Screenside Chats feature online practitioners as they discuss their experiences, strategies, and tools building and interacting in pedagogically sound online learning environments.
In this Screenside Chat, IU High School English teacher, Courtney Gaylord, discusses why students have difficulty attending to content in online courses and shares her strategies for overcoming these obstacles.
Please watch the video and then join the conversation below!
This would have been helpful to know prior to administering the ACP tests online this spring. The directions were so incredibly long that my students couldn’t even find the link to the test. Are there examples of what this would look like anywhere? It seems that once you put the expectations along with the directions, you’d be past one page in length. I have noticed though that the pages where my kids have no accountable action, they tend to skip completely. They skip from one assignment page to the next and skip the page in the middle where the notes are. Perhaps it’d be better to have them together so they don’t skip every other page.
On a completely unrelated subject, it is refreshing to watch an educational video where someone’s home is not truly visible in the background. In so many of these videos, I realize just how different I am from other teachers. They have fancy fireplaces, art work, book shelves, and throw pillows. Meanwhile, my video is created on my kitchen table which is covered in stickers from my kids. Its a little thing, but I appreciate the dog barking and the background noises (kids?). I feel like so many teachers have focused on looking academic instead of looking real. I don’t want my students to think I make $300,000 a year because I don’t. I’d rather them see my videos and feel like they can relate to me. This video made me feel like I could relate, so thank you Courtney.
Ha-ha, Joanna! I’m glad you enjoyed my barking dog and the ambient chaos. That cut toward the end is where the marketing people edited out the part where my kids decided to make snowcones with the shaved ice machine (a.k.a. the loudest device in my kitchen) and I dashed up the stairs to tell them to BE QUIET. Hiding in the basement to work is neither fun nor picturesque, but at least we are all in this together at this point!
To answer your actual question, I think the specifics of how this works will depend on a lot on the capabilities of your LMS as well as on your personal aesthetics and your subject matter. I wind up just dividing lessons into many small chunks, each of which contains something that must be done (not just words that must be read).
Here is a link to the GDoc version of the lesson I’m working with in Dr. Itow’s class. It is not an exemplar, by any means, just an example of my theory in action: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tiFoRdH8U-hA933dguKDxkGZ4qbQZoOPvTbu7x-zv5w/edit?usp=sharing.
In my view, the art of online course design is largely the art of winnowing. How much can I trim away without losing the learning? So, for instance, there are materials some students (but not all) of them will want/need, I link to them. If there are instructions that I need to repeat on every lesson, I just link to them for those who want a reminder–the only exceptions to this in my classroom appear at the very end of the lesson. I keep those because I know that the kids who don’t want them can skip them, and they won’t miss any new information because nothing comes after them (if that makes sense). I just try to remember that once they start scanning, they are unlikely to re-engage with the text in an authentic way.
Do you think that the art of trimming also goes for parent communication? We were, with this spring emergency learning, required to send about 3 e-mails home each week to parents and 3 more to students. It kept being said to “overcommunicate” but it seemed to me that, if I was a parent I would have stopped reading all those e-mails long ago. Do you suggest also avoiding the scrolling problem with parents? How do you handle scrolling problems when some people are reading on computers and some on tiny phone screens?
I like the idea of linking the directions after the first time. Thanks!
Joanna – I think parents are the master of scrolling. Unless they see their child’s name (or theirs) they kind of take the attitude that it doesn’t apply to them. For this reason I make my parent email short and to the point – no beating around the bush. And continually linking to other documents is always helpful – no one can resits clicking. 🙂 But I understand your district preaching over communication. It’s to prevent parents from saying “You never told me” when something goes awry. You sent it; they just didn’t read it.
I found the topic of holding attention via NOT scrolling and placing an action on each screen invaluable! So…are Guiding Questions by heading a good idea or not? How or Can I insert Questions at the bottom of sections of a reading of which I copied? It seems like I should insert the Question instead of making a longer Worksheet that students have to open side by side….but then, how do I score? I like the advvice shorten the distance between directions and the action item….but since I am not developing a web page I think I need to teach students how to open multiple tabs (the required reading and the worksheet) and go back and forth, Yes? No?
