IDEA:

Lisa Lane of Lisa’s Online Teaching Blog shares a cool way of sparking discussion in herusing a laptop. a laptop. using a laptop. online history class. She uses pictures and video clips to accompany her discussion questions. I never thought of that. I will be revamping my course in January, so I may have to give this a try.

EXAMPLE:

Throughout my class, I try to disrupt misconceptions and biases teachers may have about people with disabilities. One way I could use pictures is to post a description of a student with a disability and description of one without and then have my students match the description with one of two pictures of students The pictures would be such that disabilities or lack thereof could not be detected by just looking at the photo.

The purposes of this exercise would be:

1. to emphasize that many disabilities like learning disabilities and ADHD are “invisible”
2. to point out that teachers need to get to know students as individuals
3. to demonstrate that simply knowing a student’s diagnoses does not necessarily tell us information we can use as teachers, and
4. to foster the idea that students are more alike than different

YOUR TURN:

I am sure I can think of other ways to use pictures to start discussions. If you have ideas from your own teaching, please share in the comments.

My class is built around discussions. I like for students to engage in genuine exchanges with each other I don’t want just teacher-student interaction or students to simply post in order to earn points (although there will always be some of those in a graded environment. )

With a class of 30 students making at least four posts each week, there’s no time to respond to every post each student makes, so I try to be selective in my participation. As in any class, there will be students who post longer comments and comment more frequently than others, so I try to respond to different students each week. Read the rest of this entry »

As an individual with disabilities and researcher in assistive technology, I am thrilled to discover any way that online learning environments can be made more accessible to students with disabilities.

Bloomsberg University in Pennsylvania has integrated real-time sign language captioning into an online course to increase access for students who are deaf and hard of hearing — very cool! The course used the Wimba learning platform.

A grant funded this project, so I am guessing this captioning does not come cheap. It would be interesting to compare the cost of captioning an online course to providing interpreters in face-to-face classes. In any case, I hope this is just the beginning of endeavors to increase online learning acessbility.