Collaborative Education: Teaching and learning during a crisis

格雷格Kovich

2021年4月20日

Engaging students and managing a remote classroom can be daunting. Technology designed with education in mind brings collaboration and control to the classroom.

This past summer I had the opportunity to safely meet and mingle with friends and family – a welcome activity after a long lockdown and isolation. My wife is a primary/secondary school teacher and two of her colleagues – Don and Emma – were guests of ours one afternoon, and so I had the opportunity to spend an interesting few hours learning about their experiences as they chatted about teaching during this crisis.  不用说，我学到了很多!

首先, I didn’t realize that many school districts don’t have a district-wide plan for 100% remote teaching. 举个例子, my wife’s school district didn’t have a standardized platform or tools to conduct district-wide virtual professional development. Their high school was using a popular LMS with an embedded – but limited – collaboration platform that was inadequate for elementary and some middle school grades. This meant that teachers were on their own in terms of choosing their platform, 这会导致部署的平台大杂烩吗, 包括:放大, 微软团队®, 和谷歌相遇.

接下来是中断. The teachers found that every platform had great communication tools, but they were intended for business use (for adults) and lacked some key features that educators needed to ‘settle students down’ and focus on learning. I heard about a class w在这里 an uninvited guest logged on and caused 15 minutes of off-topic conversation, 幸运的是没有新闻价值, 但这是令人沮丧的浪费时间. Emma said that she’d like to have the ability to control a five minute student ‘meet and greet’ to say ‘hi’ to their friends and then get down to teaching. Don wanted to be able to provide the same experience for the in-person (synchronous) or on-line (asynchronous or synchronous) learners that made up his hybrid classroom. 

Both felt that they were teaching with tools made for corporate environments, not classrooms. This prevented them from using tried and true engagement strategies with their students such as grouping, 白板, 问答环节, 私人咨询. They lamented the lack of control and continuity for example, some platforms didn’t allow file sharing and considered each class as a unique meeting rather than a continuation of the previous session making all chat discussion and file shares from previous sessions unavailable.

In addition to how tough it was teaching 100% remotely for the first time, they also missed the ability to ‘compare notes’ with their peers or learn even more from industry experts. Professional development opportunities would have lowered their collective stress levels considerably.

Emma also had several students who just didn’t show up for class.  Because the applications they used were designed for corporate meetings, attendance taking was not built into the program and had to be recorded manually by taking a screenshot of the attendee names every session. 当学生旷课太多的时候, Emma had to contact parents using her personal mobile or home land-line – numbers that she would have preferred to keep private.

知道我是做什么的, they asked me if their experiences were similar to what other educators around the United States were experiencing, 如果有更好的远程教学方式.

我的回答是响亮的——当然有! My advice was to optimize technology designed for educational environments to effectively engage students while teaching remotely. 创建一个成功的虚拟教室必须包括:

•课堂控制

•整合到现有的学习管理系统

•会议应用程序自带的安全工具

•出席

•学习平等

•专业发展

To learn more about how Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is bringing collaboration to the classroom 请到我们的 彩虹的教室 页面.