As many teachers would agree, we were not trained or prepared to teach students online during a global pandemic. In March, we had to search for resources to help us finish the year online. For some, it was hard but manageable. While for many others, it was a difficult transition. Many felt lost and confused about where to go and what to look for. They were struggling with teaching online. What I have discovered during this pandemic and "new" normal is that as teachers, we always roll with the punches and make things work to the best of our ability. What works for some teachers may not work for others. What everyone needs to do instead of judging what others are doing is we need to give each other grace during this time. If you are struggling to survive, do not worry, I am too. I am in survival mode. Below are a few tips on how I have learned to survive during this time.
First, I did some research and found many teachers on TpT that I have gotten resources from have social media and blog posts. Many have worked tirelessly to turn their products into Google Docs, Nearpod, Boom Cards, and Seesaw resources. They have also posted how to use their resources and share ideas of what they are doing in their classroom. I found this extremely helpful in discovering what works for me. As teachers, I believe we are one of the most generous communities out there. There are many teacher sites that share ideas and resources for free! There is a group on Facebook that shares Google Classroom Ideas. But, my absolute favorite is Bitmoji Classrooms!! You may have to request to join these groups, but they share awesome resources. The Bitmoji Classroom group shares tons of Google resources that you can use with your students!! I teach kindergarten and they have many phonics and reading resources. They are willing to share as long as you give the creator credit and make a copy of their document. This is a game-changer and has saved me time and energy of creating my own resources! They also have teachers that share Wonders and Eureka Math resources, you just have to search for them. I use a Wonders Google Doc every morning with my students. It does take time to look through these resources, but I promise it will be worth it!
Next, collaborate with your grade level team. This will save you time and energy. If each member shares what is working for them and what is not working, you can encourage and support one another through this. Building a community with your grade level team will not only help each other but your students as well. Use each other as a resource! They can help you if you are struggling with ideas. I understand that not all grade levels work this way, but at least try to find one person you can go to. I have that person and I talk to her daily through text and email, plus we Zoom as often as our schedules will allow us to. She has been my lifesaver! She has been there to offer support, vent to, and to plan with. She has had great ideas and kept me from falling apart. I have also returned the favor and given her resources, ideas, and support when needed.
Finally, give yourself a break! No one knows what is expected during this pandemic. None of us have ever been through a pandemic and switched from in-person to online learning in the blink of an eye. There are no exact guidelines on how this should work and what we should be doing. We have no control over it. However, we do have control over how we respond to it. We can overly stress about it and let it take control, or we can just breathe and take it one day at a time. You are not the only one going through this. To quote High School Musical, "We're all in this together!" Take breaks when you need them. Go for a walk, exercise, read a book, talk to friends and family. Don't let this stress take over your life! This too shall pass. I have discovered that watching reality tv and playing with my new Siberian Husky has given me that much-needed distraction. I have learned that I am not going to be as amazing as some other teachers I know and I am not going to be 100% great at this, but at least I am trying daily. I am not giving up, I am doing the best I can, and most importantly I am there for my students. I bet they are having a much more difficult time than I am with online learning. As long as my students are learning, they are engaged, and they are having fun on our Zoom, that's all that matters right now. Remember, you are their break from their home life and you give them something to look forward to every day. Give yourself time and grace during this time! It will be alright.
When we started distance learning this school year, I felt like the most time during my day was spent filling in attendance records and tracking participation. It took HOURS of my day; there had to be an easier way. I tried using the Zoom attendance report or the Zoom chat to track participation and attendance but it still required quite a bit of work on my end to manually cross-reference my roster and the reports.
That's when I showed my husband what I had been doing. He took a look and immediately saw an opportunity for improvement using automation through Excel. He and a friend put together a template on Excel where all attendance and participation counts are automated based on chat and attendance reports.
I make it a point during my Zoom lessons to ask students to respond to questions in the chat. This encourages whole class participation and students can select to respond privately to me or the whole class. With Middle School students, it's not always easy to tell if they are actually paying attention to the lesson so this allows me a way to keep track quickly and easily so I know who to follow up with.
Now I can take attendance in under 30 seconds and can also track participation in about the same amount of time. It gives me an immediate idea of who is engaged and who isn't. It has been a complete and total game changer! See below for a video walkthrough of what it can do or skip ahead for a step by step guide. Here is a template you can use yourself.
