Building Classroom Community Online

I've done a lot of reading this week on how to cultivate a strong sense of community in your online classroom. To help me sum up what I've found, I created the infographic below. The image points out 3 things that I believe can make a big difference in the online classroom:

1. 4 things a community provides its members
2. 4 things a classroom community needs from its leader
3. Activities that can be fun, educational, and foster community

Agree or disagree with what I have here? Drop me a comment below.

Experimenting with Instructional Frameworks...

Today I was studying and experimenting with two different educational frameworks. First was the Instructional Core from Dr. Richard Elmore:

Then I went on to the Community of Inquiry Framework from Vaughn & Garrison (2008):

As I started to dwell on these two frameworks and how they relate to face-to-face classrooms, blended classrooms, and online classrooms, I started to see a connection, (I know it's not profound, but there is a lot of truth to the connection). 

I plan to use this concept to show our online instructors how they can use various tools to strengthen the connections between their students, their content, and themselves. Using these two frameworks, instructors should find guidance in what objectives their tools accomplish in the classrooms.