Teaching remotely has brought our attention to the wealth of resources available to teachers (for free!) online. We have an amazing amount of innovation taking place in the school and use of online resources to engage students.
A collection of general, cross-subject resources and tools you can use to enhance your online lessons and the learning experience for students can be found below with contributions from Amelia Rowan, Leyla Marasli, Michael Paulus, Jojo Laber and Ruhina Cockar.
Google Questions
What is it?
Google Classroom can be used to set a range of assignments, one of which is ‘Google Questions’. These can be used to ask students surveys, comprehension questions, quizzes, opinions, and so on. Students can edit their responses and reply to other students if you allow them to.
How can I use it?
A great way to use these is as a Do Now - teaching online is difficult, but so is learning online. Having students take ten minutes to answer a Google Question gives them time to transition between lessons and switch mindsets (as well as giving teachers time to take the register). It can be a great way to get discussion going (especially if you tell students a requirement for the Do Now is to respond to at least one of their peer’s responses), to immediately test knowledge, and to ensure students are engaged. You can differentiate the task as you can set different levels of questions to different groups of students. It’s great for showing student accountability as you can see who has responded and contributed and who hasn’t as it automatically “hands it in” when the student responds.
How do I set it?
Found on google classroom - go to “Classwork”, click on “Create” and set a “Question”
Quizziz
What is it?
A fantastic website where you can create low-stakes quizzes; you can either create your own from scratch writing your own questions, take questions from other peoples’ quizzes already made, or take whole quizzes made by others, for effective formative assessment.
Why is it awesome? (and better than Kahoot!)
A fun, engaging way to complete Assessment for Learning in your lesson
You get to watch the students complete the questions in real time so you can monitor their work
You can write different types of questions (multiple choice, checkbox, fill in the blanks, poll or open ended)
Although each question has a timer on it, students can take more time to complete each question which cater to both types of students: those who worry about the timer, wanting more time, and those who like the pressure of the timer
There are detailed reports produced at the end of the quiz so you can pick on questions to go through and give feedback on
You can link it to google classroom so it automatically has your classes on there. This means it’s easy to schedule the link to the quizziz on google classroom and it can import the quizziz grades into your marksheet in google classroom.
Nearpod
What is it?
Nearpod is a platform that can increase student engagement in your remote learning classroom. You can create your own presentations that can contain quizzes, polls, videos, images, drawing-boards and web content. You can start with a resource you already have or check out some pre-made lessons on the platform for formative assessment. As with a lot of these resources, the best bit is the real-time insights you get given into what students know, and you can access reports after your lesson.
Three things you can create are:
The collaborative activity looks a bit like this (this is similar to padet):
Have a read of this to understand more of how it works:
https://nearpod.com/how-it-works
Google Forms
Google forms have been an ever-improving G-suite app, that is fast becoming WA teachers go-to tool for making low-stakes assessment. Google form testing can be used for a wide range of question-types to suit your needs and can be used for all subjects. I myself have used them for assessing KS5 IB Economics students on perfect competition, and on balance sheets for IB Business Management students, to programming for our KS3 students
Critically, Google forms provide immediate feedback to teachers on their students and their whole classes strengths and weaknesses in their understanding to help plan future teaching and learning. So no longer do teachers need to put individual question scores for each student onto a spreadsheet. These images below represent an example of how a teacher could quickly identify what learners fully understand and where misconception still persists.
Further still, you can add auto-feedback for when a learner gets a question incorrect/partially correct. This allows learners to address the cause for each mark lost instantly and can even make a note of the perfect answer (similar to how we ‘Action’ items for learners during ‘Review & Improve’ post-assessment)
With the appropriate settings in place (see image below), a google form can be used to create a test on a chromebook that learners can not check other digital notes or ‘google’ an answer until they have submitted the form to their teacher. This really is a unique advantage of this tool over others and has enabled us to google forms for the bi-annual internal examinations with great success (with no printing required!)
Making a google form takes time and and mistakes in setting a certain question-type correct can undo the validity of the results you then receive if you are not careful. Until more years of consistently good use of google forms by teachers for high-stakes assessing, learners will persistently not take them as seriously as written assessments. So let's all use them more!
Google slides and docs assignments
What is it?
Google Classroom can be used to set a range of assignments.
How do I use it?
Assignments: used to set a worksheet, exit card, assessed task where all students get a copy of it. You can set a number of marks for the assignment, set up a marking rubric and a deadline.
Quiz Assignment: used to add a google form (see above) assessment or quiz. The fun thing is that it will import the score from the google form quiz and it to your markbook on google classroom
Material: used to post lessons, YouTube videos, links to websites, resources for your lesson
Loom
What is it?