1. Set up the spreadsheet in columns A and B with student last names and first names. You can copy and paste these from your roster on Q. The template will automatically switch the names as they appear on Zoom (First then last name).
2. To take attendance, open the Zoom report and click on "show unique users" then export it. It will open in Excel. Copy column A which contains the student names. Then paste it into column F of the spreadsheet.
3. To track participation in the chat, open the saved chat from your files. It will open as a text file. Then select all and copy the text. Click on cell H3 of the template and paste. This will paste all student responses from the chat. The spreadsheet then extracts student names from the chat history and counts how many times they responded. The counts then show up in column D of the spreadsheet next to each student's name.
The first couple of weeks of virtual teaching were rough. I cried often. For me, the most challenging part was coming to the realization that I'd have to do everything completely different than I have for the past twelve years. I needed to find a new groove AND get my students to find a new groove also. I understood that it wasn't just more challenging for me, but also entirely different for them. Like me, they were used to collaborative community building activities the first couple weeks of school: Find Someone Who? Getting to Know Me, Teacher Investigations, etc. I was at a complete loss on how to create an interactive, virtual community.
After days of figuring out how I could re-create my cheerful, lively classroom, I started doing some research. As usual, I found many tips and tricks on different social media platforms. Teachers across the country were struggling like me. They were looking for ways to recreate their lively, interactive classrooms. I poured over countless blog posts and slowly started to rebuild my classroom community. It's far from where we usually are in November, but it's also far from the first couple of school days.
*Please note: I'm not here to say that I have it all figured out, but I don't cry daily, so I feel like that's a start.
Here are three things I'm doing to help me connect virtually with my students:
Attendance questions
Where I first found this idea?
My research led me to a wonderful teacher on Instagram, The Townie Teacher. She is super inventive and shares her resources for free! One of her resources that I've been using daily is "The Ultimate Attendance List."
What is it? This idea is very similar to restorative circles or check-in questions. This resource (linked above) is a list of "this or that" and my favorite questions. Students have to think about how they will respond and share their answers with the class.
How I use it? I choose five each week and type them onto my "Get Ready" slide for each day. I refer to them attendance questions, and my students now know to share their answer by un-muting and saying it aloud when their name is called. Sometimes, to save time, I have them type their answer into the chat and ask 2-3 students to find someone who has a similar answer to their own. This process ensures that they listen or read each others' responses and think about their classmates as a person rather than a thumbnail picture that they are sharing a Zoom meeting with.
5 Similarities and Flipgrid
Where I first found this idea? I got this idea during my time with the Inland Area Writing Project this summer. This three-week professional development was done virtually this summer. In this setting, our leaders knew that building our virtual community was essential, and it was evident how much planning went into this portion of our learning.
What is it?5 Similarities is a chart where students answer common questions (e.g., Favorite color, number of siblings, favorite food, etc.). Then, in a virtual classroom setting, they record their answer using Flipgrid.
How I use it? Students then need to go back on to Flipgrid and listen to all of their classmates to hear who they share similarities with. As they listen, they keep notes on the answers their classmates shared. I also asked them to reply to their classmates on Flipgrid with something like, "Hi friend, I also love sushi. Maybe after this pandemic, we can eat sushi together. What's your favorite roll?" After they gather data from their classmates, I asked them to write three statements: One about what they learned from their class as a whole, one about what they wonder about their classmates, and one question that they wish I would have added. We've done the 5 Similarities routine 3 times since school started. I have used the questions they wished I would have added. They are learning more things about each other, which is helping us to slowly build our community.
Positive notes home
Where I first found this idea? This is another idea that I found from a teacher on Instagram(Miss Bertels). She shared this idea last fall when she moved schools and wanted to start the year off on a positive foot with her new families.
What is it? Basically, this note is a "caught being good" slip that you fill out and send home.
How I use it? I print out a slack of these
positive notes and keep them on my desk. This year, I decided to write my students' names on the slip and address the envelopes ahead of time. So when a student shows respect or responsibility during our meetings, I grab a note, fill it out and send it off that day. I decided to fill them out ahead of time to ensure that I send them home to each student at some point over this trimester. My goal is to send them out to each student twice over this school year (*Side note: I've also noticed that my outlook each day is much more positive because I'm looking for the stand out behaviors rather than the negative ones).
