How I Teach in the Online Environment

I’m a San Marino (CA) High School social studies teacher with over thirty years of in-class teaching experience and also a great deal of online teaching experience.

For anyone wondering what it might look like to be enrolled in one of my online classes, I suggest checking out the 32:00 video found here.

This video reveals how, on a daily basis, I teach the thirty-two students enrolled in my 6th-period AP US History class (the video made with the students’ permission.)

The class is structured as I have structured all my online courses this year — five-minutes for attendance and announcements; twenty-minutes for content delivery; twenty-four minutes for students to work on the long-term, high-end PBL opportunity placed before them at the start of the year; and one-minute for the closeout.

• The video begins with my verbally greeting the students at the start of class, followed by the taking of attendance.
• From the 1:02 mark until the 7:10 mark, the video reveals various Golden Rules that I sugeest the students should keep in mind when trying to answer an APUSH short answer question.
• From the 7:10 mark onward, the video reveals how I tried to achieve a specific learning objective . . . to have the students acquire, in no more than twenty minutes, what they need to know to answer any/all questions on the May APUSH Exam relating to the topic of the Great Awakening and Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
• A 24-minute portion of the video that featured the students working on their PBLs has been deleted. No point in keeping that section. Nothing worth noting took place.
• At the 32:20 mark, I close out the class.

The content was delivered in the same manner that I deliver the content in all of my online and face-to-face classes (by combining a Google slideshow presentation with the Socratic Method.)

The Period 1 video didn’t turn out nearly as well as the Period 6 video. Same true for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th period videos. In other words, as the day went on, I learned more and more, with this learning leading to my making one significant change after another.

If I were to teach the same lesson again tomorrow, I would first make several other significant changes. Such seems to be the learning curve when it comes to the online environment.

No matter my prior online teaching experience, at the end of every day this year, I find myself incessantly feeling like a first-year teacher all over again.

Such challenging times. So exhausting