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Question: Independent Learners in a Virtual Classroom Setting

Do you feel students have more responsibility or less responsibility as learners in a virtual classroom environment compared to a traditional classroom environment? How might virtual classrooms affect students that do not have supporting parents to help and encourage them to stay on top of their studies? Either post a written response to my question or respond to my POLL on the side on my blog. Thanks!

Online Learning Reference Web Links

Online Learning Reference Web Links
Resource links for interested teachers

Teaching art online may seem a bit of a stretch at first thought. My personal concern was the following: How can art teachers effectively combine hands-on-learning studio experiences with web tools in order to create an online art class that works for the k-12 art education community? After contemplating where to begin with the topic I decided to explore online applications for setting up a virtual art classroom. I logged on to http://arted20.ning.com/group/teachingartonline to see what the teaching art online group had to say about the matter.

After reading the comments posted I organized some of my findings below:
Here are a few good/free web based applications to set up a virtual classroom:

http://www.wimba.com/solutions/k-12/
http://www.wimba.com/solutions/k-12/collaboration_suite_for_k_12/
“The Wimba Collaboration Suite 6.0 integrates video, voice, chat, application sharing and white boarding into typically static, text-based online classes or the traditional classroom to enhance the learning experience through greater collaboration and interaction.”

Another resource is:
http://moodle.org/

What is Moodle?
* Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
* Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
* Many of our users love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

Also, for more information on how to use this resource:
Teaching with Moodle: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teaching_with_Moodle

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ can be used for the following:
Art museum field trips/ scavenger hunts. Even though it’s an online class maybe arrange a day where the class would meet at a museum or local art gallery, park, exhibit, etc. This idea came from http://smarthistory.org/blog/88/flickr-in-art-history-class-how-fun/ “The students could take pictures of what they discovered during their scavenger hunt and upload the photos to Flickr where they could tag them, annotate them (using the “notes” feature) and leave descriptions and comments…. The idea was that they tagged their photos with the vocabulary words or things that they were looking for on their scavenger hunt, and also with their name so I could find their photos easily. If you look at, for example, all the photos tagged with “atmosphericperspective” — you get an amazing selection of images that use that technique, along with their descriptions (if you have that turned on, in the slideshow).”
Upload photos of student’s artwork for purposes such as:
* class critiques
* ongoing assessment
* digital portfolios of their artwork

Last but not least I found a website that gives an extensive list of links of the top online art resources available. Art teachers can incorporate these into their virtual classrooms based on the context of the topics to which they are teaching:
http://surfaquarium.com/IT/content/art.htm

(one of my favorite sites listed is www.pbs.org/art21)