Now that all the summer fun is over it's time for school again. My first day of 11th grade was the 17th of August this year. I had spent the week before getting all of my supplies and materials ready for the new school year so that on the 17th I was ready to get up at 7am and start my schoolwork. This year my eSchool has a schedule for the first few days of school and my peers and I have to be in live Elluminate sessions from 9am to around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. These Elluminate sessions are like live online classrooms. The teacher can talk to us through a microphone and we can respond by using our microphones or typing in a little chat box. There is also a white board area where the teacher can show a PowerPoint, pictures, screenshots of our schoolwork, and many other things a brick and mortar public school teacher would be able to put on a regular white board or chalk board. Us students can raise our hands by clicking on a button and then our name gets put at the top of the list of attendants in the Elluminate session right under the teachers name until we are called on and given whiteboard privileges.
So through these Elluminate sessions, my peers and I are able to get to know our teachers and each other while having a live online lesson in a virtual classroom. It's really cool :-). It's also a totally new way of learning online. (I also say that Elluminate is "A whole new world! A dazzling place I never knew!" As my homeroom teacher had me sing last year during a Elluminate session lol.) After we finish doing these Elluminate sessions we are able to start working on our first lessons of the year.
One of the coolest courses I always look forward to is Spanish. My eSchool uses a program called Power Glide for all of its foreign language courses. It has all these cool activities that help you memorize vocabulary words for the week and it also has great methods to help you with grammar in the language you are taking. One of the best things about Power Glide is that you get an avatar! An avatar is like a little cartoon version of you that you can dress and add backgrounds and cool things to. You can get "money" for your avatar by getting high scores on quizzes and tests in your foreign language course. This is my Spanish III avatar as of today:
So those are some of the general ways that us eSchoolers learn online during our first days of school. :-)
