Communication and Collaboration

This post is a reflection on the Leading Edge Digital Educator unit on communication and collaboration.

Portfolio assignment for module 6:  Space Engineering

Out of necessity, teaching needs to include both asynchronous and synchronous communications to both address immediate concerns as well as providing more in depth feedback over a longer period of time.

Students are able to talk to me during class by raising their hand, coming up to me, or by sending me a message through Google Classroom. My new favorite feature of Google Classroom is that it e-mails me every time a student adds a comment to an assignment in Classroom. At first I was ignoring the e-mails because of the quantity and often times I would not look through them or reply until the comment was no longer relevant. Now when I get an e-mail during class time, I get a notification immediately and am able to walk over and resolve or discuss the comment with the student right away. With the combination of digital and face to face communication, I do indeed feel like I’ve created a blended classroom where students and I can navigate through either medium and use whatever means is easiest at the time for communication.

My communication and collaboration with other teachers is similarly both via e-mail and in person. E-mail works best for either quick questions or for detailed information. Face to face communication and collaboration happens mostly during nutrition and lunch time, but is a valuable way to hear thoughts from a whole group at once.

With parents, my communication is solely via e-mail. I much prefer to send and receive e-mail so that I can think about my message rather than try to communicate with my mouth that moves more slowly than my brain. I do my best to reply within a reasonable timeframe with all correspondence. I do try to Tweet our activities in class as well but I will need to grow my Twitter base to include more parents to make it an effective means of communication. I’d say my communication to parents and the world is the newest aspect of my teaching and one that I need to continue to build. I have lots of pictures and resources I’d like to share but get stuck figuring out the best method to do so and end up not sharing anything.