Rhys's Teaching Pieces

 It's time for  presents  presence!  Specifically, the three types of "presences" we try to maintain in online learning: teaching, social, cognitive. Teaching Presence While it might seem obvious that a course needs a teacher, it also needs a clear sense that the instructor is there to direct and focus the class on the content, and maintain a safe and inclusive space (Garrison, 2007). A big part of this is starting the class on the right foot. Teachers need to establish ground rules, expectations, and goals for the course  (Maxwell & Shackelton, 2012). To demonstrate this, I decided to create a Bitmoji classroom .  At the moment, only the Netiquette box and my email actually link to the appropriate resource, but hopefully this gives you a sense of how it would look and function. Are you in love?  See the video below for more information on how to create your own! This virtual "classroom" is a great way to get students oriented to a course, or to u...

You might think the title of this post is purely for fun, but the tool I'm going to share with you came to my attention at an opportune moment when I was desperately trying to find tools that I could use in a particular class. At the time, I was not sure if I would be able to implement it in real-time (synchronously), or if I'd have to give students something they could work on even without me there (asynchronously). Such is life in a pandemic! Finding PearDecks and it's dual modes for instructor-paced and student-paced learning turned out to be  exactly  what I needed- a true synchronicity!  In this post, I want to give you a quick introduction to PearDecks, an awesome tool that I use for both synchronous and asynchronous learning.   In my school district, the first half of class is supposed to be synchronous, a time for "lecture," and the second half is asynchronous, for individual work time. ( Image available from   Cotron Online ) Why this tool? In my school...