Practicum Reflection

As a student at Lenoir Rhyne in their Online Teaching and Instructional Design certificate program, I am required to do a practicum. This practicum is evidence of the ability to use the material learned throughout the program in a real virtual environment.

My practicum started off at North Carolina Virtual Public Schools (NCVPS). Here I participated in half of a 16 week program where I learned the ins and outs of teaching at an actual virtual school. This was a very informative 8 weeks. I learned about the importance of constant communication; we were required to learned how to create the most effective class announcements that were to be posted daily. I learned about the importance of anonymity; it is imperative that teachers keep there students identity anonymous due to the child identity protection laws. I also learned about creative commons. As educators, we tend to reuse a lot of material that has previously been created by someone else. That is why it important that we understand what material has open rights to share, use, and build upon. Otherwise we may end up in a lawsuit when we genuinely may or may not have had any idea we were in the wrong.

The second 8 weeks of my practicum was held at my current place of employment; North Carolina Connections Academy (NCCA). NCCA is a public charter school that is 100% online. I started working with them in January of 2018. It was an amazing experience. I was able to use the material I learning in my program as well as through my internship with NCVPS. We had to ensure we had constant communication with out students through use of webmail and phone calls. We were also required to hold Live Lesson (LL) sessions at least once per week per course. Fortunately, I only taught one course, math 1. One of the major issues that I ran into as an instructor at NCCA was getting all of my students to attend the LL sessions held on Wednesdays. As a department, our most successful session was the one session that we made mandatory by attaching a quiz grade to it. Although we had major success with this, we are working toward finding ways to achieve the same success without taking away the flexibility that an online course offers.

I plan to remain in the virtual world for the rest of my life, if I can help it. I thoroughly enjoy teaching online. I am excited to see what more I can learn as I continue to expand my knowledge of online teaching.

Week of April 22nd Reflection

Last week I mentioned that I was thinking of making the Benchmark review Live Lesson a mandatory quiz grade. I brought this idea to my department and they agreed that this was a good idea and that everyone should try it. However, one small change was made. We wanted to see how we could maximize the amount of information we could get out to our students. Since we do two Live Lessons for math 1 on the same day, we decided to cover two different sets of material. Now, usually we cover the same information so that students are able to choose which LL to attend. This fosters a sense of choice and gives students some type of control over their learning environment. But we came to the conclusion that the students will attend whichever session they choose, and although they may not get all of the required information, any information is better than none.

I have to say, making the LL mandatory was the best decision that we could have ever made! My attendance was at an all time high. 100+ students both attended and participated. It was amazing!! There were plenty of great feedback from each student and they enjoyed playing the kahoot game. There are truly some competitive students here at NCCA! I was very happy and excited to teach class this Wednesday.

Looking back and reflecting on this, I'm pulled in both directions. One one side, I'd love to get this same amount of attendance and participation on a daily basis. So it would seem that I should make each LL mandatory for every student. But on the other hand, many of these students attends this online charter school due to the flexibility that it offers. So we would be completely wrong to try and take that away from them. Maybe as we continue to grow as a school, we can determine better ways to make the students feel a strong sense of responsibility for their LLs.

Week of April 15th Disucssion.

 This week started off a little rough. I live in Greensboro North Carolina for the first time since I’ve ever been here, we experienced a  tornado. The tornado hit literally one street over from my house. Luckily I was at work at the time, so I wasn’t there to experience the physical tornado.  When I did finally get home from work, I searched the house and came across a broken window, a few patches in the roof, and some of the metallic siding missing at the top of the roof. I know it may not seem like it, but I was blessed. Houses just the next street over we’re completely destroyed.  We were without power for about for five days, and my Wi-Fi was out for about a week. Now I know the Wi-Fi may not seem like it’s that big of a deal. But for someone like me, who works completely from home, that is a major inconvenience. So I had to spend the entire week searching for different locations to sit in, in order for me to go to work that week. On top of the tornado, my brother had to be hospitalized for a couple of days. His hospitalization had nothing to do with the tornado, just other health issues.  So as you can see this was a very stressful week for me. Nevertheless, I pulled myself together because I knew I had students that were counting on me.

Being completely honest, I had to put this lesson together at the last minute. I was so overwhelmed with the different events of my week, that I let my weekly Wednesday lesson creep up on me. So I was very nervous as I entered class that morning. This lesson was the last lesson of the semester before we start reviewing for the EOC. I still was not able to get the attendance numbers that I'd hope for, but those that did come, gave a high level of participation. The students did very well with the questions I prepared for them.

