Post 390: Transitioning from Face to Face to Online Teaching to Online Forums to Zoom Teaching
It was in 2005 that I started teaching online at the University of Phoenix. Before teaching online, I had spent many years teaching face to face with ESL students, college students, and with students from grades 2-12. I taught English Composition, ESL, English Grammar to ESL students, ESL Reading, ESL Writing and French. I taught at ESL schools, private schools like Crossroads School of Arts and Sciences, UCLA, and CSUN.
When I teach face to face, I am used to writing everything I am about to teach on the blackboard. I usually write an outline of the day's lesson including any grammar rules or writing rules I will be teaching as well as examples of these rules.
In this way, I would simply face the students and discuss the lesson. Having everything written down in advance allowed me to have more time to interact with students and less time with my back to the board as students took notes. Typically, I liked to write everything I was going to say for that day on all the different blackboards around the classroom. Then with each class period, I would just go from board to board.
With the invention of Powerpoint, I talked off my Powerpoint slides when in the UOP classroom teaching hybrid classes. I never read off my slides, but just used the slides as graphic background for my lectures. I used to use really colorufl graphics. I liked to use the slides to show graphs and charts or graphic organizers when needed such as when I was teaching the structure of an essay.
With the advent of online teaching, my hardest obstacle to overcome was the lack of my blackboard. Suddenly, most of my discussions with students were in forums or conversation threads. At first, I had a hard time trying to teach core concepts without that blackboard. Instead, I learned to teach by creating mini-bites of information for students in each post and having students continue the conversation about the core concept with each forum post.
Later, I used Screencastomatic (screencast video) and I loved video because then my blackboard was back. I was able to teach once again by pointing to whatever I was teaching and making comments about the content just like I did when I was teaching face to face. I have made over 100 videos on all my Writing Channels during my years teaching online. My writing videos cover the same material I used to cover on my blackboard. With screencast video, I was able to video tape what was on my computer screen and I used my computer screen as my new 'blackboard'.
Today, I taught my first two Zoom lessons. I used Share Screen a lot as my blackboard so that I could point to the material on my Share Screen to teach the lesson. It was hard interacting with students because the Share Screen took up so much space, and I could barely see my students' tiny portraits on my screen. I also am not yet familiar with the Zoom hosting tools which threw me off balance as I taught today's lesson.
Then, after the Zoom lesson was over, I spent a lot of time figuring out where the Zoom recording was and then figuring out how students could get access tothe Zoom recordings. It was not easy since I am not that familiar with Zoom recording either. Hopefully, I can look back on today and compare how much I have progressed in teaching Zoom. I hope to learn more of the student-centered tools on Zoom to get students more involved in the lesson. Someday, I intend to become a Zoom expert like I did with Screencastomatic. Like my 3rd grade teacher said, "Practice makes Perfect."
Anybody else a Zoom expert? Do you think Zoom will replace Discussion Forums in online teaching?
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