Thirteen Distance Learning Tools

It’s still possible to teach your class if you or your students are out of the classroom for a long period of time.  I’ve compiled a list of digital learning tools that can help in the event students or teachers are absent for long periods of time.

 

Screencastify: Record your lectures. Record your voice over your Google Slides or Powerpoint presentation. Create questions on a Google Doc which your students answer while watching your presentation.

Explain Everything: Digital whiteboard. Record explanations of key concepts and math problems. Upload your recording to Your Google Classroom.

Google Hangouts Meet: Meet with your class or individual students over a Google Hangout.

Nearpod or Peardeck: Create student paced lessons with assessments. Include videos, short answer questions, and a space for digital white boards.

Edpuzzle: Create an assignment out of a video.  EdPuzzle allows for the insertion of questions in the video. You can even record yourself explaining a concept and turn it into an EdPuzzle video. 

Flipgrid: Students can use Flipgrid to record what they’ve learned.  Students can give an oral book report, summarize events in history, comment on a classmates video and so much more!

Socrative: Easy to use assessment tool. Use Socrative to ask multiple choice or short essay questions.

Padlet: Use Padlet as a classroom backchannel.  Set up a Padlet for each of your Google Classrooms for student questions.

Book Creator: Have students create books based on their learning. Students can insert text, drawings, photos, and recordings of their voice.

Google Calendar: Post all daily activities and due dates.

Google Classroom: Use as the hub for student work and online discussions.

Google Drawings: Great for math.  Students can work out math problems and turn in using Google Classroom.

Google Forms: Use Forms for not only assessment, but for virtual worksheets as well. Forms is also great for a weekly/daily check in with students.  Ask how they’re feeling, goals for the week, etc.  Multiple choice check-in’s are easier to review because you can then use conditional formatting in a Google Sheet to flag certain answers.

One of the Most Important Digital Tools in Your Classroom

In light of current health concerns, many students are missing class. Because students are asked to stay home with the slightest symptoms of a cold or flu, it’s important to keep your students aware of what you’re doing in the classroom. With technology it’s even easier to keep your students up to date with the classroom activities. One of the most important tools you can use in your classroom is an online calendar. If you use Google Classroom, it’s already built in. If students are home sick, they can access the calendar and find out what their class did or is doing that day. In Google Classroom, assignments are populated on the class calendar (if there’s a due date for the assignment). But what about the day in day out activities of the class? Perhaps you had a discussion about a topic. That particular day you read a passage from a book or watched a video clip. These activities may not qualify as classroom assignments with due dates. This is why it’s important to get in the habit of posting daily activities on your classroom calendar.

Book Creator Gives Students Choice In Their Reading Logs

I was recently asked by a teacher how she could drop the traditional reading logs in her class. Her kids were doing it the old fashion way. They were talking out a piece of paper, writing the date, pages read, and a brief summary. After giving it some thought, I told her that Google tools could come to her rescue. She could use Google Sheets, Slides, Keep, and Drawings instead her paper reading logs. But the one tool that I focused on was Book Creator. Book Creator is a versatile tool that can be used in any discipline and for almost any classroom exercise. Book Creator allows the user to include pictures, videos, drawings, voice recordings, and of course, text. Book Creator is the ultimate in student choice when it comes to reading logs. I’ve found that when using Book Creator and giving students choice on how they’ll summarize what they’ve read, many students actually want to read! One of the downsides is that some students actually cut reading short in to get to their reading log. The teacher has flexibility too. On a certain day, the teacher can ask students to include a simple summary with a picture from the web. The next day, the teacher can ask them to record a video of them summarizing what they’re read. On yet another day, they can ask the students to draw a representation of what they’re read. They can also ask the kids to choose how they’d like to summarize their reading. The teacher has the ability to leave comments in a students book. Like creating a book, the teacher can leave comments in the same way, with text, audio, video, or by using a stylus to make comments.

Looking to give students choice in their class work? I highly recommend checking out Book Creator!

Start the New Semester With These Digital Tools

With a new semester comes a new beginning for both the student and teacher.  The student comes into your classroom with a clean slate.  You, the teacher, you have an opportunity to set the tone of your digital classroom by incorporating  tech tools into your teaching.  By using technology at the beginning of the year, your students will know that they’re in a 21st century classroom where you, by using technology, are going to prepare them for the world that awaits outside of class.

Below are a few tech tools you can use to get your semester off to an EdTech start:

Canva or Google Drawings:  Ask students to create a vision board about themselves.  With vision boards, students simply incorporate pictures that represent who they are, what they hope to learn, and what they want to be.  Students can browser the internet for the appropriate pictures and incorporate them into their board.  They can also use these tools to tell you about themselves by including pictures of family, favorite things, foods, places, and whatever else might be relevant to them.

Book Creator and Google Slides:  Ask students to write a short e-book about themselves.  Not only is Book Creator easy to use, but Google Slides can be fashioned to create e-books as well by changing a couple of settings, namely the aspect ration of the slides, making them look like pages in a book.  Students can include not only text, but pictures into their books as well.

Google Forms:  Create a student interest survey so you can learn more about what makes your students tick.  Ask students about their interests, hobby’s, favorite subjects, areas that they struggle in and so on.

Wakelet: Introduce students to Wakelet as a repository for their work.  Whether the teacher keeps one Wakelet for the entire class or each students keeps their own Wakelet, students can create digital portfolios as a place to keep copies of their work.  

