Online Course Development & Facilitation

These artifacts show the screencast instruction videos that I recorded for my students. My students were sixth graders who had opted to learn virtually for the school year. In the district that I worked in, all online classes in grades 6-12 were exclusively asynchronous. As you can imagine, having a bunch of eleven-year-olds coming out of an already disjointed, pandemic-altered elementary school experience who are then thrust into taking five asynchronous online courses created a situation ripe for confusion and navigation errors. In order to help them find their way and feel less overwhelmed, I recorded these screencast directions to help them navigate their assignments. 

In this position, I used the Itslearning LMS, which is a learning management system most commonly used in Europe. While it is not used by many U.S. school districts (my district was their largest U.S. client), Itslearning has a lot of similarities to other popular LMSes such Instructure Canvas, Blackboard, and D2L/Brightspace. 

In the videos below, you can see the different ways that I used educational technology to try to engage with my students even though I was limited in my interactions with them by the asynchronous environment. Even though they had chosen an online learning experience, I never wanted them to feel like they were alone or that there was not a real, living teacher who cared about them on the other side of their computer screen.