With the newly emerged, technology-driven realm of K–12 education, there’s been a paradigm shift in how educators must structure the teaching and learning experiences they provide. The truth is, the teaching practices that were effective for you in a brick-and-mortar classroom need to be thoughtfully reconsidered as you translate them to a digital classroom. Adapting successfully can help you improve student success and deliver truly transformative online learning experiences.
By integrating your existing innovative pedagogy and content knowledge with technology, you can reach learners in new and engaging ways. You already bring immense knowledge and wisdom from your experiences in a face-to-face classroom. By uncovering the potential of online tools to complement your teaching, you can successfully achieve the educational goals you set for your students and for yourself.
In the Brightspace platform, there are many powerful tools that can assist you in applying the teaching practices that worked fantastically in your face-to-face classrooms. Tools such as Announcements, Activity Feed, Assignments, and Discussions will support you in teaching online comfortably and confidently, just like you would in your in-person classroom.
For example, the Announcements and Activity Feed tools can help you share vital information with your students the same way you would use chalkboards or planners.
Meanwhile, the Assignments tool can assist you in creating formative and summative assessment items and support the need for assessment as/for/of learning.
Lastly, the Discussions tool is helpful in structuring meaningful student engagements and creating an environment that builds positive feelings in student learning experiences.
Beyond transforming in-person teaching practices into a digital learning experience, you likely want to achieve other educational goals, such as ensuring inclusive and whole-child learning.
In the Brightspace platform, there are several tools and features that can support you in creating learning paths, assessments, and engagements that suit the individual needs of students:
- Check in with each student to discover their academic needs by sending instant messages or emails from the class list. You can even choose to set up private discussion boards with students, where students can interact freely or seek support from you.
- Build inclusive online quizzes with a large variety of questions that match an individual student’s learning style and needs.
- Provide extra support to struggling students with Intelligent Agents to automatically send email communications based on individual learner progress.
- Issue badges and certificates to students with the Awards tool to motivate your students as they make progress and achieve success.
- Create special work areas for students with different learning needs or organize every student’s work on projects and assignments within the same course. With the Groups tool, you can allow each student to simultaneously belong to different groups, and you can easily assess their work.
In summary, online tools can equip you with the resources you need to make your digital classroom just as rich and engaging as your face-to-face classroom. A well-planned and structured adaptation of Brightspace tools can result in phenomenal outcomes for your teaching practices, providing you with more time to listen to your students and to foster academic excellence.
In our next post, we’ll explore a few of the benefits of transitioning your teaching from other learning technologies to the Brightspace platform.
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