Hi, Connie–I think putting questions into the reading section would work well. I do that in some of my lessons. I also put the questions on the document/”worksheet” that I ask them to submit so that they don’t have to go back and forth as much. I would just say that it’s important to make sure they actually have to answer the guiding questions–otherwise, many of them will skip the reading entirely or do it very minimally. You don’t necessarily have to score the questions, unless you want to. Requiring students to answer them in writing on a document that they will ultimately submit to you will do the trick for the vast majority of students. Then you can just eyeball those answers for completion.
As for the question of multiple tabs/pages, I haven’t found that to be a problem for students. They are used to managing many tabs and even, often, many screens with many tabs. They are super-good at clicking and navigating and scrolling–they are not at all good at *learning* while doing it. So that’s where I put my energy: making sure that I include something that will force them out of the deep, lazy grooves that their constant online behaviors have worn.
If your lessons are designed to be linear, they should be able to go from one part to the next part of the lesson, requiring only one page of your LMS to be open at a time. If they are also using outside online sources, just make sure you design it so that the link opens in a new tab (this is usually the default).
I prefer having them do all of their work for each lesson on a single document. That makes it easier for them to know when they are finished, makes it more difficult for them to cherry-pick the parts of the assignment they want to do (and leave out the others), and makes it easier for me to look at what they’ve done and see where, in a holistic way, they may have gotten off task. It also, as an added benefit, reduces my grading burden because I touch each student’s work only once per lesson. For me, that’s a win/win/win/win.
Connie – I understand what you’re saying about making the lesson “unscrollable” while still providing questions for them to answer as they read. I don’t know if you use a lot of Google apps, but if you have access to Google Classroom, I found it a really good way to do exactly what you are talking about. My students split their screen between the reading and the questions I posted on Google docs so they were able to view both at the same time. Now that being said – I also made sure the questions were not “regurgitation” questions where they could look for specific words/phrases and answer the question. Questions were structured so they HAD to read and then infer/analyze in order to answer the questions – and give examples to back up their answers. But my lessons were always short enough there was no scrolling.
If also helped that our district provided us with a template (universal for the whole district) that we had to use to post our eLearning assignments on. You only had so much room,so you had to put in links to get them to the activities.
I find this technique is helpful with videos/video lectures as well. Before emergency remote learning I used EdPuzzle to edit longer videos to include both multiple choice and short answer questions. I love how once students get to the question, they can go back and review the video as well. I plan to also incorporate checks for understandings in the synchronous/asynchronous meetings going forward.
I hadn’t thought a lot about students tendency to scroll past checks, but looking back, I can see that many students did just that during emergency remote teaching. I like how Canvas is set up to chunk the information, guiding students to “submit” as well as us a “next” or “Previous” button that guides them through the “Module”, lesson or unit. I am not sure if Microsoft Teams works that way yet. I wonder about creating a checklist for students to complete. Definitely a mind shift! Thank you for your insights.
If you use Chrome there is a Kami extension that will open pdf docs so they can be manipulated. By doing this you can insert questions in the doc where you want them and the students can respond right there on the doc also. This might help eliminate some of the “worksheet” activities.
I will rewrite my Lesson Design so that I have sections labeled “Problem” and “Action.” This has been a helpful discussion. This is the world that I live in. At the very end, after the assignment is done and there is no possibility of re-submitting the assignment, the students may be willing to engage in the “meta-cognition” piece. Before that, they must be led precisely by “Do this” and “Do that.” But these directions must be kept just sort of “This is exactly what it should look like.”
Many of my students want directions that contain the finished product. I will give them “Actions” and not “Copies.”
Helpful. As a middle school principal, I see the pitfalls of “too much on the screen”.
Thanks, Josh! Agreed! As I lead IUS, I am constantly thinking about our responsibility to ensure students step away from the screen and interact in non-digital spaces. What are some of the ways you encourage middle school students to balance time with and without the screen?