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AMLE - Association for Middle Level Education

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Norms are the patterns of behavior defining how we treat each other, ourselves, and our shared spaces. Norms exist in all physical and virtual classrooms. We often create norms at transition points such as the start of the year, term, or quarter. Typically, norms are listed on the walls, are not revisited often, and may be communicated to parents.

Norms exist in all settings. The question is, are they created intentionally or unintentionally? For example, when in school, intentional norms about seating are to assign seats and unintentional norms are when there is no seating assignment, but students sit in the same places each day. Intentional norms are essential and are attached to values. Intentional norms provide routines, agreements, consistency, and a framework for addressing difficult situations.

When reviewed consistently and created with equal contributions of students and teachers, intentional norms provide the guardrails for the classroom. Imagine the norms are the frame around a beautiful picture, with the picture being a reflection of students and teachers working together.

With COVID-19 bringing an entirely new teaching environment, many teachers find themselves reactively creating norms when situations arise. A teacher started her remote class and was frustrated because some of her students were in bed. Telling the students they must all be out of bed at the start of class elicited immediate negative responses. In this case, the teacher created a norm (must be out of bed) without attaching a value (presenting as "ready to learn") or inviting students into the discussion.

Realizing values and student voice were missing, the teacher reframed the experience asking herself:

1. What are the classroom values I want the norm to support?

2. How will I communicate the values to the students?

3. How will the student's voice be invited into, and heard, in the discussion?

4. In what areas am I willing or unwilling to be flexible?

5. How will I ask students what might be missing?

The teacher started class the next day with "I realize I forgot to have a norms discussion. The value I want our norms to support is showing up ready to learn, and I want us to work together to identify how this looks, feels, and sounds. While flexibility is important, some boundaries are necessary, including limiting outside distractions and listening for learning, rather than debate. Let's work together to create our norms, given how quickly things are changing; we will revisit our norms during our last class on Friday and will adjust as needed."

The teacher asked students to be ready to co-construct norms the next day and invited them to share concerns privately if they had critical contributing factors they didn't feel comfortable sharing with the entire class. COVID-19 and remote learning disproportionately impact students with mental health concerns, physical disabilities, learning differences, lower socioeconomic status, and students who are members of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, question/queer) community, and more. These experiences may be challenging to share with the entire class while being mindful of your school's requirements, so it is essential to create communication streams to allow students to share.

Learning online--and therefore viewing other's homes--can cause students, parents, and teachers to feel exposed. Addressed thoughtfully, the use of norms can help reduce instances of invasion of privacy. When the teacher invited students to share outside of class one student offered that he was in bed during class because it was the only spot in his room where his classmates could not see that he shared a small room with two siblings, while another shared that her anxiety was elevated with COVID-19, and being in her bed made her feel safer.

When the class met to work on norms, the teacher reminded them of the importance of equity. Without providing any identifying information, she incorporated questions such as, "how might we ensure we are not causing someone to disclose a private part of their lives while also being in class together?" The students and teacher collaborated and decided that to be in bed was allowed as were virtual backgrounds, however, students needed to be sitting up, dressed, and presenting as ready to learn.

Our "classrooms" are different now, calling into question how we create norms when nothing is normal. We might consider that while our settings are different, our need to treat each other with fundamental decency is unchanged. Therefore, we create intentional norms by:

1. Outlining the goals and benefits of norms.

2. Connecting all norms to values, noting those classroom practices not connected to values are probably habits rather than norms and may be unnecessary.

3. Including the student voice, giving think-time, outlining the expectations of the discussion, and allowing personal concerns to be raised outside of the group discussion.

4. Communicating your boundaries, remembering most of us are frustrated when we believe we are working as a group and the facilitator (in this case, the teacher) has not communicated intended outcomes or "no go" areas before the discussion.

5. Ensuring you include norms for how the group will respond when the norms are challenged.

6. Reviewing and revising regularly.

7. Communicating the norms with students and parents or guardians.

If you are wondering where to start, you might pick one of your classroom values, use the steps above to plan, develop words to use with students, consider the "what if's" including how you will respond to challenges, and permit yourself to revise as needed. Intentional norms are even more critical as we are all faced with so many new situations, and we are comforted by as much consistency as possible.
More ideas on creating norms
Jen Cort worked as a counselor, principal, and senior administrator for 25 years before moving to consulting for schools on equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice. Jen is the host of a podcast called Third Space with Jen Cort.
jencortedcon@gmail.com
www.jencort.com

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Norms are the patterns of behavior defining how we treat each other, ourselves, and our shared spaces. Norms exist in all physical and virtual classrooms. We often create norms at transition points such as the start of the year, term, or quarter.

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School Library Journal: YA and Middle Level Webcomics

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School Library Journal: YA and Middle Level Webcomics

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Looking for ways to keep your comics-loving kids and teens occupied? These free webcomics promise to eat up hours of time.

Middle Grade

Audrey's Magic Nine
Written by Michelle Wright and illustrated by Courtney Huddleston, Francesco Gerbino, and Tracy Bailey, this webcomic, now a series of graphic novels published by Farthing Press, centers on a black orphan adopted by a well-meaning but clueless suburban white couple.

