c)When conducting an online lesson, classroom management becomes a key issue. It becomes very common for students to become easily distracted when they are on the computer. One of the key ideas that can be used for a teacher when conducting a computer class, is to acknowledge that distractions exist, but to incorporate these distractions into the learning. A good way of doing this is introducing students to iGoogle.
iGoogle is a website developed by Google, in which when an account is created, users are able to put nearly EVERTHING they find on the internet link back to the one central place. The can stream research from the site, create links to Facebook and MySpace, and even formulate group of people with similar interests.
When students are distracted in class, are not staying on task and it becomes clear that they are looking at sites that are irrelevant, a useful way is to get students to go back to their iGoogle, and see if whether they are able to link the site they are looking at to their homepage. Also, iGoogle also allows users to customize their page to make it increasingly personal, so this could be a useful way to get students back on track, by allowing them to make their page more interesting, and with the most applications.
Another key issue surrounding classroom management in an online learning environment is that it should be student centred, not teacher directed. Going back to Dreikurs idea of democratic discipline, for a successful online classroom, students must be given the opportunity to take responsibility for their work, and the teacher should only act as the facilitator. For more information on Dreikurs, and his ideas on student autonomy and responsibility, go to the education wiki created for him – http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Dreikurs,_Rudolf
