We are grateful to Seedlings’ amazing Director of Technology and Science Facilitator Karen Zwick for taking time out of her busy days as a Master Teacher for grades 4/5 at the Cold Spring School in New Haven to write up some reflections and suggestions for teaching remotely. We know not every school operates on the same platform, and there is a lot of variety of approaches and student demographics, but we hope that you will find some comfort and inspiration below.
Karen Zwick, Seedlings Technology Director, on Virtual Teaching
Zoom
I wanted to find a program that was flexible enough to provide a format for “lecture-style” discussions with the whole class and small group meetings where the students could work together. Zoom is a free program that offers virtual classrooms with breakout rooms. It also has a whiteboard background that is available for use by the speaker. Students can be given permission to write on it as well. Teachers or students can share their screens. I also use it with the McGraw-Hill Everyday Math on-line version program. Both Zoom and Everyday Math work very well together.
Setting Up Zoom Etiquette
Just like the beginning of the school year when we go through developing a contract for behavior expectations in the classroom, we needed to do the same thing for our Zoom meetings. Here are the expectations that my students came up with:
- If you list your name as Puppy Lover, you must include your real first name in parentheses
- Show your video (unless you have bandwidth problems)
- Sit up and pay attention to whoever is speaking.
- Mute yourself unless you would like to speak.
- Don’t talk over other people.
- Don’t do any distracting movements.
- Don’t use the chat feature unless you have a problem.
- Stay on task in breakout rooms.
Breakout Rooms
Breakout rooms have been a great tool. You can set them up manually or Zoom will divide the students randomly. I often have Zoom randomly set groups and I then just tweak the groups. I also prefer to leave an empty room in case someone needs to have some time alone. Zoom allows the teacher to pop in and out of the rooms to check on things. Within the breakout room, one student can share their screen while the group works together to solve the problem. You can send a message to all rooms that time is up and they will be returned to the main room. Once all the students are back together, a spokesperson for the group shares how the group was thinking about the problem. Periodically, I ask the group how they did with working together. We have also scheduled academic collaboration times using Zoom. When students arrive, I ask them what they want to work on, then I set up the breakout rooms accordingly, and off they go! Recently, our 4-5 students starting meeting again with our K-1 reading buddies on Zoom. Each reading team gets its own breakout room.
Collaborate!
Finally, and most importantly—collaborate!
It really helps to find another teacher to collaborate with. Although it is potentially, possible to manage the Zoom classroom and breakout groups, it is a lot for one teacher to manage. Since you are working remotely, your partner teacher could be from your school, from your Seedlings community, or from the world! By teaming up, you both will find your classes not only more manageable, but fun! One teacher can be in charge of letting students in, creating breakout rooms, responding to any problems with the chat feature, popping in and out of the breakout rooms to refocus students if necessary, and closing the rooms to return all the students to the main virtual classroom. The other teacher is in charge of teaching. During breakout sessions, this teacher can work with individual students who need teacher support.
Google Classroom
Google Classroom is a helpful platform for delivering and tracking assignments. Many of us have been using the technology for years, but there is something we recently discovered that I am very excited about. My classroom initially used Google classroom for tracking student progress on research reports, but the revision and editing process between teacher and student didn’t offer a full-proof method for students to learn from a teacher’s suggested edits or revisions. We found that students just clicked and accepted the edits without taking the time to read them, learn from their errors and apply the skills in the future.
If you have an iPad and an Apple pencil, we have a workaround! There is a feature on the Google Classroom App for the iPad that handles this fantastically. After installing and logging in to the app, I simply pulled up a student’s research report, and exported it as a pdf. At this point, I could edit and suggest revisions on the student’s work using an Apple pencil. The pdf then was attached to the student’s work. The students have to read my written suggestions and edits in order to make the changes themselves within the Google Doc.
If you have an iPad and an Apple pencil, we have a workaround! There is a feature on the Google Classroom App for the iPad that handles this fantastically. After installing and logging in to the app, I simply pulled up a student’s research report, and exported it as a pdf. At this point, I could edit and suggest revisions on the student’s work using an Apple pencil. The pdf then was attached to the student’s work. The students have to read my written suggestions and edits in order to make the changes themselves within the Google Doc.
This is AWESOME!!! Thank you, Karen!!!! ??? I plan to digest it a little at a time!!??????