My Presentation on Best Online Practices

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Supporting Struggling Learners

    Lack of motivation is one of the greatest challenges for both students and educators, many students suffering from a prolonged lack of motivation, and many educators suffering from desperation from not being able to motivate students. Many educators take on the question of whether its lack of motivation or a skill deficit, the age-long question creating setbacks in the classroom, teaching lessons, and overall frustration for all parties involved. An efficient way to easily answer this question is the "Can't do/Won't do" assessment which is an assessment that basically tests for the motivation factor. The assessment doesn't need to be hard and elaborate, it only has to be an assessment without additional instruction. This assessment becomes the first step in figuring out what your next move should be.

   After using this assessment you can move on to the next challenge, skill deficit or performance deficit? A student who is struggling with a skill deficit is a whole other challenge, as this student may not only be struggling in your class but in many other areas. Students who are experiencing a skill deficit require more intervention than simply moving them up in the class and giving them different coursework/accommodations. Students who are experiencing these difficulties require a village of support, building knowledge and mastery of the skill, not just changing up a few things here and there. Working closely with a school psychologist, other teachers, and even their parents can assemble a team where you're able to brainstorm the best way to support this student in numerous different ways. In an online environment, assessing kids with skill deficits can be facilitated via zoom calls, online evaluations, and often in-person meetings with your team. If you set your mind to it, you can do it. 

A performance deficit can be an extremely easy challenge to tackle or an extremely different challenge, you should never underestimate it and as an educator, you must validate every reason or cause for this performance deficit. The truth is that we only see these kids for 50% of their day, we don't know what goes on with the other 50% that could be affecting this motivation. Whether it's a mental, physical, or seasonal challenge, you must be available and present for these children and always try your best effort to work and cooperate with them. The Can't do/Won't do assessment presents a new approach to students who lack motivation, by offering an incentive or an easier task first, there are hundreds of ways to motivate students. In an online environment, this can be extremely hard; however, by presenting an easier task and building up from there, you're able to not overwhelm kids and let their grades go up.

    

Motivation

 Student motivation is one of the biggest factors in online environments, with students falling behind, lacking accountability, and often not even participating, motivation is the hardest challenge to tackle. After researching and reflecting on my instructor's practices I concluded the best five ways to motivate students: providing meaningful student feedback and interacting with your classroom is one of the best things you can do for online learning students. Allowing students to virtually interact with you and letting them know that there is an actual person there increases motivation as they aren't just interacting with a screen but with an actual person. The second best way to motivate students is to allow self-monitoring on their learning platforms, keeping track of attendance, computer activity, and course activity enables for students to develop discipline, accountability, and motivation to actually complete the assignments. The third way to motivate students is by encouraging collaboration with other students, assigning group assignments to help foment the sense of a community within an online environment, making students feel more comfortable to post, create, and communicate with peers and the instructor. The fourth way is sprinkling in a variety of different assignments like videos, jamboards, edpuzzles, and a multitude of different assignments that limit repetition. When you create variety, you help the brain stay awake, helping students stay motivated. The fifth and last way to keep students motivated is to make assignments personal and relatable to students' life, by doing this you not only add variety to your assignments but also make students feel like actual human beings, by sharing their experiences, you allow for creativity and the sense of a community to flow.

The application of these tools is all relatively easy, personally, as an online instructor I would host virtual meetings and get to know my students. If a virtual meeting isn't available, I would create a discussion board for students to get to know each other. Through this, when you assign group projects, students are more likely to actually want to work with each other. Additionally, these group projects could also be personal, allowing students to thoroughly get to know each other while also learning the content. As an instructor, I would also make sure to leave meaningful feedback that relates to students, not just generic comments like "good work", but actually discuss what is in their replies or submissions. 

Assessing students in online environments