Regular Radical Readers know that I’ve been writing a ton lately about my experimentation with remote learning experiences over the last three months.
And one of my core beliefs is that the best remote learning experiences resemble the best learning experiences that we develop and deliver in face-to-face settings. They are focused on a small handful of essential outcomes and differentiated by interest, need and circumstance. They also include elements of structured voice and choice. Finally, they are designed to facilitate participation and higher order thinking.
What’s interesting is that none of those core elements of good instruction are new to us as teachers. What IS new is finding ways to use technology to incorporate those elements into learning that students are doing on their own from home.
So what are some technologies that are worth exploring?
Here are three that I leaned on a ton over the last few months:
Padlet – https://padlet.com/
Padlet is a technology that has been around for a long, long while — but it has really started to pick up educational users during our recent efforts to teach remotely. Here’s why: Padlet allows teachers to create simple pages on the web that students can post content to in a variety of ways.
Students can record video or audio responses on a Padlet. They can also embed pictures or search for Gifs to add to a Padlet. Finally, students can link to documents, record their desktop or write text responses on a Padlet.
Think about how important that versatility is, y’all.
Have students who struggle with written responses to your questions? Use Padlet and let them record audio responses. Want students to create videos as evidence of mastery of performance tasks? Use Padlet to host all of those demonstrations of mastery in one place at one time. Want to model effective writing for your students? Use Padlet to record your desktop while you demonstrate your expectations.
Flipgrid – https://info.flipgrid.com/
Most educators have probably already heard of Flipgrid. It’s been a popular tool in the #edtech space for a long while. Flipgrid allows teachers to create individual pages called “topics” that students can visit to interact with one another by recording short video responses to prompts asked by their teachers.
Here’s a sample of a topic that I had my students think about together during the spring:
What I love about Flipgrid is that I can deliver content to students AND monitor their thinking all in the same place at the same time.
If you look at the sample above, I wanted my students to think metaphorically about the science concept of superposition. To support this thinking, I shared a video in the top left corner of the task that students could watch to see a sample of metaphorical thinking in action. My students then recorded their own short responses both rating the quality of the metaphor shared in the video sample and creating their own metaphors for the concept we were studying.
Here’s why I loved this task: Students have limited amount of time during remote learning — so giving them the chance to respond through video instead of by writing out responses saved them time. What’s more, I was able to record responses giving students feedback on their thinking — and that video feedback means EVERYTHING in a remote learning environment.
Remember — we need to build trust with our students. They need to know that we believe in them even when we are challenging their thinking. Those messages in our classrooms are most often delivered through facial and voice cues. Students read US as much as they read our WORDS. So video feedback — which Flipgrid facilitates probably better than any other tool — is essential during a time when students aren’t interacting with us in person on a regular basis.
Edpuzzle – https://edpuzzle.com/
Let’s face it: Whether students are learning in our classrooms or learning remotely from home, OUR job is to deliver content, right? We have to make sure that every student masters the outcomes that our learning teams have identified as essential.
One of my favorite content delivery tools has always been Edpuzzle because it allows teachers to embed questions into videos that they have always used to teach essential content.
There’s nothing fancy about this task at all, right? If we were in class, I would have shown this video and asked the exact same questions of my students. We would have probably done that in a whole group discussion — but the content and the questions wouldn’t have changed because they (1). highlight the essentials that I want my students to know and (2). give me the chance to assess student mastery of important ideas.
What Edpuzzle allows for in a remote learning environment, however, is some quick and easy assessment of student progress. Each multiple choice question is graded automatically by the platform. In my Edpuzzle Gradebook, I can also easily see which students have tackled the task already and which haven’t gotten started yet. That helped me to monitor participation levels during remote learning.
Edpuzzle has also become a great tool for initial reteaching and reassessment in my classroom. If a student in my room struggles on an assessment, I often have them turn to Edpuzzle videos first. The thinking behind that instructional choice is that many students who struggle don’t need a new lesson to master content. They just need a quick review. Edpuzzle can provide both the initial reteaching and reassessment for me automatically.
Finally, I’ve also started to tinker with Edpuzzle as an extension activity, asking STUDENTS who are ready to move forward to create review activities for their classmates.
You can learn more about my work with Edpuzzle for remediation and extension in this post on my blog.
Can you see what is going on here?
Like all teachers in a remote learning environment, I AM using technology with my students. But I’m NOT out looking for technology just because I think that technology enhances instruction all by itself.
Instead, I’m looking for technology that supports the instructional practices that I believe in.
I know that I’ve got to give students multiple ways to respond to classroom prompts, so I’m tinkering with Padlet. I know that students are going to need to see and hear me when I’m giving feedback on their thinking if they are ever going to trust me, so I’m tinkering with Flipgrid. And I know that I need to both deliver content and initial reteaching on essential outcomes, so I’m tinkering with Edpuzzle.
Are these the right tools for YOU to explore?
That depends. Do they support the instructional practices that YOU believe in? If so, then give ’em a look. But please know that choosing tools should only happen once you know what kind of instructional experiences that you are trying to create.
Period.
Full stop.
(By the way, if you want to know MORE about what good remote learning looks like in action, think about joining me and five of my thought partners in Solution Tree’s upcoming Remote Learning Virtual Institute. It’s going to be remarkable.)
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