Navigate 1.1.1 Synchronous and Asynchronous

This is a topic that excites me due to my experience!

Synchronous learning is what makes a virtual education in my opinion great. I believe synchronous should be a requirement for a good high school program. Students need interaction with their teachers and peers. In the program I previously taught for we used Blackboard Collaborate for daily synchronous opportunities. Within our pods (mine was American Government) we came together as teachers and designed standard lessons for our modules. We did mini lessons to help students on specific assignments as a launching points, exam reviews, and primary source research tutorials. As a department each month we signed up for a variety of times and dates. We had enough teachers that each one of us signed up for four "live lesson" 2 am times (before 3pm) and 2 pm times (3-8pm). We posted the calendar on the homepage of our course with dates and times for the entire month along with the link to our classroom. Students were highly encouraged to attend as many as possible, but only required to attend one lesson within the course for an assignment grade. Honestly I feel students should have been required to attend more. I believe one per module would have been amazing. Even with only one mandatory live lesson we still averaged between 15-50 students per lesson. Our biggest turnout was always for the final exam review games. There are many tools to use for synchronous learning. I enjoyed Blackboard Collaborate because it is user friendly and App friendly. Students often downloaded the app and attended via their phone or tablet.

Asynchronous learning is built in within the course. Assignments were students must post to a discussion board an initial post and respond to a minimum number of classmates is an asynchronous lesson. This is often found in numerous courses especially college courses for busy adults. This method is great for extensions to assignments and is necessary. The downfall to this is students often make their initial post, respond to classmates, then never go back and engage in a meaningful discussion.

Both types of learning require monitoring and use by the teacher. Many virtual teachers get excited about synchronous learning because it takes us back to our classroom roots.