I am continuing to share on this blog more great tips and updates as we continue on this journey!

Google Meet

Google are always updating their education apps (frustratingly for us teachers doing tutorials!) but this one is great:

STOP PRESS:@GoogleForEdu Meet calls now prevent attendees (students) from muting or removing other attendees. Only the organiser (teacher) can do this.#StamfordHK #CognitaWay pic.twitter.com/i3t4MzVRAd

— Tim Evans 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇸🇭🇰 (@edTechEvans) March 18, 2020

No pesky kids kicking you out anymore! A great new addition. Puts it back into contention with Zoom as the go to video conferencing tool. As with all Google updates – it may take a few days to be available. Keep an eye out for when it changes!

Whereby

For something a bit more professional, Whereby have a very good reputation and one big selling point that may turn you to using them – is that you do not need to download any app to use it – or require any log in. The other big advantage of this is that there is a feature where you can lock your room, meaning new people joining have to ‘knock’ to get in.

Are you looking for a solution to virtual parent teacher conferences? After trying a few platforms our team tried @whereby and it’s great! It limits participants, asks new people to knock, and teachers can lock a virtual room! Thanks @davidwbeaty #ptc #elearning #virtuallearning pic.twitter.com/pCwVsZFOvj

— Tanya LeClair (@TanyaLeClair) February 13, 2020

This will work brilliantly for teacher conferences – especially as it is free for 4 or less people in the virtual room. Also, if you do pay the extra – you can use it fro up to 50 attendees and one cool tool is that you can play Youtube videos to all the people in the room without loss of audio.

Epic!

Epic have been great with schools so far, but since the outbreak of COVID-19, they reevaluated and realised that they can’t share books through the school set up, at home, due to publishing. So current access is not available through school codes. HOWEVER, Epic have offered 3 MONTHS free access to parents.

The unfortunate downside is a bit of work for the teachers as you will have to invite them using individual emails. At our school we are providing teachers with a list of emails from our management system, but that is as far as we can go. Once parents receive the email they do not even have to enter any card details – they will be provided with 3 months free to access at any time.

WordWall

I’ve spoken before about this great tool – but they are offering free Pro access if you get in touch. Wordwall gives you a link to share fun mini activities to help with retrieval practice. Best of all, when you complete a set of flashcards, Wordwall automatically creates various different games with the same learning information, giving you up to ten different activities with the click of a button, including matching activities, crosswords, anagrams and more.

There is a maximum of 5 activities in a free account, but you can create more if you upgrade to Pro.