This is undoubtedly a question we have all been asking ourselves since that fateful March day. It was Friday, March 13th, to be exact (but you certainly don't need me to remind you. In fact, that day is seared in our collective OMSD memories--adults and students alike.) That whole day was surreal. And to add to the gloomy mood, it was rainy and dreary and I was SAD.
After my students left, I looked around and noticed how beautiful my classroom looked. Student work was posted. The room was colorful. Desks were straightened up. Yes. I had taken such pride in getting everything ready for Open House. Now what? I wondered what tomorrow would look like. What about all of the other "tomorrows" that were to come?
I was in a funk. I couldn't shake it. I missed my students, my colleagues, and all of the little things that I never fully appreciated. Smiles. Hugs. Lunch in the lunchroom with my friends. I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get my point.
In my imagination, I fancied myself a superhero, and this novel coronavirus, my arch-nemesis. Yes, it was indomitable (at least for now), destructive, and did not play favorites. As potential victims of this novel foe, we had to arm ourselves for this new battle with our weaponry of sanitizer, masks, and social distancing. But I had a secret weapon that it did not have. I had HOPE. Hope in a post-virus future is what motivated me on March 16th to embark on and even embrace this new phase in my teaching career--remote learning.
In an attempt to make it feel less remote for me and my students, I have left my bulletin boards and posters up. As the need arises, I am taking pictures of the information on the bulletin boards and posters and sharing them with my students as a resource. Just because students cannot be here in class in person, does not mean they don't need the traditional supports we have in place.
I am so proud of all of my OMSD colleagues for showing tenacity, creativity, and compassion towards one another and the students in their charge. I am immensely grateful to our advocates at the district office who have come alongside us and provided countless resources to empower us to thrive
Teaching kindergarten in a global pandemic presents its own challenges: many students do not have the acquaintances of their new classmates and the fact that they NEED to have hands-on academic experiences.
My kindergarten team planned all summer for these challenges. We decided to provide supply and material boxes for each student that would be filled each week with the necessary materials for instruction. Each student has 2 boxes; one with them at home that has the current materials, and the other filled with the next week's materials to be exchanged at the school each Friday.
The students return their empty boxes on Fridays and exchange them for their new ones. The boxes are left on the kindergarten patio so parents can come at their convenience during the day. If a box is left over at the end of the day, I will deliver it to their doorstep that same day. It is important that my students have their materials ready for the next week. It is rare that I deliver a box.
Over the course of the first trimester, students have collected materials that we use often during our virtual learning sessions. They have a math tool kit (left) and an ELA tool kit (below).
Daily, I record a video and post via Class Dojo in our Class Stories the materials they will need for that day. I post it about an hour before our session begins. My students always have their materials at the ready. I tell them they should be watching it themselves to be prepared for class (Be Responsible). I keep my own set of materials just like my students so I know exactly what they have and I model where to return each item so they can find it in the future.
I have received numerous comments from parents about how they appreciate the organization and materials that keep their child engaged online. My students are always excited to get their new boxes to see what we'll be doing. We even do painting projects every other week (the paint goes home in the small containers).
Here was a "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate" STEM Challenge and below is our culminating project of carving our pumpkins with shape features after a whole week of pumpkin exploration (measuring, comparing, describing, sink or float, writing about, counting the seeds, etc...)
This is definitely A LOT of work with planning and preparing, but my team and my parents make it work. Not once have I had a parent complain about having to come get their box.
Our students deserve it! I surely hope this post has inspired to think outside of your proverbial box on how you can keep the engagement alive with your students during virtual learning/teaching!
I personally feel like the ONE worst aspect of online learning is that the kids are missing the social interaction and collaborative learning structures they so desperately need. As we know, students learn the best when they are working collaboratively in highly structured groups. This has been especially hard for me as a teacher, because I live and breath Kagan cooperative learning structures in my classroom on a daily basis and have truly seen the growth in my students both academically and socially over the years that I have implemented Kagan into my classroom.
So today I'm going to talk about Breakout Rooms on Zoom! It doesn't fully replace in person collaboration of course, but it's a really good option to support our kiddos talk time, during this period of online learning. Let's get started!
