The Trouble with Online Anything

In junior high, we were required to keep a daily planner with all of our assignments marked. I always failed. I could do the assignments (usually late), I generally paid attention in class, and I was a pretty low maintenance student otherwise (I was a little goofy, but I don't think I was on the Ben Franklin Junior High Most Wanted list). It's no wonder I spend a good chunk of my time writing fiction now--I've always been someone who lived most of the time in my own head. So remembered what was due and when has always been a bane for me.

Fast forward: Now, I'm the teacher and, though I married a wonderful woman with stellar calendar skills, very little of that skill has rubbed off on me. In a face-to-face classroom, on a day-to-day basis, I still have trouble remembering what's due and when--and I'm the one assigning the work. What I'm hoping for most in this new adventure into online teaching is that I'll be required to focus more on the pre-teaching and curriculum development and that that planning will help me maintain a consistent schedule in my classroom--both online and, in the future, in the classroom.

My fear, I suppose, links back to my own personality. If I have trouble remembering to pay attention to the world that I'm actually walking through, then the digital world has even more potential to slip my mind. One of my goals over the past year of teaching has been to outline the each class's schedule before class even starts; just writing it in the upper left-hand of the board is a good way to let them know what's coming and remind me what I'm supposed to cover. The nice thing about online teaching is that part of the pedagogy seems to be built in. Now it will just be a matter of remembering to walk into the digital classroom. That Dr. Ragan piece was a particularly helpful reminder that I'll need to be present in the classroom, that online courses don't simply run themselves.