Sites To Help With Distance Learning.

I just heard the school year at the moment will be by distance for the first few weeks of school and then it switches to dividing the students into two groups.  One group will attend on Monday and Tuesday while the other group is coming on Wednesday and Thursday with no students on Friday.  That could possibly change because our town just reported it's first case of the coronavirus.  We'll have to see if the person who is a non resident infected anyone else. 

There are several sites I fully recommend using for distance learning. These sites are in no particular order, I  have used them and like them a lot because they make learning more active.

1.  Edupuzzle - This site is great because it has lots of videos that have been curated and those that you can curate.  By curate, I mean you can take a video, shorten it if you want, add questions that are open-ended, multiple choice or even add in notes.  When ever you add in questions or notes, the video will stop and require students to answer the question or read the note before it moves on.  If you don't feel like doing it all yourself, you can use an already curated video.  Another nice thing is that if you use multiple choice questions, Edupuzzles will automatically correct and assign a grade to the watched video but you have to grade the open-ended ones.

Furthermore, the site allows you to access videos from YouTube, Khan academy, National Geographic, TED talks, Veritasium, Numberphile, and Crash Course.  In addition, it allows you to cut, do a voice over, or add questions for any video on the site.  These voice overs, notes, and questions turn the video experience from passive to active so they are more involved with their learning.  The last thing this site has going for it is that you can log in using a google ID and you can export scores to google classroom.

2. Thinglink - This site allows links to be embedded into a picture or a video for students to follow as part of their learning.  This site has a free version, a paid version for up to 60 students, or the version for school districts that have everything.  This allows you to login with a google ID and it connects to google classroom.   What you end up with is an interactive picture or video containing everything you want students to learn associated with the top.

There are many completed Thinglinks you can go through or you can create one for yourself. Creating one is not that hard as the site has some wonderful tutorials and help.  I did a picture based ThingLink in a very short time. I just needed to select an image from my computer, start adding tags which are where you place the link, text, image, or video for the student to experience.  Then it can be assigned and students work their way through it. 

3. Hyperdocs - This is a site where you can learn to create one document that is set up with engage, explore, apply, share, reflect, and extend.  It is interactive google document designed for students to work their way through the document rather than giving them a ton of worksheets.  The authors of this site wrote a book on HyperDocs, offer some free training, along with samples, and templates. 

Hyperdocs is like providing a map of the instruction for students to work independently through a topic. It has it broken down into the first thing to do, then what comes next, and next, until the student has worked totally though the lesson.  Each section allows the teacher to create a link to all the resources needed by the student for everything from start to finish.  This is a wonderful thing to use for distance learning because it puts everything in one place and the whole document is around one to two pages long.  So it is short and manageable.

These are the sites, I recommend to begin with if you have to look at starting the year using distance learning.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.