How to Train Your Students on Breakout Rooms
Well just like with live in-classroom instruction, you can't just throw kids into groups and expect them to work together successfully. You want start with some fun, non-academic teaam building activites that they can do in their groups to get to know each other. This is important for helping them build relationships with one another so that they will feel comfortable talking and sharing with each other. I would suggest starting small and having them work with pairs for a while before moving into largers groups. Also modeling how to discuss with a partner and providing them with response frames/stems will help them verbalize their thoughts into words.
Next, you want to set clear expections so they know what is expected of them. I display this slide every day before our first breakout room of the day (they need lots of reminders.. lol)
Most importantly, once you send them to their Breakout Rooms, you want to pop in and out of as many rooms as possible and help reinforce those breakout room expectations. Once they know you'll always be popping in to check on them, they are much more likely to do what they are supposed to do! This is also a great way for you to observe your students and evaluate their strenths and weaknesses.
Tips and Tricks!
So now how do you go about setting up these Breakout Rooms??
So once youre logged into your Zoom meeting with your class, you want to click the breakout room button on the bottom of your Zoom toolbar (be sure you have enabled this option in your Zoom settings). Now, you can select to create the groups automatically or manually. If you want them in pairs and you have 28 students, you will select to create 14 groups. If you want them in groups of 4 you would select to make 7 groups.
As it sounds, "automatically" means it will randomly group the students together, whereas "manually" allows you to group them as you'd like. I would suggest selecting manually and creating your groups intentinally and specificially. However, there is often a time and place for the automatic option as well. Once my kids are all logged onto Zoom in the morning, while they are working on iReady, discussing the morning circle topic, or another independent task, I quickly create those breakout rooms manually and then they are set for the day! As kids join or leave the meeting, you can choose to swap or move kids to other rooms, rearranging as you see fit!
Under the "Options" dropdown, when you select the time for the Breakout Room, I would aim to keep it around 5-8 minutes or so, just having them discuss one or just a couple of questions. As mentioned before, always making sure you are popping in and out of the Breakout Rooms to support, and reinforce your rules. You can also adjust the amount of time you want them to have once the timer is up. I usually set mine for 15 seconds so that we don't have to wait for kiddos to be dumped back into the main room. I do however "broadcast" a message warning them how much time they have left.
You can end the breakout rooms at any time as well, you just click the red button that says "close all rooms." You do not have to wait until the timer is up. Likewise when the timer is up for the Breakout Rooms, a notification will pop up asking you if you want to end them or keep them open. So they don't have to automatically end just becasue the time is up. You have control over that. Aditionally, if there are kids who you dont want to put in a breakout room, you just simply don't assign them to a room and they will then remain in the main room with you.
I hold the kids accountable by letting them know I'll use the random selector to have them share out after they've had the time to discuss the question in their breakout rooms. Also, usually whatever they are working on with their partner/group in the breakout room is something they are also typing and submitting to me in some form or another. This ensures that I can monitor they are all working and participating.
If the students have a question while in their Breakout Room, they have the option to click "ask for help." This picture to the left shows you what it looks from from the students view of the Breakout Room.
You will then get a notification that looks like this image below here.
So these are the basics to help you get started setting up Zoom Breakout Rooms with your students. I truly feel that students need this interaction with one another for so many different reasons. They really need the social interaction with each other. Our English Learners as well as ALL learners need to get their "talk time" in throughout the day. Research has also proven that kids learn better when they are working collaboratively with their peers. The Breakout Rooms option in Zoom really does provide us with that missing piece of social interaction and collaboration that these kids are so vitally missing with online instruction! I hope this helps!
I am sure you have heard about Nearpod and seen it on the district website of online learning resources, alongside many others. I know that there are sooo many resources our district has graciously purchased or shared with us to support us in our online learning. So I am going to spend some time just talking about ONE aspect of Nearpod here today.
First off, what is Nearpod? Nearpod helps educators make any lesson interactive whether in the classroom or virtual. The concept is simple. A teacher can create interactive presentations that can contain Quiz's, Polls, Videos, Collaborate Boards, and more.
In this blog, I am only going to be talking about how to use the Nearpod Collaborate Board as a collaborative learning tool. I think the biggest part of online learning that's killng me (and the kids) is that they're missing the student interaction and collaborative learning structures that we use so routinely in the classroom. If you've been through Kagan training and implemented those collaborative learning structures in you classroom before, you know the power behind them and how positively they effect student learning, growth, and confidence.
