After reading through the manifesto and reading some responses I found that I did identify with a few of the principles stated. Even though I don’t teach online I do use a number of online technologies to connect, assess and provide feedback in many ways to my students. I teach a specialized program in my grade five classroom called Literacy and Learning. The students are grade five age however many of them read and write at a grade 1-2 level with a variety of learning disabilities and a lot of traditional face to face classroom techniques for connecting and providing feedback don’t work for them.

I identify with the principle in the manifesto that states “by redefining connection we find we can make eye contact online” because I often use asynchronous tools with a visual aspect to build a relationship with these students rather than having a teacher-student conference that would challenge them to have an intense discussion with me.

I also identified with the principle that stated “feedback can be digested, worked with, created from. In the absence of this, it is just ‘response’” because most of my students have trouble reading and understanding feedback that is written or discussed with them so we have a new tool that was developed through the Calgary Board of Education called IRIS that I can use to provide feedback in creative ways.  It is a reporting tool for teachers but is also a place where students can set learning goals and post work that teachers can provide a variety of feedback with traditional text comments as well as responding in other ways.  I like this tool because it allows me to provide students with feedback even during the process of problem-solving, allowing for self-paced, incremental progress toward their learning objectives.

Even though I am not an online teacher I think some of the manifesto principles can also be good building blocks for many forms of teaching.