Distance Learning…get creative

I wrote a blog entry over at techlearning yesterday called New ways to communicate talking about some of the new ways technology can impact learning in school.

Wednesday I had a chance to try some distance learning out on my own. I work on two difference campuses that are, by taxi, about 2 hours apart. I’ve picked up a class this semester on the Pudong Campus, therefore limited my time on the Puxi campus helping teachers there.

Here’s a picture I took of teaching the class. We have a state of the art video conferencing system that connects the two campuses. It’s mostly used for teacher meetings, and to my knowledge this is the first time it’s actually been used to teach a class. On the left is the AP Abnormal Psychology class in Puxi and on the left is my computer screen. We took about an hour to set up new blogs for them and walked them through the back side of WordPress. It’s been awhile since I’ve worked directly with high school students and I found it very refreshing. The best part is, as I was walking them through how to register for a new blog step by step like I do with the 5th grade, two of the students said “done!” I hadn’t even gotten to the part where they were to put in their e-mail address. So I changed my plans and told them to explore and if they had any questions to ask. So they went off customizing there themes. Two of them even put clustrmaps on their blogs before class was over. While the students were self discovering their new blogs. I was walking the teacher through step by step how to set up her blog. The students were helping her when she didn’t understand something. When all the technology works….teaching this way is fun!

[tags]SAS[/tags]