Welcome to Teaching in Blended and Online Classrooms!

I'm excited about this course and hope you all are too. I know we'll all learn a lot from each other.

Getting to know P2PU

Here are a few important things to know about P2PU. It's really all about:

• Community and peer learning - This means we are all learners and teachers, so jump in and collaborate, add to the class, edit posts to make them better, help teach, share, etc.
• Openness - All content on P2PU (including your contributions) is open licensed. This means we are all giving others permission to share our work here as long as they attribute us as the source (CC BY). This is great, because it means these courses can be remixed and reused by others. Share the love!
• Personalization - This is one of the things that makes the School of Ed different from other professional development you might have been involved in. This course is about your learning so take control of it and make it work for you. If you don't find an activity here to be beneficial to you, suggest another one. Personalize, customize, and make your learning the very best it can be!
   

And here are a few techical tips to get you started.

• P2PU is pretty straightforward, but ask any questions you have. (A good way to do this is either as a comment on a task or on the Activity Wall, which is for course related comments rather than task related.)
• You will get notifications by email of various comments and important things going on this the course. If it gets to be too much, just go to My P2PU -> Edit Profile -> Notifications and choose which ones to turn off.
• Most tasks on P2PU can be edited by participants. If you see something that is wrong or have something important to add, just click the Edit button in the upper right. Don't worry about messing things up because there is version control so anything can be "undone." :) If you have something to add but aren't sure about editing the task, you can also say it in a comment.
• We'll use tools on the P2PU site in this course as well as others. Don't feel constrained to the tools we use though. If you have a favorite tool or Web 2.0 site that meets your needs, please use it and invite others to do the same.
   

This course

For this course, we'll use these conventions:

to indicate hands-on activities or other things to do

to indicate optional supplemental readings. These will be included in a separate task for each week.

Getting to know each other

As we're starting on this course, please do two things to help us get to know each other. First, if you haven't already, update your profile (My P2PU -> Edit Profile) to include info about yourself and a picture. Also, post a comment on this task to introduce yourself (Post Comment in upper-right corner). In addition to your name, what grade and subject you teach, and anything else you want to  share, include your own goals for this course and collaboration ideas you have. (See below.)

Setting your own path for this course

This course is all about steering your own learning in a way that works for you.

As we're getting started, take a look at the syllabus. Think about how you can customize each week's activities to meet your own goals. In particular, weeks 3-6 have a lot of opportunities for this.

In your introductory post, include how you plan to customize the course to meet your own goals. (You may link to your own customized version of the syllabus if you like.)

Possible collaborations

Collaborting is a big part of peer learning, and one way to do this is through active collaborations on tasks. The sky's the limit on what you might do for this course but here are some ideas:

• Collaborate with others using the same tool (e.g. Moodle or Blackboard) to exchange ideas and provide support.
• Join up with someone in a similar grade level or subject area and exchange resources, ideas, etc.
• Choose an area you are especially interested in or have expertise in and moderate a webinar or contribute additional material to the course.
• Form a cross-classroom collaboration with students.
• Ask someone to be an online guest speaker for your students.
• Look at eeach other's course outline or materials and make suggestions. Iteratively design in teams.

Use this spreadsheet to record what platform you're working on and your ideas or interest in being a part of a collaborative effort and/or write about it in your introductory post.

I've also include a column here to include your Twitter account name as well. I tweet as @kfasimpaur and will be using the hashtag #p2pued for all p2pu related tweets. Join me there if you're on Twitter.