How to Use Traditional Teaching Methods Online

Using traditional teaching methods online is easy, as long as you are willing to make a few changes in how course work is structured. Through discussion forums, blogs, text boxes, video, podcasts, and webinars, you can teach students effectively and still maintain a fair amount of control and personal interaction.

Things You'll Need

• Computers
• Internet access
• Windows XP or better
• Teacher and student email addresses

Instructions

Virtual Tradition

1. Choose a wiki site. They allow page edits and creation of additional pages, and they offer forums, blogs, notes, video, and podcast. Wetpaint.com is an excellent site that offers these kinds of tools. It is easy to use and manage. You can find other wikis suitable for educational purposes at ncvps.org/web/.

2. Use discussion forums to take advantage of traditional discussion methods. Online discussion forums allow a teacher to start multiple discussions that can be accessed by students from multiple periods.

3. Invigorate your lectures by using blogs and podcasts to deliver key points. Both venues accommodate comments. Have students comment to earn credit and to show comprehension of the key points.

4. Check for understanding in a variety of forms. At your disposal, all the student comments, blogs, and forum replies lend themselves for your perusal and give you an excellent benchmark for how students are learning.

5. Give instant feedback to individual students. No more traditional chicken scratch in the margins of papers--you can, instead, deliver the necessary feedback through comments and emails.

Tips & Warnings

• Explore a web tool and play with its functions and options, determining later which traditional teaching method is suited to it.

• Ning.com is excellent for discussion and blogging purposes.

• Unless you're an online teacher only, you don't have to forget all your face-to-face interaction. Having both accommodates more students, which allows for greater student engagement.

• Availability of Internet access affects students' abilities to get online, so have some traditional options to allow offline students to have equal access to the learning opportunities.

• Choose the "Private Website" option to shut out spammers and other unwanted entities. "Invitation only" allows you to control who joins your website.

References

• Prep's Virtual Jaguars

Resources

• NCVPS Web 3.0 Tools
• Wetpaint Wiki