Whether you’re shifting online (again) or staying online for the time being, five of our contributors offer ideas to organize your online classroom, provide daily structure, get students collaborating and talking using Jamboard, Google Slides, Padlet, and waterfall chats.
1. Organize your digital classroom
One of the biggest challenges that Samantha K from MissKEnglish has seen for students is an onslaught of online clutter. When a student is overwhelmed finding the online materials, they shut down and give up… especially her freshmen. Here are two things she’s done to help mitigate the issue:
- Labels in Your Digital Classroom: There are eons of ways to organize a digital classroom, but what Samantha has found to be the easiest is to use dates on assignments and topics. It makes it easier for both herself and her students to find assignments on the day of the assignment and later. Here are a few slides modeling different labels and organization styles.
- Notification Settings: Do you get overwhelmed when you open your email after you have 20 students submit something on time? Think about how overwhelming it is for students who are not used to email! Students are overwhelmed by the notifications and emails. Therefore, they don’t look at their email and then miss important messages. This causes a major breakdown in communication. Samantha recommends doing some Googling on how to adjust notification settings on your platform for both yourself and students! Here is a link on how to adjust the settings in Google Classroom for students and teachers.
Do not worry about it being too late to make these changes! Modeling and teaching these skills will benefit students beyond this school year as they move out of your class and into the world!
2. Organize your daily online instruction
Using Google Slides to organize your online instruction is a complete game changer. Just as you have rules and expectations in your classroom each day, your virtual classroom should be no different. Students appreciate routine, whether in person or virtually. Not only does creating a Google Slide Daily Agenda keep you and your students organized, it also adds that little extra to your online environment.
So what should you include on your Google Slides Daily Agenda?
Ashleigh from ashleigh.educates suggests including a welcome slide with information such as a brief overview of the lesson, materials needed and daily reminders. You can make it as simple or as cutesy as you wish. Graphics, timers and videos are also fun additions to your slides. The main thing to focus on is consistency. If your students are logging on every day and know what the expectation is for your class, it is going to make the day move along more smoothly. If you want to take it a step further, create additional slides to incorporate portions of your lesson. By doing this, you are then able to save your Google Slides for students who were absent from your class or for students who need to review the lesson.
It might seem like a lot of work to create a Google Slide Daily Agenda for each day, but once you have your template, you just have to type in the daily information. Plus, your slides can easily be adapted to your in person classroom as well. In the end, you will have created a fun and inviting virtual environment for you and your students to learn!
Interested in using Google Slides for your virtual classroom? Check out this editable template created by ashleigh.educates.
3. Use Google Jamboard for discussions
What is something that English classes aren’t getting enough of during hybrid and virtual learning? Discussions! This is something that Kimberlee from @catsintheclassroom is struggling to recreate with her 11th graders. Enter: Google Jamboard! If your school has Google Suite, then you should have access to Jamboard, an interactive and collaborative slide deck that aids in discussion.
Now, how can a teacher use Jamboard? There are a couple of ways that Kimberlee has used Jamboard in her classroom. The first way is with collaborative bell ringers, where students might want to answer a question anonymously. You, as the teacher, can put a question in the center of the slide and have students create anonymous sticky notes to answer your question. This is a low-stakes way for students to collaborate and answer a question before a lesson.
Here’s an example from Kimberlee’s class about email etiquette.
Another favorite way to use Jamboard is a discussion after students fill out an anticipation guide (check out ashleigh.educates’ post about anticipation guides) for a new novel. In the pre-COVID days, Kimberlee would have students line up and arrange themselves on a continuum from strongly disagree to strongly agree and move positions depending on their answer to each question. This year, she has moved this activity to Jamboard, which has been a great way to spark friendly debates in both virtual and hybrid settings. After you have set up your continuum on the slide, simply share the link (with editing privileges) to students. Then, they can create a sticky note with their name on it and change their stance with each question.
There are so many other great and engaging ways to use Jamboard – from check-ins to note-taking to annotating. Kimberlee encourages you to play around with this tool and see what you and your students can do together!
Click here for your copy of Kimberlee’s continuum template for Jamboard discussions!
4. Layer your discussions using Padlet
Jennifer Berry was a post-it note, dry erase board-obsessed teacher before the shift to virtual learning. Her classes used mini-whiteboards regularly to brainstorm, brain dump, compare, share and plan. Students would hold these boards up during class or leave them around the room allowing students to share their work (and there is nothing scarier than having your work SEEN by everyone). Transparency was the biggest thing that was missing when we shifted to the virtual classroom: teachers couldn’t see what students were doing and couldn’t offer help or highlight success in real-time. That instant feedback made the greatest difference in the classroom, so many teachers knew they needed to find a way to combat that lack of real, raw writing during virtual sessions.
This is where collaborative boards like Padlet come into play. Since students didn’t like to talk (and who could blame them; their whole home life was now being shared with their classmates), the idea of letting them share words where their class could see offered immediate feedback and a connection between teacher and student.
Here’s why Jennifer loved Padlet: templates. Sometimes, there was a need for students to quickly stick their ideas somewhere (and not in the privacy of direct messages on Zoom). Think Post-it note style discussions, but with the added benefit of links, editing responses, adding accommodations like video/audio response, and making connections between posts. The shelf format allows students to add ideas under different columns, so when looking for character traits, students can use a Padlet to list traits for each character and cross-compare between columns. The Timeline lets them track events, giving students the chance to pinpoint the order of a story in a collaborative way.
Here’s the con: You have to trust that the kids are going to keep things appropriate. If anything inappropriate is posted, you are able to delete it, but I would always have screenshots ready to pass along to administrators.
5. Get students ‘talking’ using waterfall chats & Google Slides
Reluctant participants have been the most significant challenge in online teaching since September for Lesa from SmithTeaches9to12. She shares two options to get students “talking” even when they don’t want to talk!
ACTIVITY 1: Waterfall Chat
This encourages all students to participate but rather than individually or the usual suspects, they’re all doing it at the same time. Students respond to a question in the chat and wait for the signal before posting so all messages flow… like a waterfall.
This decreases pressure that comes with the lone message sitting there as everyone reads it. Instead, all students can participate with the teacher reviewing, as necessary. Start low-stakes with a few this-or-that (popcorn or chips) and then build to more lesson-specific questions. Aim for an open-question that requires a sentence or so as a response.
Click here for a copy of the instruction slides from SmithTeaches9to12.
ACTIVITY 2: Collaboration in Google Slides
Looking for a next step after waterfall chats? Use a slide to have students write longer responses and interact with each other. Create a slideshow with guiding questions on different slides, share the whole slideshow – with EDITING PRIVILEGES in the share settings – and watch students jump from slide to slide adding their thoughts and building on others’. This can be done with text boxes on the slides or using the comment feature (Alt + CTRL + M or INSERT >Comment). This can also work on a Jamboard but the version history of Slides increases accountability and safety for an online classroom.
Do you have a success story or suggestion for increasing engagement in your online classroom? Sound off in the comments below or follow us on Instagram or Facebook to join in on the discussion.
