Agenda Templates for Remote Learning

One of the struggles with remote learning is making sure our students and parents know what they need to do and where to find the resources they need. Many teachers are using Google Classroom or other LMS to distribute and organize lessons and activities. I think it is also important to have a site, doc, calendar, or slide deck agenda to help parents and students stay on top of the work.

I've started to collect some sample remote learning agenda templates for teachers in this folder. What are you using? Send it my way and I'll add it to this folder. 

Additional Remote Learning Resources

Formative Assessment Resources for Remote Learning

There are quite a few awesome formative assessment resources that teachers can use to engage students, but I am going to start this post discussing some of my thoughts about assessments in remote learning experiences. If you are just looking for the tools, just scroll down a bit and they are all there. 

I've seen this question quite a few times over the last few weeks, "How do I prevent students from "cheating" on a test when they are home?"
I've also been reading quite a few posts about secure tests and preventing students from "cheating" on tests and quizzes. Many educators are recommending different "secure" assessment tools or asking the parents to "supervise" their children as they take the tests. The idea is that we can stop students from cheating on the traditional multiple-choice or short answer assessments. Here are a few reasons why I think that this is the wrong question and the wrong mindset for remote learning.

• If students don't value the learning experience, most will take the easiest path. Often they don't even think that they are cheating. They are just using all of the resources at their disposal. 
• There is no assessment tool that can guarantee a student is not using a second device to find answers. 
• Many parents may not have the time or even the inclination to supervise their students during an assessment. Even if they do, some students are very good at hiding what they are doing from parents. 
• Even the best students may choose to find help because they believe everyone else is doing it.
• Online assessments are stressful for many students and there is just too much stress in the world right now.
• Instead of focusing on just vocabulary and content assessment, let's engage students in critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication as we engage them in formative assessments. 

Instead of securing our assessments, let's focus on this question, "How can we use formative assessments to engage students in understanding what they know and what they don't know in a fun and creative way?"

Getting Started With Flipgrid - Videos, Whiteboards, and Screencasts

Zoom and Google Hangout/Meet have both become very popular for synchronous remote learning experiences. Synchronous learning definitely has a place as we look for a way to engage students outside of our classrooms, but I also think we need to make sure that we are not relying only on these types of experiences for our students. 

Asynchronous learning with videos should also be something we should be leveraging to engage our students. I think one of the best tools to engage students in asynchronous learning is Flipgrid. Flipgrid is a free platform that allows both teachers and students to create and respond to videos in a safe and secure online environment. It also has some awesome features that can make the learning experience fun. 

Using Popular YouTube Videos to Engage Students in Critical Thinking

There are some incredible YouTube Channels for almost every content area and grade level. Many of these are incredibly well done and have a lot of potential to engage students in essential concepts and ideas. I've even shared some of my favorites in the past. Still, the use of these videos in many eLearning experiences is still mainly about the consumption of content. Content matters, but I think we can do much more with YouTube than just distribute content.

Incredibox Brain Breaks - Curious Engagement Matters

I've tried to create a variety of different activities to engage my students as we learn more about best practices for remote learning. Some of the activities have gone very well and some not as well as I hoped. I was a bit stressed about this until Hank Thiele put this all into perspective for me. If you've not read Hank's Twitter post, I would recommend taking a quick look at Twitter here. 

Hank's tweets served as a great reminder that more than anything else, I want my students to explore new things and be curious. I want them to be curious about something, even if it isn't connected to my content. When you get right down to it my content only matters if my students are interested. Engagement in learning something new is what matters most. 
While I will continue to explore different ways to engage students in Environmental Science, I am excited to find unique ways to engage them in learning regardless of the content. This is why I am excited about an activity that I initially posted as an enrichment activity.