Google Keep, Docs, and Slides:  Begin day one of the new semester by asking students to keep a daily journal.  This would be a great warm up activity or an exit ticket asking students to reflect on what they’ve learned that day.  All three Google tools are very good for students to keep a journal.  For example, in Google Slides, students write the date as the header and then use the rest of the slide for their journaling.  Each slide represents one entry.  

Again, begin the semester with the expectation that this will be a 21st century classroom.  You will be preparing students for life outside of your classroom walls and for their future careers.

My Favorite EdTech Apps of 2019

This year brought a slew of apps to teachers. Even though they aren’t technically new, they were new to many teachers who tried them out for the first time. As a technology coach, part of my job is to find those apps that teachers can easily pick up and and play, so to speak. That is, that they’re easy to learn and easy to use in the classroom. I want teachers to see how accessible an app is. The last thing I want if for a teacher to be overwhelmed by learning a new app.

Below are five apps that I found easy for teachers to learn and, most of all, were easy to implement in the classroom in 2019.

• Equatio. Equatio is an easily accessible math app that allows teachers and students to insert math into their Google Documents. Equatio is not only great to use with Google Docs, but it works well with Google Forms as well. Equatio solves that eternal conundrum of working with math on a Chromebook.
• Nearpod. The first of the interactive presentation apps on the list. Nearpod is great in that it provides total classroom engagement through it’s interactive presentation lessons. Nearpod provides everything from short answer, to drawing, to quizzes. Nearpod provides an end of session report, showing the teacher where students excelled and what they need to work on.
• Wakelet. Wakelet was app that I discovered this year and shared with teachers. Wakelet is essentially a curation tools that allows for so many other uses. Wakelet can not only be used to collect resources for students or fellow staff, but it can serve as a class website and student portfolio as well.
• Google Forms. Of course Google Forms has been around for awhile, but now that many schools are going 1:1, it’s getting used more and more. Google Forms is great for using in an opening warm up activity, posing inquiry questions or as an exit ticket, asking students what they learned that day. It’s great for assessment too! One thing that took it up a notch was the new “Locked Mode.” Essentially locking down students Chromebooks while their working on an assessment.
• Google Classroom. In the age of a Chromebook classroom, a classroom management system has become a must, and Google Classroom is one of those that teachers have come to rely on. Google Classroom serves as the classroom hub that turns your classroom into a paperless one. From distributing and collecting work, to posting announcements and having online discussions in the stream, Google Classroom has proven to be a valuable teacher tool.
• Pear Deck. Another totally engaging classroom presentation tool. Pear Deck, like Nearpod, engages students in activities while the teacher presents the lesson. Students take part in the presentation using drawing tools, answering questions, watching a video, hovering a selector over the right answer, or taking a quiz. Like Nearpod, Pear Deck allows for a report for the teacher to review student data of the lesson.

If you haven’t explored the above digital tools, you owe it to yourself to make your 2020 school year a more productive and engaging one by checking them out.

Blogger in the Classroom

Blogger is a fantastic blogging platform (I’m a bit biased). Not only is it great for personal blogging but It can be used in many different ways in the classroom by teachers and students.

Teachers

1. Share what’s going on in your class. Write about the daily goings on, from what students learning to projects they’re working on.
2. Self reflection. Keeping a journal can help a teacher reflect on their day.
3. A staff blog. I’ve written about this before. Create one blog for the school site and ask the staff to contribute.
4. Share notes and assignment directions with your students.
5. Weekly updates. For the administration, use Blogger to share a weekly update about what’s going on around the campus as well as upcoming events.

Students

1. Student journaling. Students can use Blogger to keep a daily journal, sharing it with their teacher.
2. Assume an identity. Students can assume the identity of a historical or literary figure and blog as if they were that figure. What kinds of things would they say?
3. Exit ticket. Student can use Blogger as a daily exit ticket, reflecting on what they’ve learned that day. A great way to keep a journal of their learning.

Google Sites in the Classroom

Some districts are opening up the use of Google’s web site creation tool, Google Sites. Although they’re Google districts in that they use Google tools such as Classroom and Docs, Sites sometimes can take time for districts to warm up to, citing student privacy concerns and hard to manage what exactly gets posted to the site. Anyway, with some districts using Google Sites now, I thought I’d put together a few ways the digital tool can be used in the classroom.

1. Post student work. Students tend to give a bit more effort if they know their work is going to be published for all to see. You can create a site that’s strictly for sharing student work. You can upload a variety of things from an image, to a video, to a Google Doc. Then, share the site with parents and staff.

2. Keep parents in the loop. Create a site that’s strictly for letting parents and guardians know what’s going on in your classroom. From topics being covered to what the students are working on.

3. Insert a contact form. Use a site that enables parents or guardians to get in touch with you. Insert a Google Form that includes their name, contact information, and why their contacting you.

4. Embed a calendar of classroom and school events. Use a site as a calendar. Insert a calendar that includes school and class upcoming events.

5. Supplement your lessons. Use a site to supplement your lessons. Perhaps you want the students to research or put together a project using only the supplied information. Direct them to your site. Everything’s in one place for them to conduct their research.

6. Keep a classroom blog. The obvious, keep a classroom blog. It can be a personal diary of sorts. It can you reflect on your day and teaching practice.

7. Create a page that explains lessons and provides directions with examples. Use the site to post examples of student work or detailed directions on an assignment. If students have a question about an assignment or want to see a examples, simply direct them to the site.