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.

7 Things To Think About If You Go Distance.

Some teachers will be back in the classroom while others will be teaching via some form of distance.  I know that many school districts have not yet decided which way to go, making it hard to plan ahead.  I'm still looking at ways to make the year more interesting should the semester start using online.  

I've looked at general information on distance teaching which can be easily used in the math classroom.  These tips should help one prepare lessons for distance learning.  When you have to teach via distance, the students do not have the chance to communicate with each other so they can't work together in the same manner. 

1.  Simplify instruction because everyone is not longer in the same room.  Students are unable to work with each other or ask for help as needed.  Now distance teaching has had to incorporate activities that require a much higher degree of self direction.  There should only be one or two activities associated with a class period and the activities need to have clear directions. Furthermore, there should only be one or two resources associated with each lesson and the resources should be easily accessible to a student when they want to use it.  Resources can include pdf's or slides, or even a video.

This would be a perfect time to use chunking.  Chunking is when the material is broken up into units or chunks which are much easier to learn and uses short term memory more efficiently.  In addition, chunking helps students "see" the connections between all the "steps". 

2. Make sure you have a home base set up for your digital classroom.  Rather than a classroom, use a digital place such as Google classroom or Canvas, to check up on the most up-to-date information.  All the information should be in one place so students don't have to jump around various programs and possibly miss important information.

In addition, it is important to set up clear instructions with checkpoints so the teacher can see what is happening and to help students continue progressing through the course.  Since distance requires more self direction, many high school students still have difficulty with that so they need the checkpoints to help them.

3.  Planning classes is going to take longer because you have to plan everything in detail.  If students are not engaged, you cannot suddenly change direction when doing a distance class.  It is better to plan longer assignments that are student driven so you have time to plan future units. Try to make the units so they are more student directed with check points so students keep on pace and arrange sections so students can discuss it with parents or other students via the phone.  In addition, set up choice boards or perhaps a choice of problems so they have a certain amount of engagement and ownership.  

4.  The thing that gets lost in distance education is the personal interaction.  The part where you say hello in the hallway, or ask a student about their last basketball game, or how their weekend was.  It is important to create points in the lesson for personalized interactions which can be done by e-mail, video messages, messages through Google, or phone calls but whatever method you choose, stick to it.  Cultivating those personal moments is going to take more energy than when in the classroom but it is worth it. 

5.  When the class first begins, take time to set your expectations.  Let the students know about the different types of activities they'll have, the amount of work you expect them to complete and deadlines along with checkpoints, how they will be assessed, and behavior guidelines including what will happen if cyber bullying occurs.

6. Make sure every resource you need for the lesson is on line and working.  Check the links to make sure they work as there is nothing worse than expecting students to watch a video and the link is broken.  It's not like being in a building where you can pop out and make extra copies or make new copies for a change to the lesson.  

7.  If you decide to make your own videos to go with your lessons, you need to keep it relatively short, in the four to five minute range.  Don't worry about making it look like a Hollywood movie, just make sure it covers the points that need to be covered.  Be sure to practice the lesson before you record it so it does not have a lot of pauses or Umsss.  In addition, if you aren't sure about managing the explanation while being recorded, there are several prompter apps available to use so you don't forget anything.

If you are going to be starting the year doing distance learning, these are some things you can think about as you prepare the class.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  I'll be exploring this a bit more on Friday.  Have a great weekend.