Month: June 2020

For our Interactive Learning Design, our group found a video on YouTube called What is coding as an introduction of coding. K12 student will have a basic understanding of coding, how we need coding in our life, how does coding work and what does the programmer need to do. To interact with K12 students during this video online might be challenging, but I will provide some activities that will suit the COVID-19 situation.

In class, we will ask students and teachers to broadcast live classes through ZOOM. During the class, the teacher will share the screen with students and watch the video through the teacher’s screen. The teacher will pause the video to emphasize and explain important video contents. The teacher will also randomly ask questions to ensure that students are paying attention to the class. If one student cannot answer, he/she will ask another student to answer. After getting the correct answer, the students who have not answered the question before will answer it again according to their own understanding.

We hope students can ask questions after watching the video. By default, the teacher will mute students’ microphone, but when the video ends, the teacher will turn on the students’ microphone and let them ask questions.

After the teacher assigns the task, students need to submit the assignment through our forum. The teacher will explain the task requirement and instruction in detail during the video conference, and describe it again in the forum through text. After students are divided into groups, they can hang up the video conference. Each group can discuss according to the video materials and instruction of the topic, and complete the task. The teacher will receive assignments in the forum and give feedback and score within a week. But before that, students need to do peer-review to evaluate at least one tasks from other groups.

In my opinion, the teacher’s workload will be excessive. Answering questions and explaining the course will be conducted in a video conference. However, due to the delay of video conferences and possible situations, the Q&A session may take a relatively long time. For writing evaluations, students will be conducted in groups of 3-4 people, so the teacher does not need to evaluate each student. However, because students also need to discuss remotely, the teacher will need to solve some technical problems in the middle as well. ROY MAO ‘s post also includes that teachers’ workload will be increased base on online activities. Therefore, I think 30-40 people will be more suitable for a class. This way the teacher can give feedback to all groups within a week.

Our group is planning to teach K12 students to write some relatively simple code in English, In our course, students will complete some simple tasks by using  JAVA programming language. The tasks will be playful and practical, so children will not be bored or feel too hard to learn during our course. Children will develop logical thinking and innovative spirit while figuring out our little tasks. This course will also help children to practice their attention span and patience since children might need to try many times to get the desired effect. We do recognize that our learning activity will affect by some unexpected event such as the COVID-19.  Children must stay home and reduce unnecessary travel. Therefore, we most likely will change our learning form to online courses.

In order to ensure that our courses can be carried out normally, we will conduct training and Q&A with staff, teachers, parents and students themselves. Ensure that in different family situations and environments, we can help students solve technical problems and deal with emergencies. Moreover, we will establish a mature examine system to ensure that teachers’ teaching effect will not be reduced by the change to online courses. We will also arrange some Q&A during and after class to check students’ learning outcomes.

Our group plans to let children work together as a team to complete programming tasks. However, due to long-distance teaching, students were unable to discuss face to face. But we decided to let each group exchange ideas online through video calls and file sharing. This method not only solves the difficulties that children cannot communicate with each other but also can summarize everyone’s ideas in the same document remotely.

Online teaching can reduce the potential barriers of incomplete notes and incomplete understanding caused by the failure to keep up with the teacher’s lecture progress. Because the online live broadcast software provides a screen recording function, students can watch the playback video to consolidate the content of the class. If a student miss classes, he/she can also use the playback video to make up for the lesson later.

I think elevators are also an example of universal design. The elevator is not only convenient for those living on high floors and need to take a long time to go downstairs, but also indirectly help people who need to carry heavy objects. This design is an aspiration for learning design. Because online teaching not only allows everyone to contactless study in a special period but also facilitates those office workers who do not have time to go to class in a specific place. They can also get various learning opportunities just stay home.