Hi again and sorry for the delay. I had a busy week with my teenager son since my husband is out of town in a business trip in Brazil.
As a educational therapist specialized in teaching high school math I will focus on mainly on four students activities that I might use in an online class as described below.For all of the activities you should provide accommodations for students with disabilities or other special needs.
1) Ice Breakers - This is a great initial course activity to create a online community among the students. After this activity students should fell more comfortable in interacting with other students and be willing to participate more in the virtual classroom. Ice breakers can be asynchronously (videos or written form) or synchronously. One example of a synchronous activity is meet and greet through Skype where I would initially introduce myself and then the students would do the same. Prior to this activity I would provide instructions including time of the event with time zones and directions (tutorial) in how to use Skype. The format of the activity can be formal with a set of prior questions given to students or informal with only some guidelines. Students with visual impairment will use audio tools to record his/her voice.
2) Drill and Practice - This activity is not used frequently in adult education, but it is very useful when teaching mathematics. It is a great activity for students to practice and to master a set of critical skills required to advance and to excel in higher level mathematic courses. I normally use this activity to review a set of skills that will be used when teaching a new concept. KhanAcademy is a wonderful tool ( https://www.khanacademy.org/) where students can easily create a free account and they can practice a large amount of skills with immediate feedback in different subjects. KhanAcademy uses different formats for practice not limiting to multiple choices. This tool also avoid students to be bored since he/she can practice a new skill or advance to a new level after five correct answers.
3) Online Quizzing - I am not a fan of this activity, but it provides a quick way to assess the students' knowledge and to provide feedback about the instructor methodology. Instructor needs to have a large database of questions in many formats. Cheating can be a problem when using this activity. To avoid this problem provide an honor code and set clear cheating policies in the syllabus at the beginning of the course. Open notes quiz can also help minimize cheating. Pop quiz during a live session is another way to avoid cheating and to keep the students on their toes. A good teaching strategy is to allow students to create quiz questions so that they will have ownership over their learning process and will increase motivation to do the work.
4) Group Problem Solving Activity- I love this activity since the students will solve a problem (in my case, real life mathematics) in a group. This activity help students to develop building team skills, analyze facts, propose and test solutions, and present the solution (orally and written). Small groups of 3-5 are usually effective in online classroom. Groups can be pre-selected by the instructors or self selected among the students. Instructor should provide the students with enough background information and materials to the students so they can start to solve the problem. Timeline to complete this activity varies a lot and it will depend on the type of problem, For example, Small groups can be formed in a synchronous session and students have 10 minutes to come up with a problem solution. This is ideal when the problem involves multi-steps solutions but it is not a complex problem. For long projects, students should submit progress reports. In the beginning, the instructor should monitoring the groups closely by short live session to guarantee a smooth star. Make sure you provide a rubric and a model to help students gauge the quality of final work. Assessment should take into account the individual contribution as well as the group performance. .
Below is a link to an article about the best practices in online teaching strategies from the Hanover Research Council,
http://www.uwec.edu/AcadAff/resources/edtech/upload/Best-Practices-in-Online-Teaching-Strategies-Membership.pdf
I found a good video to introduce high school students to learning community,
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