-to-face classroom experiences, each 8^th grade Algebra student comes with a slightly different a-priori math “tool box”. No matter the “sage on the stage”, most students learn best in a cooperative environment.

Without direct “live” one-to-many interaction (the normal classroom), my expanded Online and Blended Teaching skills and strategies will have to incorporate many more tricks-of-the trade. We all know that a student teaching a concept makes the student a better learner. Students become their own best tutors and I will incorporate frequent peer-to-peer teaching or coaching for some of the more abstract concepts (absolute value, inequalities in 1 or 2 variables, various forms of quadratic factoring/equations, graphing …). I will use different outside “teaching” resources (think Khan Academy and PurpleMath.com) and non-threatening, set-time, virtual small group sessions with peers as facilitators.

Given the nature of a blended or online classroom, the progress and success of students must be clearly delineated in an easily digestible time-line of expectations. Support tools, practice resources, peer and teacher assistance will need to be easily available to maintain student self-worth and ensure their academic success in an online world.