"Collaborate! is a Nearpod feature that allows you to set up an interactive board for brainstorming, sharing text and images. You add the boards, students simply add their ideas. You can moderate these boards from your Teacher Dashboard, reordering them and sharing them." CLICK HERE to learn more about his feature.
Ways I use the Nearpod Collaborate Board in my 5th Grade Classroom:
1) ELA Wonders Curriculum: I use this feature in many ways throughout the Wonders curriculum. I use it with the Day 1 introduce the concept question that is in the Reading Writing Workshop book. I also use it at the end of the week with the essential question to help them brainstorm ideas before they start their RACES writing. I also use it with the Making Connections questions that are throughout the student stories in their text books (you can see this below).
2) Community Circle Discussion Questions:I also setup Nearpod with our community circle question. We start our day with a community circle question each morning, and most days we do it on Nearpod. I read their posts aloud as they post them. I then ask if anyone wants to share their thoughts outloud. This way, every child is held accountable to responding, but for those super shy introverrted kiddos they're not forced to share out loud if they feel uncomfortable
3)Eureka Math Student Debrief: Often times I pick one of the student debrief questions and have them do it on the Nearpod collaborative board as you can see here. This is from the 5th Grade Eureka Math Module 1 Lesson 14 student debrief. It's really amazing to see all the connections they're making in math. If I didn't provide them this opportunity to share with each other, they'd be missing out on this really powerful component of a Eureka Math lesson.
So if you've been searching for a way to bring that collaboration piece back into your virtual online classroom, I hope this helps!!
Online learning has definitely increased the level of challenge in education today. Many of the strategies we use in face to face instruction have to be adapted to our new online classroom environments. Here are some ways that my students have been able to continue collaborating while learning from home.
Insert Learning There are so many digital platforms that provide articles and comprehension questions for these articles within the text. I have always been a big fan of Newsela and Common Lit for this reason and also recently discovered and fell in love with Actively Learn. While there are a plethora of articles available through these sites, I may have something that I would like students to read that is not already available. This is where the Google extension Insert Learning comes in handy. I can take any text from Google Docs and turn it into an interactive response. This is great for really focusing on exactly the questioning or standards I want to address with that piece. Options for your responses are open ended questions, multiple choice response, and even collaboration boards. You can also insert sticky notes and highlight text to really guide student thinking as they work.
Discussion feature on Insert Learning. Students can view peer responses in real time.
Jamboard I started using Jamboard when I saw an idea for taking attendance using Jamboard. I tried it out and loved the ease of it and immediately saw how it could be utilized in the classroom in so many other ways. Recently, I also used Jamboard to create a brainstorm for class thinking map in preparation for writing. I gave them time to add to the thinking map then changed them to "view only" and then grouped and arranged their ideas onto a completed map that they then used to write from. We added transition words and decided what order to include all our ideas. From there, students were able to demonstrate that they understood how to turn a Thinking Map into writing by writing a short summary of the information on the Thinking Map. With another class, I separated the students into groups. Each group was to read a section of the article then come up with a maximum two sentence summary of that section. Their summary was then posted onto the class Jamboard. Once all responses were posted, I changed their access to "view only" and they were then able to use this to review before continuing work on the article independently.
Cause and Effect Map Compare and Contrast Map
Jigsaw Article Summary
Padlet This is an old favorite of mine. Students are able to respond on a message board setup in a variety of ways. They can simply post answers to questions, converse in a message board stream, and even respond to each other's answers. The free account allows up to 10 message boards, which I have always been able to work with. You can delete older boards once they are no longer in use. I use Padlet for ongoing discussion about something we are reading as well as a review of what we have already learned.
Google Suite Of course, there are always collaboration options through Google Apps. I have one of my classes starting book clubs next week in small groups of four and we will be collaborating using some of the above options but will regularly communicate using a group response form in Google Sheets and a weekly check in with Google Forms. The benefit of using both is that the students within the group can communicate with each other on the Sheet but they can communicate with only me on the form. This will allow me to see how they are all contributing and to alert me of problems that I hadn't seen within the Doc. Click here for a simple template for Book Club online collaboration.
This year is definitely not what anyone expected, but I know that we are all doing what we can to make the learning meaningful from a distance. Please share some of your amazing ideas below so we can continue to inspire each other!
