Internet Learning Volume 7, Number 1 • 2018/2019 | Page 24

Preparing Teachers for the 21 st Century Classroom
a learning platform which provides
professional development courses for
educators and administrators in five
areas: Participate, Navigate, Communicate,
Create, and Evaluate (GA DOE,
2017). The five badges are components
of the GAVS Effective Online Teaching
course series and the platform is open
for anyone to register free of charge; the
badges can be reviewed, completed, and
self-awarded. “K-12 school districts
partner with TOOL to provide quality
professional development courses to
educators .... Post-secondary institutions
partner with TOOL to enrich initial
teacher certification programs and
augment graduate study programs” (GA
DOE, 2017). These are the same badges
the GAVS instructors are required to
complete by registering for the verified
courses, for which a fee is charged.
UWG’s education candidates are
required to review the components of
best practices as presented in each of
the five TOOL courses. Then, they are
expected to participate in an online
discussion with their classmates about
the most significant findings and implications
for their future careers as educators.
After students complete their
overview of these five areas of best practices
in online teaching, they are granted
access to their GAVS field course.
Facilitating Online Discussions
As the education students, or candidates,
immerse themselves into their
active virtual field course, they must pay
particular attention to the online discussions.
They are expected to critique
the discussion assignment directions as
well as the posts of the secondary students
and instructor. The observations
and authentic virtual examples offer a
thorough, threaded experience across
the time span of their field experiences.
To guide this process, critique guidelines
are provided:
1. Select three units in the GAVS
course you are observing and read
over the discussion questions and
responses for those units.
2. Reflect on your impressions of the
discussions concentrating on the
following:
a. Are the discussion questions
engaging?
b. Are the student responses
appropriate or not?
c. Why are some students’ responses
better than others’?
d. Has the teacher responded
appropriately, especially to
the students whose responses
may be off topic or represent
misconceptions?
e. Are there any discussion
questions you might add to
this unit? Why?
Communicate is the TOOL most
emphasized by the GAVS mentors, and
that expectation is reflected in this assignment.
This activity also informs the
online discussion activities that candidates
later create in the LMS.
Facilitating Online Assignments
Evaluate is another important TOOL
at GAVS. For this reason, the educa-
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