I’ve always tried to make the beginnings of my class meetings special, to set the stage for the learning encounter that will follow. When classes are separated by 10 minutes and students linger after class (as I welcome and hope they will), that sometimes means that the teacher I follow or the teacher who follows me in that physical location doesn’t have time to get the stage set the way we’d like.
With my online class meetings, that’s not a problem–one of the things I’ve come to love about teaching online.
So I begin admitting students into the Zoom space only after I’ve shared a screen with the title slide for the day. I choose a background for the title slide to set the tone for the day, intellectually or emotionally or ideally both. I also play a song or two so there’s music playing as the students become present in the Zoom space. I start it all up two or three minutes (or more, depending on the length of the song) before the time scheduled for the meeting, so students enter the immersive world of our meeting with the world already in place. Then, once we’ve pretty much all gathered together (I often wait a minute or two past the meeting start time, because I know it can take a few seconds to join the Zoom space), I greet the students with some (hopefully) lively patter, a bit of an overview of the day’s work, maybe a weather report in my radio voice if I’m feeling daffy. Finally, to get us properly started, I ask all the students to wish each other good morning or good afternoon or happy Tuesday (again, depending on my mood, and theirs) into the chat.
So we’re all together in the world that preceded our arrival, and we’ve all sent good wishes to each other in a way that would never be possible in a physical co-location, and we’ve got some music in our minds and a bit of a daffy welcome from the prof. Then there’s often some class business, reminders, etc. And then, when I shift gears into the main lesson for the day, I say, “so if you’re ready for (whatever it is we’ll be doing), please type ‘ready” in the chat.’ Almost always, I’ll tell them what a thrill it is to see that beautiful cascade of readiness (and reaaaddddy!!!!! and woohoo let’s go!! and whatever they feel moved to type) pour down the chat window.
Thus, mutually strengthened for the work ahead, we enter the lesson together.
As a bonus, the title slides from each lesson become a dandy scrapbook, a little souvenir of each meeting. I’ve taken to using these as a montage sequence in the little farewell video I make for the last day of class, the day we each bring to the class a digital “farewell” gift.
Here’s a little gallery of some recent title slides. Looking back, I see some are more graphically effective than others, but they all get the job done, at least. And when I make my little farewell montage for the last day of class, a little movie I run in Zoom (typically with a little fair-use song as a soundtrack), these slides, along with screenshots of RamPage sites and avatars from our discussion Forum, are a reminder of the journey we’ve completed. I can say farewell and, with each student’s avatar onscreen at one point or another, I’m rolling the credits too.
I’m filing this away in “ideas I will steal/borrow” folder. I know we talk about these small rituals as a way of making the class more than a color block in a schedule, that it has an essence of being an event. Not show-personship or being a show, but … a regular occasion?
In reading this I am struck too that there is a regularity, an expectation that you set up for students, but there is also the unknown. What will be the music? The greeting? The daffy message?
And saving the weekly opening covers into a class end show piece is a marvelous way to tie the whole course together. It creates something than can trigger every participants memories and connections.
I believe these small acts matter a lot.
That’s an excellent observation about the regularity and the unknown. Exactly right. Going fully to online has taught me that you have to have both. It’s like being in a spaceship together. The stuff you need absolutely has to be there. The ship is hard to maneuver because it has a lot of mass and it’s in a zero-G environment where some intuitions from Earth just don’t work. (Paging Buzz Aldrin, “Dr. Rendezvous.”) But the whole ship starts to go bonkers unless there’s some variety on board.
Not sure that analogy works entirely, but I think it’s pretty durable. Magic School Bus meets Magic Space Ship. (Did I mention I’ve been watching “The Expanse” lately?)
As always, you help me sharpen and focus my thinking, a lot.
I completely agree about the small acts. Long ago I read a piece in the Columbia University alumni magazine about how students remembered the professor’s digressions more than the professor’s lessons. I can’t make my lessons fully into digressions, but I can keep the lesson peppered with little change-ups.
When my colleagues and I were thrown into “remote” learning, many all but panicked, asking “How am I going to teach (the way I used to f2f in an online environment. You, by contrast, asked a different question: “How can I use the affordances of online learning to provide what my students need to experience learning in a new environment.” You make the answer look easy, but it requires knowledge of what’s possible online, an open mind, and deep thought about what effective learning requires. Thank you for sharing your insights. Like @cogdog, I might steal some of your ideas. At least, they’ve made me think.