Loom is a website that you can use to record your screen at the click of a button. Whether you use it as a google chrome add-on or you download it as a desktop app, loom records your screen and your voice with no time limit. It allows you to use the annotate and spotlight features to add more engaging features to your recorded video and as soon as you’re done it instantly provides you with a link that is accessible to anyone who clicks on it. Here is an example of some of the videos I’ve created using loom.
How can it be used?
Modelling: Sometimes there’s something that you’d want to model that’s quite complicated in method. Recording a loom video for this means that the students can pause, rewind and re-watch as many times as they like until they’ve grasped the method. This saves you from repeating the same
Supporting SEN/LPA students: This is the main reason I use loom. I often record myself explaining a concept in great detail for the students who didn’t understand the work previously. I’ll then include different types of questions for them to attempt and then will show them my worked solution at the end of the video. Students will be instructed to go and watch the video whilst I’m live teaching the rest of the class something else.
Review & Improve for topic Quizzes - Review and Improve lessons can be boring for the kids if they feel like they have to sit there and watch you go through the whole lesson. You can record yourself going through a quiz and explaining the answers. You’re then in a position to instruct the students to go and watch the video that corresponds to the questions that they answered incorrectly.
Advantages over other screen recording apps
You can record really long videos. I recorded a 35 minute video the other day!
You don’t need to download the video and upload it to google classroom. As soon as you’ve finished recording, the link to the video is added to your clipboard and all that’s left to do is to distribute it however you see fit.
General Advantages
Allows the students to be a bit more independent which is a great benefit for SEN and LPA students in general as they’re more used to working closely with an LSA or another teacher.
Helps lessons to run smoothly
The students are really appreciating of the videos
Improves teaching practise as it makes you think about what might need to be explained in greater detail and how to explain that so it’s as easily understood as possible.
Zoom Chat used for AfL
If you know a maths teacher, you will know how much we LOVE mini-whiteboard questioning. Thus, as lock down loomed upon us, my biggest worry was, how do I effectively question every student in my lesson- at the same time?
Why did I want to do this? Besides the obvious benefits of quick and easy assessment, MWB questioning is also a great way of keeping tabs on behaviour and engagement.
What is it?
The chat function on zoom, the video conferencing app
How do I use it?
The zoom “chat” feature is the perfect MWB substitute. Actually, it’s even better than the physical thing because when you change the chat setting to “participant can chat with teacher only” students can only see their own answers. This means that you eliminate cheating and you also eliminate some of the fear associated with getting a question so publicly wrong. I find that my LPA’s are much more willing to engage knowing that they have this barrier of anonymity. I can also give positive praise and encouragement of correct answers and participation.
Awwapp
What is it?
It is a web-based whiteboard which gives you a series of tools such as pencils of different colours and styles to add text, you can upload images to annotate and draw sketches.
The best thing about this is the ability to invite students to collaborate on the page by sharing a link like you would a google doc.
How can I use it?
You can upload an image, share the board with students and ask them to annotate the image with their ideas and responses to it
You can create mindmaps collaboratively on it (although I think padlet is better for this)
One way I have used it is as a mini whiteboard. I copy and pasted multiple images of a grid on one page, and labelled them with the student names. I then shared the board with the students and asked them to sketch the algebraic graph I asked for to check their understanding:
Padlet
https://en-gb.padlet.com/dashboard
What is it?
Padlet is a great place for gathering ideas, sharing them and modifying them later. It's like a dynamic webpage where students can add links, YouTube videos, files and images to a page, move and arrange notes however they want.
How can I use it?
One way we have used it is to share a page with students to create a mindmap at the end of a unit - a great way to start a revision lesson:
This is a great blogpost on 30 different ways to use padlet in the classroom: Click Here
Menti
What is it?
A simple way to create a presentation that allows you to interact with your students as it gives real-time voting and feedback.
How can I use it?
This is a great, fun way to get some quick feedback on a question or used for reflections from students at the end of a topic.
At the beginning of this term I used it to ask my Y10 students a question: reflect on your year so far and say what you are most proud of.
I chose the Type as “word cloud” and this is what came out of it:
This coincided with us learning about graphs for different types of data, so it was a great example of non-standard data representation!
The downside to using this is that on the free account there isn’t a lot of control over what might be written in other than putting on the “Profanity filter” so only use it if you feel the students will be sensible.
If you haven't already - give them a go! Or try a new one you've just read about!
How have you found using these resources?
Have you got some neat ways of using them not mentioned here?
What other resources have you been using? Share in the comments section below!
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