On April 20, 2016, the 21st TCC Online Conference continued with Day 2! During the morning part and at different times throughout the day, I visited the “Coconut Cafe” to network and talk with some of the other attendees. This was a very nice feature and I enjoyed that it was available!
On Day 2, I attended 3 sessions.
The first session I attended was, “Retain! Motivate! Engage! Students! Just a Mouse click away!” presented by Julee Poole. This was a very neat seminar, as it discussed a variety of useful tools for educators to use to help engage students, keep them in the classroom, and motivate them to do more! Julee Poole discussed blogging as one type of tool, as well as the use of audio and visual tools that increase the engagement of students in the material and classroom concepts. Great class and lots of important tools discussed!
The second session I attended was, “The Language Hangouts Project: Implementing video chats to develop English skills and cross-cultural community,” presented by Allison Selby and Jodie Kitchens. This is a really neat project going on that connects academic English speaking students with students from other countries, such as Haiti. They can meat and chat through web-based videos and work together in weekly conversations over several weeks. This seminar was definitely empowering and reminded me about how large the global community really is – it is important to teach our students to be respectful of cultural differences and allow them to experience diversity in all new ways.
The third session I attended on Day 2 was, “Facilitating Student Engagement in Online Courses; Framing Discussions for Informal to Scholarly Exchanges,” presented by Danilo Baylen. In this session, the presenter discussed how to guide and facilitate discussions in online classrooms in order to promote higher order thinking skills and support collaboration among students. The presenter reminded us that we need to do more as facilitators than just start a discussion – we need to step in and help respond to the discussion and encourage students to reflect on the discussion or issues at hand. Once students start to experience this back and forth informal scholarly discussion, they develop stronger skills for their future courses and careers.
And that’s all I was able to attend on Day 2. Still so much information to look at and think about in how I can integrate these concepts into my classrooms! Now its time for Day 3!
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