Page 45 - Year-Long Plan_Neat

Prior to my interview with Lorie McCarthy, my knowledge and experiences with virtual

classrooms was fairly limited. I was amazed at the amount of communication and organization that goes

in to running a successful classroom. Not only is the teacher responsible for managing the virtual portion

of the classroom, they are also responsible for online maintenance and daily communication with, in this

case 18 different schools.

When thinking about how I would set up my virtual classroom, I considered a few different

things. The most important thing is where that is going to take place. Lorie taught directly from her

office. I do think that there are some benefits of teaching the class from your office. All of your

electronics and materials are kept in your office. You wouldn’t need to worry about reserving the room

or having any scheduling conflicts. However, depending on the size of your office, it could get a little

crowded with the ITV, your desk, and all your materials. How I would set up my virtual classroom would

more than likely depend on the size of my office.

Policies and procedures might be one of the most difficult components to a virtual classroom. As

Lorie mentioned, she has to deal with not only the policies and procedures associated with the GWN,

she also has to consider those of each school participating. I think depending on what issues have come

up, those policies and procedures could very well change year after year. Policies and procedures would

need to be established for methods of communication. Clearly there are obvious methods of

communication such as emails and message boards but I think that it would be important to also touch

on inappropriate methods that should not be used like social media or phone calls unless specified by

the classroom teacher.

After having the chance to visit with Lorie about her virtual classroom, replicating in class

discussion in the virtual classroom does not seem to be as difficult of a task as I previously considered it

to be. Essentially, you are teaching the same class that you would be in a regular classroom, that

discussion is just conducted over an ITV. One thing that Lorie touched on was using hand signals to get