Next week I plan to make the Live Lesson (LL) mandatory. I really need to do something about the low attendance numbers, esp at such a crucial time of the year. Since next weeks LL is specifically a review of the material needed to pass the benchmark exam leading into the EOCs, I will require the students to attend. I think I may assign this as a quiz grade and allow them to earn extra credit through participation. I haven't decided if I will add the extra credit to the attendance quiz grade or to the benchmark, but I do know there will be an extra credit opportunity. Let's keep our fingers crossed that making the LL mandatory will be the motivation needed to get the students to attend!

651 Foundations of Distance Education Reflection

Week of April 8th Reflection

This week is the first week back from spring break. The students are a little slow to getting back into the groove of things. I sent out a reminder for students to join in on our weekly live lesson, scheduled for every Wednesday. Unfortunately, attendance still suffered very tremendously. What suffered even more, was participation levels. At first, I was not aware of the low level of participation. Many of the students don't participate in the warm-up, so it completely went over my head that participation was so low. It wasn't until I started asking scaffolded questions from the lesson, that Ii realize I wasn't getting too many answers. So in an effort to determine exactly how many students were participating, as well as reward them, I asked the students to send me a webmail. In the webmail, they simply had to say, "I participated". Once I received their webmail, I'd rewarded them with a free 100% discussion grade. It pains me to say, only 5 students sent in that webmail.

This was a little discouraging, as I had just had a meeting with my principal about increasing my live lesson attendance numbers. I was sitting there thinking, why is no one participating?”, “am I boring them?”, “am I confusing them?”, “will my principal be upset with me?”, and “What could I possible do to increase these numbers?” I knew I couldn’t keep this from serving the students that were actually participating, so I pushed these thought to the side and finished my lessons.

Despite such low participation, the live lesson went very smoothly. I got through the objectives I set for that day, and each of the students expressed their gratitude for the day’s lesson. For next week’s live lesson, i’ll have to be sure to send out reminders a little earlier than usual. Hopefully this will catch those students that simply forget, or do not check their webmails on a daily basis. With the weather getting warmer outside, I am going to have to sit and really think about ways to get students to want to wake up at 8 am. The 2pm class seems to have much better attendance and participation.  

Practicum Reflection Sept 10

This week in my practicum with NCVPS, we focused on communication between teachers, students and parents. We talked about what an eLA is and why its very important to work very closly with our eLA.

NCVPS is very strict on communication. We must keep a communication journal and keep very detailed notes on any and all levels of communication, even communication through email. Students are to be contacted the weekend before school starts. This is called a "welcome call". These welcome calls are used to gather more information, like parent email, alternate phone numbers, etc.

We also learned how to handle different situations that may require intervention. For example, what to do if a student is in danger of harming themselves or being harmed. If a teacher thinks that a student needs intervention, is it very important to call the instructional director and instructional leader, given it is immediate danger. Email will suffice if there is no threat for immediate danger.

My favorite part of this weeks discussion was the communication scenarios. Were we given scenarios where we had to talk about how we would handle them while staying true to NCVPS standards/protocols.

I'm going to place the questions below (paraphrased versions). You tell me how you would have responded.

1. You have a student with low skill levels. She  usually takes a long time to work through her assignments, but all of a sudden, she is submitting work that far exceeds what you know her ability to be. You have a strong suspicion someone may be doing the work for her. How do you proceed?

2. You are connecting with parents. You reach a parent of a student who is immediately rude and standoffish on the phone. In fact, she tells you, “I have given up on her. Please do not call me again.” How do you proceed in supporting this student and parent? *

Practicum Reflection Sept 3rd

This semester is currently the last semester of my 2nd masters degree!! Exciting right?!!

In December, 2017, I will officially have a MAT (Masters in the Art of Teaching) with a certification in OTID (Online Teaching and Instructional Design). But before I celebrate I must complete a few tasks.

At the top of the list of those tasks is my practicum. I am doing my practicum with NCVPS (North Carolina Virtual Public Schools). I am super excited about this opportunity because it gives me the tools and skills needed to be a successful online educator. In my current face-to-face class, I am working on a gamified model. This model requires a lot of skills that online teachers must master. Which is why I am so excited to be allotted the opportunity to be apart of this year's cohort.

The program is broken up into two, 8-week sessions: course work and student teaching. You must be recommended to move on to the student teaching session before you are approved to student teach. Hence, it is very important to stick to the goals of the first 8-weeks. These goals include learning NCVPS's rules and regulations on:


Week 2: Instructional Model
Week 3: Communication
Week 4: Making Announcements
Week 5: Grades and Feedback
Week 6: Individualization
Week 7: Evaluation and Support

So far things are going well with these goals and I am on track. The course work is very informing and I am truly enjoy learning new information. This week we talked about communication and what things we should and should not include in emails. This practicum is going to truly change my life, and I can't wait to embrace the change