Each day, whilst the school is closed, I have been sending daily tips and advice to our staff to support with their online learning provision. Sometimes it is in response to common questions, and sometimes it is just great tips and tools. I’ve decided to share them in light of the ongoing global impact of Covid-19.

Recording your Screen with a Whiteboard To Write On

Introducing Jam Board – it is a google app that is designed for collaborative meetings – but we can use it as an online whiteboard – meaning you can screencast (using whatever app you are comfortable with WeVideo/Screencastify etc) and use the whiteboard at the same time. It obviously works much better if you have a stylus and touch screen facility. Watch this video to see how it works.

Retrieval Practice
My big love at the moment – but I don’t want to get into it all now, so here are some great quizzing tools to use to create your own low stakes, daily quizzes.

Quizizz – This I have seen being used across the school really well – I’ve mentioned it before, but it has some very good quizzes already on there and by the nature of the software, Students review and review their answers to get a bigger score.

WordWall – An example here and here. You can create up to 5 activities at a time (then just delete old ones and rotate). The results are stored on the site and the best thing about this is that when you create a list of words and definitions, or quotes and people, or concepts and meanings, or examples and non examples, the site will then give you umpteen different ways you can present that as a task – from a fully gamified pacman style game, to a simple matching activity. Just share the resource as an assignment – very quick and great fun. TRY IT NOW!!!!!

Diagnostic Questions or Eedi (mainly maths and science at the moment) – links to all UK schemes of work and qualifications. We are looking into creating classes for secondary students and teachers to use. This has bags of questions ready to use.
Google Forms – This is a simple way of helping recall – and you can use it for more than simple multiple choice quizzes. Example here .

Kahoot – Did you know that Kahoot has a feature called ‘challenge’ which allows students to do it from home – just like Quizizz above? You can set Kahoot quizzes now as home learning – or even better – flip your learning and ask them to create a kahoot and share it with the class. Creating a quiz requires a great amount of recall as you have to recall the correct answer and think of incorrect answers too, basically creating an example / non example style activity.

There are other great quiz building tools, like educaplay, factile and the beautiful but limited typeform, to name a few. 

Each day, whilst the school is closed, I have been sending daily tips and advice to our staff to support with their online learning provision. Sometimes it is in response to common questions, and sometimes it is just great tips and tools. I’ve decided to share them in light of the ongoing global impact of Covid-19.

More help for Google Classroom:

There are still a lot of teachers posting in the stream and not creating assignments. We’ve now had feedback from various parents (and some students) about the presentation of the home learning. Also as mentioned on Friday, the benefits FAR outweigh any reason for just posting into a stream (which only really exists for discussion and announcements). If you still are unsure about how to use classwork in Classroom, please watch this video. (And please don’t have the ‘well this is how we’ve always done it’ excuse)

Differentiation

Whilst we are seeing increasing student engagement, there are still some that have not started their work. Equally, there are some that have not accessed the work as well as others and this perhaps because it being too challenging for them (and their parents ). Remember that in Google Classroom and Seesaw there is no expectation that everyone has to have the same work. One great way to help differentiate is to choose not to ‘assign to all students’ and assign either different versions of the same activity to differing groups or just simply miss students out so they aren’t overwhelmed when they start their home learning. You can easily add them in to any assignment at a later time if you wish. (watch the video above for more info)

Coaching

Thanks for keeping in touch with us for any problems you have, and for all of you who have shared some great home learning ideas and positive stories with us. We are delighted to be able to support you and at the same time show you some wonderful tech, please do check the slides we have provided for you as well to help with accessing certain apps.