Hello! And welcome to my opening blog. This is about a journey in teaching. Combining my love for the Spanish language with my interest in teaching technology, I am attempting to develop an online AP Spanish Language course for high school seniors. I know it will be a learning experience for both my students and me!
Ever since I began enrolling in a few online education courses in order to improve my teaching skills, I have toyed with the idea of incorporating online education at the high school level. There are many things that one must learn in order to have a successful online learning experience. First, there needs to be some level of self-motivation. Because the environment is asynchronous there is more time for reflective learning, a component that is sorely lacking from many face-to-face classrooms. The pace and timing of classroom instruction at the high school level is often at the mercy of schedules coordinated by state examinations. Material must be presented, digested and returned by students in a limited amount of time. In the online environment students must learn to pace themselves, which requires not only self-motivation but also a sense of responsibility. This is the second factor needed for a successful online learning experience. Students become more responsible for their own learning, which helps build a community of independent learners.
I am both excited and aprehensive about this ‘experiment’ in teaching and learning. Before I can deliver a quality learning experience to my students, I need to do a lot of reflecting, a lot of creating, and a lot of testing. I think one of the biggest challenges will be to create a course that is engaging enough without being overwhelming. Technology overload may be less of a problem with younger students, but we are all prone to it’s effect.
So, I am looking for the place of balance between comfort and challenge; familiar and unfamiliar; native and foreign. When we can look back, with confidence, from where we came, we are much more likely to press on to the unknown and accept new challenges. This is the starting point at which I would like to begin my course.
