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Hello everyone, sorry for the delayed post. I'm Geetha, COIL fellow at UW Bothell. I teach computer science and cybersecurity courses.

I’ve read that lectures are a bad use of synchronous learning. “Death by PowerPoint online is worse than Death by PowerPoint in the classroom”. It will be a good idea to make all course slides, readings, resources and videos available ahead of time to help with synchronous activity. The synchronous session should be focused on activities and insights that cannot be otherwise gained. For instance, we can integrate small group activities as part of online meetings. Creating small group sessions online can help with brainstorming ideas and interactive discussions. Students can be asked to bring a topic that they find challenging or difficult and use the synchronous session for problem solving.

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I would like to explore a power of maps and mapping in COIL course. It might be natural thing as an urban geographer/planner who has a strong interest in GIS and digital geography. However, spatial narratives allow us to see, qualify and highlight our everyday experience (of place). I encourage all participants in my COIL class to map and share their spatial narratives as much as they can. As a starting point, I created my first padlet with a map view: https://padlet.com/jkjung5/cwx7qfsgqfaq

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I know some of you already know my love affair with the city of Buffalo; however, I always think of people in the Buffalo East Side neighborhood whenever I see the word, 'resilience.' To me, the story of declining/dying city is as much a story of resilient people who are working harder to achieve the same standard of living in the midst of the negative structural conditions many would associate with (e.g. poverty, crime-prone, presumed wasted urban spaces etc.). Rather than a narrative of lack and deprivation,  they show a very real kind of abundance that forecloses the usual negative narrative and turns it on. The story of decline could be a story of resilience.

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I believe the classroom itself should become a community that all participants including students and instructors can teach and learn each other respectfully and comfortably. I believe all participants should listen actively as much as they do speak and try to give an opportunity to express his/her view comfortably. I am also thinking to provide various ways we can actively construct this learning community within our class as well.  We may need to make this padlet as a more fluid and 'reflexive' space in which we can see and experience (or even imagine) our and others' understanding and perspectives more fully. I know these tips should too 'abstract' though.

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I have been incorporating a lot of individual freewriting, grounding time & reflection time during my in-person class, but I realize that in the past, I've tended to do less of that individual time in my online class and tend towards trying to encourage more conversation in discussion boards and through interfaces like Slack. This quarter, for an in-person class, I am having students keep a creative practice journal where they are supposed to make three entries a week, including a photo entry where they are visiting a living object (like a tree or a plant) at the same time weekly and taking a photo of it. I would like to incorporate more of this individual practice work because I think it does help with developing resilience and making sense of the creative practice on your own before having to explain/discuss with others.

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I think I shared these words from Adrienne Maree Brown on Padlet when the Bothell COIL Fellows met in person. Brown's book, Emergent Strategy, deals with this question in response to Octavia Butler's science fiction work in books like Parable of the Sower. The main characters in the series (who are surviving in a post-apocalyptic world) develop resilience because they believe that change is the only universal thing you can rely on and that a useful way to respond is to cultivate your response to shaping that change. For me, that relates to my teaching in that I expect things won't always go the way that I intend to and that I will learn from those experiences how to better shape the experience when I teach again. I also try to encourage students to think of creative "failure" as part of the process, so that it teaches them something even if they might not choose tto use that strategy in their own creative making practices.

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Hi all!  My name is Ching-In Chen (pronounced Chingy) and I teach creative writing & performance in the Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell. I am non-binary and use they/them pronouns. Apologies for the late posting -- I mistakenly thought that the experimentation we did in our last COIL session on Padlet was this assignment until I looked more closely today. To be honest, in online courses, I've done a lot more asynchronous activities than synchronous activities because I've found that when students sign up for online classes, often it is what they expect. In general, I found that I had to make more effort in structuring scaffolding (such as specific and clear weighted responses to original posts so that there's a sense of conversation among students) in online assignments if I wanted to host discussions/conversations and to create a sense of community in the classroom in ways that felt easier in an in-person class (for instance, to break them in small groups or pairs and for them to get to know each other through working together). During our recent snow days, I did use the Canvas conference feature for one of the classes for a synchronous class and it worked pretty well for being the 1st time most of us had used it. Though it ended up being me talking more than I would in an in-person class (a lot of students had entered using the listening mode and had to exit to come back to be able to talk), students were able to use the chat function to respond so I was able to check for understanding, answer questions, etc. I was also able to use the small group function to put the students in their own rooms. I also found it helpful that I was able to record the session since I was going over the instructions of a major assignment and was then able to refer students who missed class to the recording to catch up.

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I usually have my co-teaching partners on  WhatsApp, skype, email and WeChat if they have an account.  These tools can guarantee connection necessary to keep our collaboration. A teaching management system like Blackboard, Edmodo, Schoology also helps.

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We can ask for support from various sources  Besides IT department, COIL colleagues at Tianjin Normal University are like in a community of professional practice. We have a WeChat group where we can share experience and help each other.  Besides, we have regular COIL workshops to share IT knowledge and tools.

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Hi, my name is Ruiling Feng.  Nice to meet you online!
As Ko says, I suggest clear instructions to students on both sides.  I once used whiteboard in COIL, asking students to brainstorm interested group project topics together with their Japanese partners. Students were told how and why to do the task, and for what purpose (they were required to give a tentative interested topic list with reasons for each topic, and submit the list as one of the assignments).
Also I recommend to include the participation in asynchronous communication in student assessment.

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I have many ways to contact my partner instructor just in case things go wrong: (1) Email, (2) Zoom, (3) personal cell phone numbers that we can call, text, or Facetime as we both have iPhones. Juuuuust in case!

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I think knowing the people whom you can ask your questions as needed can be helpful. Here at UW Bothell, there are many resources available, such as COL fellow colleagues, Digital Learning, etc.
Additionally, I would save the asynchronous assignments in the pdf files on my computer as frequently as possible just in case all comments in Padlet disappear, etc...

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Hello! My name is Ko, and I'm a COIL fellow at the University of Washington Bothell. Nice to "virtually" meet you!
To facilitate synchronous activities smoothly, I can think of a few ideas:
(1) Clear instruction. Tell your students where to go (e.g. Padlet web address) and what to write.
(2) Send reminders and follow up via email. If you see any student who missed the due date, I think it's a good idea to follow up with the student to see if they are doing okay.
(3) Use emoji. I'm not sure if we can use emoji on Padlet, but I think ":)" stands for smile, for example... at least in the United States! I think emoji can serve as a voice tone :)