Whew. I’ve been officially “out of school” for the last two weeks and I’ve never been more exhausted. Who’s with me?!

I’ve spent that time trying to get myself and my students up to speed with some formats for online teaching. I’ve experimented with several tools and ideas and have learned a lesson or two along the way.

Here are some things that I’ve discovered/decided on so far:

I’m going to offer synchronous and asynchronous instruction — and vary the times for any synchronous session that I offer: I teach 120 kids and have surveyed them all this week. One of the lessons that I’ve learned from that data is that many of my kids are craving the opportunity for online synchronous sessions. Not only do they dig seeing their peers, they dig feeling like they are “in school.”

But the other lesson that I learned is that there is no one “right time” for my kids to join a synchronous online session. Some kids are caring for little brothers and sisters. Others are caring for grandparents. Some are sharing devices with siblings — who also have online classes to attend. Others are sharing wifi bandwidth with entire families who are all working online at the same time.

That means if I offer sessions at the same time every day, there will be lots of kids who can’t attend. And there are going to be some students who can’t ever attend a synchronous session. So my plan has to be to vary the times that I offer synchronous sessions to give everyone a chance to attend AND I have to make sure that I also offer as many meaningful asynchronous opportunities as I can so that every child has a chance to learn in a way that works with their personal and digital “availability.”

My synchronous sessions are going to be structured and have an agenda that is posted in advance: That should make sense to everyone, right? Instruction — or any kind of meeting that doesn’t have a clear structure/agenda — is always going to be disastrous.

But it is EXTRA important when working in an online environment with students. Remember — they are surrounded by other distractions when participating in a synchronous online class with you. They may be sitting in their bedrooms — or even their beds. They might be texting their friends while “taking your class.” They might have refrigerators three feet away — and they can probably turn on their televisions while in your meeting room.

That means we have to give our kids a REASON to pay attention to us — and a structure that they understand and know in advance is often enough of a reason to keep kids on task.

Here’s how my 40-minute class ran yesterday:

• We started with a short (15 question) Quizizz game.
• Then, I used Socrative to have my students respond to an End of Grade Review question.
• After reviewing the question, I had three students present on an example of biotechnology — the topic we were studying right before the virus canceled school.
• I used this Wheel of Names randomizer to choose the students who shared out.
• Throughout the class, I had students answering questions in the chat box — and whenever I saw interesting thoughts shared there, I would ask that student to “grab the mic” and tell us more.

The kids knew in advance what the topic of the session was going to be and what was included on the agenda. That led to more active participation than I expected to get — and lots of emails from students after the session saying that they had fun.

I’m going to use Google Meet for my synchronous sessions — even though I like Zoom better: When it comes to synchronous online meetings, Zoom has — in my opinion — the best overall product. What I love about Zoom is that there are lots of tools that meeting hosts can use to encourage participation from attendees. There are “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons, “move faster” and “slow down” buttons, and whiteboards that are easy to share. There is also the option to deliver polls right through the software. Finally, you can create breakout rooms for small groups of attendees to work together and then bring everyone back into a full session.

That kind of focus on participation is ESSENTIAL if we are going to engage kids in our synchronous sessions. We can’t just deliver content and expect kids to care. We need to create sessions that mirror the kind of participation that you would see in the classroom — and if we don’t, we can’t be surprised when kids are completely bored by the instruction that we are offering online.

Google Meet doesn’t offer any of that stuff. Pretty much, it has a chat box, the option to share your screen, and video for all participants. That’s it. But I’m required to use Google Meet by my district — and specifically not allowed to use Zoom.

So I’ve done some digging around and figured out a few workarounds to make Google Meet better. Here’s what I’m going to try:

• First, I’m going to have kids keep a tab open that is logged into a Socrative room so I can deliver and run easy polling throughout a Google Meet session. Socrative is great because it doesn’t require a username and a password from kids AND it allows teachers to create “on the fly” polls quickly and easily. It’s definitely a workaround — I wish polling was built into Google Meet — but it will work.
• I’m also going to do my durndest to get all of my kids to install the Google Nod extension into their browser. Users who have the extension can raise their hand, give a thumbs up, clap and send other emojis out during Google Meet sessions. Again — this is a workaround. And it will be more difficult because I have to hope my kids know how to install extensions. But that level of participation REALLY matters to me — and to my students.
• Finally, I’m also going to try to get my students to install the Grid View extension for Google Meet. Doing so will allow them to see one another during an online class — and seeing one another will help them to feel like they are a part of a class rather than sitting alone in their bedrooms. This is a workaround too — Grid views are default in Zoom. And I might not be able to get everyone to install the extension. But it’s definitely something I’m going to try.

I’m going to use Loom for my asynchronous work: Over the course of time, I’ve used about a million different screencasting tools. Recently, I started tinkering with Loom and I love it. It creates really well polished videos — and it allows you to share your desktop, content from a browser tab, or simply from your webcam. Here’s a sample of a video sharing content from a tab and here’s another from my webcam.

What I love about Loom is that it is SUPER easy to use. I have a browser extension installed and I just click it whenever I am ready to start recording. The final video is stored on Loom’s cloud and I can get links to share out to my audiences. There is a desktop recording application, too — but I haven’t bothered with that because I can still record anything on my desktop straight from the Chrome extension.

Our team is using a shared Google Calendar to keep our kids organized: It may be a no-brainer to some of you, but I’m going to say this anyway. If you are teaching in a middle or high school with an interdisciplinary team, you NEED to create a shared Google Calendar that lists all of the events that your team is offering to your kids. And in each calendar event, you NEED to include direct links to any online synchronous sessions you are offering.

Our calendar is embedded in the middle of our team’s website. Check it out here.

Keeping a shared calendar will help your kids to plan their days/weeks and to figure out when you’d like them to be available. That’s extra important now that our students are busy with a million other responsibilities at home. Keeping a shared calendar will also help your team to be sure that you don’t double book synchronous sessions and force your kids to choose between two or more classes.

What’s more, keeping a shared calendar will help your team to be sure that you aren’t overloading your kids with sessions. Let’s be honest: There are a lot of things happening in the lives of our kids right now that are more important than school. We may think that our online sessions are the greatest thing since sliced toast, but for a kid who is worried about a pandemic, struggling to find three meals to eat, worried about whether their mom or dad is going to lose a job, and charged with babysitting younger siblings, our online sessions mean nothing.

But the MOST IMPORTANT thing to include in calendar events is DEFINITELY the direct link to any online sessions that you are offering. Kids are going to be buried in middle and high schools with these kinds of opportunities — and helping them to easily find the link to the session is an easy way to increase participation in the learning that we are offering.

Anyway — those are some of my initial thoughts. Hope they are useful to you. I’ll definitely share more as I experiment more.