Managing remote and blended learning environments
Tomorrows Teacher has put together advice to support teachers working in remote or blended learning environments.
Reduce curriculum: Reduce the content you are teaching by focusing only on the most essential skills and knowledge. As a guide, aim for up to 60-70% of your current curriculum.
Include ‘offline’ tasks: Each week, set offline tasks that are relevant to the work to minimise student screen time. This could be listening to a podcast whilst going for a walk, keeping a journal, cooking. Get creative.
Prerecord lessons: We recommend Loom or Screencastomatic as they generate a direct link that you can share. You can also download these videos and upload it to a central site, such as Microsoft Stream. You can also record yourself presenting in PowerPoint. To use your videos again in the future, try to keep them free of today’s context.
Keep your videos short: Keep your videos to 15 minutes max. The shorter, the better.
Publish weekly or biweekly planners: Publish weekly or biweekly planners which breaks learning into manageable chunks each day. This will help students to work at their own pace and reduce the need for daily instructions.
Digitally record questions and answers in a central place: Ask students to record questions in a central place. This could be on Microsoft Teams, or on Google Meets. This will minimise how often you need to respond to the same question.
Keep your lessons varied: Maintain student engagement by keeping your lessons varied each week. This could include peer collaboration and peer feedback, class or group discussions, using video content or setting quizzes.
Formative assessment: Use two-three digital tools to collect short pieces of formative assessment. Using a small number of tools will minimise confusion, but having a small variety will keep interest and engagement. This could be the Microsoft Forms or Google Forms quiz feature, or Go Formative and Nearpod.
Set inquiry projects: Set inquiry projects that can be worked on over a longer period of time. This will reduce the amount of task submissions and marking. It also gives more time for deep learning to occur.
Thank you to all teachers who are working hard to make remote and blended learning environments engaging and accessible. It is important to ensure that the workload for both yourself and your students is manageable, and we hope these tips help you to achieve this. We would love to hear any other pieces of advice that you can offer to support teachers at this time - please comment what works for you below.