What an amazing test we are undergoing with COVID-19 driving schools globally into online learning facilitation. If we are going to take anything away from this as a positive we can certainly look to what we are learning, or at least have brought back to the forefront, about online learning. Lets take this opportunity to reimagine a truly blended experience for our students, virus or not. In this day and age students should be collaborating, communicating, taking action, sourcing, and connecting across borders online. It’s how our world works so lets mirror this in schools. When I say blended, I mean an opportunity to engage students in amazing in person collaboration in schools, and do so online with those same students, and students around the world they have never met in person. How do we do this?

The first order of business is get away from our thinking that online learning is the same as classroom learning, it’s just in a digital space. So many “online courses” exist out there that are simply the same course, with dated pedagogy, and content sprints and memorization. It’s time to reimagine what students could really be learning and doing online. This global challenge has brought many of these brilliant thinkers and organizations to the forefront. I have really enjoyed working with the Global Online Academy over the past 5 years and look forward to doing so at Frankfurt International School in the future. “Global Online Academy is a nonprofit organization that reimagines learning to empower students and educators to thrive in a globally networked society.” Take a look at the course selections for students. These are not your run of the mill courses from HighSchool…

 

 

 

 

 

Take a look at the teacher support and learning.  There are many sources to get best practices for online learning, such as link here. From Arizona State. SeaChange Mentoring reminds us that even when we don’t meet in person we can still have robust advisory and mentoring programs, see here.

Whether it is because we are forced as with COVID-19, or, if we were previously dabbling with robust online experiences lets come out of this global issue stronger with the types of learning experiences our future learners need and crave. Just because we may not feel completely comfortable with the online world doesn’t mean we can’t facilitate and learn right along side our young learners.

Here is some more help with the most immediate situation as people are thrust into school closures. Strategies and support found here

Please share other support for getting through this stage and for improved online learning experiences moving forward for students.