As educators, we continue to prove our resiliency, innovation and commitment to our students. We are navigating through a new era of education and have learned a lot—and have a lot more to learn.
Teachers love to learn. We crack open books, ask each other questions—and we want to add one more resource from which you can gather new ideas from practicing educators and experts in the field. Monthly, we will be bringing together tips on how we can support our students across pillars of remote teaching: Community, Communication & Collaboration, Assessment and Accessibility.
For more hand-on remote teaching help, try our Remote SchoolWorks program!
The Latest Crowd-Sourced Tips
1. Community
To help build connections with students, learn about their needs and support them no matter if they are in class or at home, consider creating a general “Check-in” form that learners can submit at any time if they have questions about assignments or want to connect for any other reason. Provide opportunities for students to practice accessing the form, for example as an exit ticket. These practice opportunities help learners begin to independently access the form and self-direct their learning.
Providing students (and parents/guardians) with voice means students will feel valued as a learner in your classroom.
2. Communication & Collaboration
Consider how you are communicating with parents and guardians – as well as how other members of the grade team and/or department team are communicating. Where can efforts be coordinated in order to communicate cohesively and meaningfully as parents and guardians become accustomed to “looking out for” that communication weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. One way to live this out may be to create a 1-page newsletter that provides an overview of updates. The newsletter can follow a similar template each week such as:
- glows, grows & next steps.
- past, present & future.
- chronologically based: Monday – Friday.
- grade-team based. (ie. 8th grade English, math, science, social studies, etc.)
Keep parents in the loop and streamline communication with newsletters posted to your digital classroom, such as Google Classroom, sent through email or even mailed home!
3. Assessment
When assessing students using multiple choice, or questions that can be answered with a quick internet search, consider including a question immediately after that asks students to explain or justify their reasoning for the answer. This will also illuminate additional insight that may not have been gleaned from the multiple choice answer alone.
Interactive assessment tools such as Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Pear Deck or Nearpod, help create different types of questions that you can choose from allow you to alternate between multiple choice and short response questions.
For emerging readers, assessment questions can also be supplemented with videos, images and resource links.
4. Accessibility
Just like students learn to organize their binders, cover their books and store their materials in their desks – they are learning a new set of digital organization skills. To support students in learning digital organization skills such as locating their materials online, consider how you set up the learner workspaces.
Try strategies such as color coordinating folders or using icons to indicate different types of assignments. You can use an emoji keyboard on your smartphone or tablet as you are typing assignment titles or you can utilize extensions to input emojis from your computer. These visual supports may help students navigate their learning platforms and become more independent in accessing instructional materials.
Thank you for your commitment to education and we look forward to sharing the next tips for remote teaching—brought to you by educators who are working to rethink learning!
Have tips for remote teaching? Share what you’ve learned with us! Click here to submit your Remote Teaching Tips.