by Ya-yun Yang (Guest Blogger)

Tsunami is one of the most dangerous natural disasters in Hawaii. However, there were no official tsunami course for elementary school students in the past.  Therefore, these speakers decided to design a 6 weeks long online tsunami education course for 3-5th graders in Hawaii’s schools.

The conference session is worthwhile to attend because you may want to know how they designed the online course by applying Articulate Storyline (e-learning authoring software), Google Apps, Google Site, and two great online learning management system: Canvas and Blendspace. In addition, an awesome tsunami safety booklet is the highlight of the session. The e-book not only contains the content of tsunami science, but also Hawaiian tsunami vocabularies. It is an excellent teacher’s guide which delivers key tsunami safety information through many fun activities and games. Once students complete these activities and games, they can get certificates as a rewards.At last, I think you may eager to know what problems the presenters they met and what lessons they learned when they design, development, and conduct the tsunami online courses.

In summary, this conference session is quite interesting and informative. It reminded me my first experience of hearing tsunami alert in Hawaii last year. I was terrified out of my wits when I heard the noisy tsunami alert, and had no idea what to do before watching news report on TV. I believe I would be calmer if I have taken an online tsunami course like this.