For this activity, go to YouTube and search for the following terms:
After you have watched two videos on these topics, answer the following questions:
There are a lot of great articles online regarding building your classroom community for distance learning. Go to the site Edutopia. Search for the following terms:
Select an article to read and write a brief summary of the article. List 3 tips from the article that you will use to build the community in your virtual classroom.
With the huge increase in students and teachers accessing distance learning options, it isn’t surprising that the number of online platforms available has increased as well.
Each school and district has a preferred platform that they use, but here are some of the most commonly used online learning platforms:
(not a platform, but used often in conjunction with them)
No matter which platform your school uses, there are a ton of resources to help you be an expert at using your school’s online platform. You can access any number of tutorials on the platform’s site, or you can go on YouTube. Rest assured, if you are struggling with something in the platform, someone else has struggled with the same issue and posted troubleshooting solutions online.
Technology is a fantastic tool, but it is bound to have its bad days. The best thing a teacher can do is be proactive about it. Complete the following tasks to prepare yourself for technical difficulties:
Doing these simple tasks before you start teaching will save you a great deal of time and frustration down the road.
Though your learning platform can provide a lens through which to teach your class, you may need other programs to reinforce your content and allow students to practice their skills. Fortunately, there’s an app for that.
There is a wide variety of online resources available for teachers and students. Most schools purchase a curriculum for their content.
These often come with e-texts and online resources. Make sure you are familiar with what your school uses as it will likely be the primary source for you and your students.
Sometimes the e-text will not be enough for students who need a little more practice with the objective, or students who require extension. Here are some resources used by schools for this purpose:
Time for an online scavenger hunt. Take some time to explore the resources listed in the previous slide or others that you know of.
After you have explored at least 3 of them, answer the following questions for each resource:
How will this resource connect to the content you are teaching
As Symbaloo is a great way to centralize and consolidate your online resources for distance learning, set up your own Symbaloo page.
Go to Symbaloo and sign up for free. Follow the instructions to set up your own Symbaloo page. Bookmark the resources you will use most as a teacher. If you like the site, feel free to set up pages for your students and parents as well.
With all of these resources, you and your students will have multiple login/user names and passwords. Students, parents, and even teachers have a very difficult time keeping track of all of this information.
Make your life easier in this department by keeping all of this information in a central location. Some teachers use a spreadsheet with multiple tabs for each student or each group’s information.
Other teachers use the program’s roster feature (if it has one) to print hard copies of student login information.
A site that is very helpful in providing students with a single login for all programs is Clever. Clever is a website where teachers can input their student login information and the site will provide a single login for all programs. This option is very popular with students and parents.
Audiobooks are very versatile. They can be used in a center, to tell a story to your online class, or as homework. In the following slides we will cover some of the benefits of audiobooks in distance learning
Audiobooks are a great way for all students to access a diverse collection of texts at their level and are very useful in distance learning. Here are some of the benefits of using audiobooks:
Teachers can find audiobooks on the following websites:
Most of these resources have free books. If they are not free, there is often an affordable membership available. Some schools also provide a login for their teachers, make sure to find out if this is available to you. Even your local library may have an audiobook feature!
Explore the audiobooks websites and select a short story to read at the grade level you teach.
Once you have read the story, answer the following questions: