Group acvities can be a good way for students to take charge of their own learning. According to Ko and Rossen (Teaching Online A Practical Guide) an icebreaker would be a good group activity to use in an online environment because it allows students to begin to form a sense of community online.
I searched the internet to see what icebreaker activities are being used in distance learning and I came across an article by Bill Pelz. His article (My) Three Principles of Effective Online Pedagogy has a number of icebreaking activities. There is an important quote in the article that sums up why we should put students in charge of their own learning: "A lecture is the best way to get information from the professor's notebook into the student's notebook without passing through either brain." What a great quote!
One activity he suggests, is to have the student facilitate a discussion; the students do most of the work and the role of the educator is to provide structure, direction, supportive and corrective feedback, and evaluation of final product.. To read more about the activities suggested by Pelz I have included the website to the journal article: http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v8n3/v8n3_pelz.asp.
posted by Marol @ 7:00 PM
1 Comments:
I like the article you linked to. The subheading that caught my eye was "Strive for presence." Presence is an area of great interest to me, since it has a lot to do with humanizing online learning. Thanks. Ann
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