of OhSoSocial (https://ohso.social), is our social media specialist. She has given us insights into the evolving role social media plays with our work, including developing the following four guidelines for using social media to enhance education.
1. All social spaces are not the same: For example, with Twitter becoming perhaps the most preferred social tool for emerging news, if you are teaching a class that relies on current events, the inclusion of certain Twitter feeds might make your learning space more robust. Instagram, on the other hand, might be a less-than-ideal fit for this kind of class.
2. All learning spaces are becoming social: From how campaigns strategize for political elections to how corporate America markets its products, social media has an impact on everything in our culture. The same is true with learner management systems and almost any type of learning experience. If an educator in a digital environment or otherwise tries to make his or her learning antisocial, he or she is unlikely to be successful.
3. Social spaces aren’t forever: Although our culture tends to enjoy the idea of permanence, social media connections don’t have to go on forever. You can join a group on Facebook and then move on once the usefulness of that group expires. Having the ability to move on and look for other in-the-moment connections keeps social media interesting and allows for the greater prevalence of innovation.
4. Schools need a strategy: It is beyond the scope of this book to delve into too many details concerning social media, but we believe that social media is a very powerful tool if it is utilized strategically. Schools need to have a plan for their social presence. To make social media work, content needs to be consistently provided and thoughtfully scheduled for release. We believe this is true for large corporate and nonprofit entities, and it’s also true for teachers who use social media with their students.
Use these guidelines as you consider how you might integrate social media platforms and tools into your own curriculum.
Conclusion
The introduction and this first chapter provide you with a much-needed philosophical backdrop for putting in context the strategies we will explore throughout the rest of this book. DEL doesn’t represent a new direction or destiny in K–12 education. If executed appropriately, it instead represents an efficient, cost effective, and comparable, if not superior, learning opportunity for the students you serve.
Finally, in Zen practice, it’s not uncommon to deliberately confront either the unfamiliar or irrational as an opportunity to extend the limits of one’s intellect or understanding. Satirist Jon Stewart used to close his popular hit The Daily Show with a funny, obscure, or otherwise jarring image in relationship to the political thought of the day. Think of Mr. Hill, who had his moment of Zen when his well-schooled charge returned and gently confronted him with the jarring reality that his assumptions about technology and learning were wrong. In fact, his students could grow more with asynchronous elements dynamically providing all of the students the opportunity to think things through and respond. In a moment of Zen, Mr. Hill learned to embrace the opportunities provided. Mr. Hill never became a technophile, but that moment gave him the courage to inspire thoughtful consideration of the tools he had come to suddenly understand and even respect.
CHAPTER 2
Planning Curriculum, Assessment, and Preinstruction
Because many of you are in very different places in terms of curriculum expectations, we approach instructional planning in this chapter from a broad perspective that you can apply to your classroom’s needs. As you conceptualize your curriculum, we attempt to clarify the methods of online teaching you can prepare as a precursor to launching your course. Here are some common questions that individuals ask when embarking on an online teaching endeavor.
KEY QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS CHAPTER
• When choosing a curriculum program to plan and develop, what are its advantages and disadvantages?
• What are the implications of attention to appropriate instructional pacing?
• What are the implications of supporting learning content and skill proficiency?
• How do teacher teams inform the process of planning and developing online learning?
• What types of instructional activities work well online?
• What types of learning assessments work well online?
As you reflect on these questions, it’s important to consider the degree of flexibility you have in constructing your online course’s curriculum. Why is your flexibility as a facilitator a factor in implementing your online course? Consider the following conundrum that Dana faced in trying to implement beneficial change.
DANA AND THE INNOVATION STRANGLEHOLD
Dr. Reason,
I have been teaching for ten years and have the good fortune of coming from a school district that deeply embraced the Professional Learning Communities at Work model. I read the book you wrote with Dr. DuFour regarding virtual collaboration with great enthusiasm because of my recent career change (DuFour & Reason, 2016). I’ve always dreamed of being an innovative educator, and this fall I took a job with a national online middle school that serves at-risk students throughout the nation. They hired me because of my experience in working with PLCs and my background in supporting at-risk learners.
The teachers that I am working with didn’t know much about the PLC process. During one of my first meetings, I had a chance to share with them the concept and talk about what steps we could take to begin to initiate the process. When I talked to them about defining, as a group, the essential learning our students needed to demonstrate, the group responded that the essential learning was already provided in the course platform. When I mentioned the importance of the establishment of common formative assessments, they again told me that the platform maintained these documents and no additional work in this area was needed. When I talked to them about making changes to the curriculum or our approaches due to discoveries that we might make along the way, my team again informed me that the curriculum was set and that we would have to go through the designated designer in order to make any changes to the curriculum.
Did I make a mistake by coming to this school? Are all schools delivering online learning this inflexible?
Help!
Dana
What you will discover in looking at what teachers are facing in teaching online is that there are numerous variables when it comes to designing a curriculum. In Dana’s case, she clearly found herself with what she felt like was very little wiggle room in terms of design and delivery of learning thanks to joining this national, online delivery platform. We have seen other cases wherein teachers are asked to teach a high-stakes, relatively sophisticated class online and are provided little more than a cursory overview of what the e-learning platform can do and a good luck wish. This chapter is designed to help negotiate both ends of the continuum, as well as where most of us exist, which is somewhere in the middle.
Approaches to Curricula in Digital Environments
We have observed many prepackaged K–12 digital curriculum programs wherein, just like Dana, the instructors inherit a full complement of instructional units, individual lessons, and accompanying assessments when they log in to begin teaching. In Dana’s case, she was