Breaking Cat News
House cats Elvis, Puck, and Lupin report on such breaking news stories as "The people are missing!" and "There's a box with a towel inside it on the kitchen table." Georgia Dunn's hilarious webcomic, with its feline's-eye view of the world, is also being published by Andrews McMeel as a series of graphic novels.

Cucumber Quest
In GiGi D.G.'s video game-esque tale, adorable Cucumber the bunny and his sister Almond go up against a series of baddies. A vibrant palette, nonstop action, and a bizarre cast of friends and foes make for immersive reading. Also available as a series of graphic novels published by First Second.

Homestuck
Andrew Hussie's wildly popular webcomic follows John Egbert, who on his 13th birthday plays a video game that unleashes the apocalypse. Available in print from Viz Media.

Ozy and Millie
Two anthropomorphic foxes navigate the world in this sweetly snarky webcomic, now a graphic novel published by Andrews McMeel, by Dana Simpson, creator of the best-selling "Phoebe and Her Unicorn" series. Enjoy the archive, or check out reruns on GoComics!

Scared by the Bell
Though being the new kid is never easy, it's especially hard for Peter, an average kid whose classmates include a mummy, a pumpkinhead, and a skeleton. Creator Dylan Campbell updates this hilariously creepy webcomic every week.

Wormworld Saga
Still reeling from the loss of his mother, Jonas escapes into his vivid daydreams. After making his way through a portal in his grandmother's strange painting, he finds himself lost in a fantasy world, unable to return. Daniel Lieske's arresting comic series has also been published in print format by Lion Forge.

YA

As Per Usual
Dami Lee's self-deprecating webcomic details her quest "to be a real lady person," from dating woes to FOMO in the age of social distancing. The graphic novelBe Everything at Once, available from Chronicle, collects many of the entries in her webcomic.

As the Crow Flies
Two outsiders endure microaggressions on a Christian backpacking trip and find solace in each other. Melanie Gillman's contemplative, poignant webcomic was published as a graphic novel by Iron Circus Comics and won a Stonewall Honor in 2018.

Bird and Moon-Science and Nature Comics
Whether naturalist and science writer Rosemary Mosco is describing how to distinguish a dolphin from a porpoise, offering improvements on bird species (like hummingbirds that are 10,000% bigger), or urging readers to join the fight against climate change, her abiding passion for the natural world comes through loud and clear in this delightfully quirky webcomic. Available from Andrew McMeels asBirding Is My Favorite Video Game: Cartoons About the Natural World from Bird and Moon.

Check, Please!
When a happy-go-lucky former figure skater joins his college hockey team, hilarity ensues, but so do lasting friendships and even a burgeoning romance between protagonist Bitty and team captain Jack. Ngozi Ukazu's webcomic has garnered a loyal fan base, and the graphic novels, published by First Second, are just as popular.

Cheshire Crossing
What became of Alice, Wendy Darling, and Dorothy Gale after they returned from Wonderland, Neverland, and Oz? Though few believed their stories, the three girls meet and find kinship in one another. Andy Weir and Sarah Andersen's enchanting webcomic-turned-graphic novel (published by Ten Speed) will inspire readers to write their own fan fiction.

DeadEndia
Hamish Steele's webcomic, now a print series published by Nobrow, centers on an amusement haunted house with a mysterious portal that entices demons, ghosts, and angels.

Deep Dark Fears
Fran Krause creates mordantly funny yet tender comics based on emails submitted by readers detailing the absurd but deeply resonant fears that plague them (What if, while walking over me in bed, my cat steps on both my eyes? What if, when I take off my goggles, the suction yanks out my eyes?). Two graphic novels, Deep Dark Fears and , based on the webcomic have been published by Ten Speed.

(H)afrocentric
Now a graphic novel series published by PM Press, this raw, deeply funny, provocative webcomic from Juliana "Jewels" Smith, Ronald Nelson, and Mike Hampton follows a black revolutionary college freshman and her friends dealing with racism, gentrification, and privilege at Ronald Reagan University.

Heartstopper
Since 2016, Alice Oseman has been chronicling the burgeoning romance between Nick and Charlie, two secondary characters from her prose novel Solitaire. Her sweet, manga-flavored tale will be published in graphic novel format by Scholastic next month.

On a Sunbeam
Tillie Walden's mesmerizing, strikingly original space epic seamlessly blends romance and sci-fi. In graphic novel format, published by First Second, On a Sunbeam has racked up accolades, making its way onto numerous best books lists and being named a YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novel.

Space Boy
To make the long trip back home to Earth from a mining colony deep in outer space, Amy and her family must be cryogenically frozen, and when Amy returns, her friends are far older, and she's not sure where she fits in. With fluid linework and a pitch-perfect palette, this tender webcomic from Stephen McCranie, now published by Dark Horse as a graphic novel series, is ideal for sci-fi readers and newcomers to the genre alike.

Ariel Slamer Ries's webcomic, now published in graphic novel format by Lion Forge, takes place in the magical world of Hyalin, where witches' magic depends on the length of their hair. But revealing one's power can be perilous.

Mahnaz Dar

Mahnaz Dar (mdar@mediasourceinc.com) is Reference and Professional Reading Editor for Library Journal and School Library Journal and can be found on Twitter @DibblyFresh.

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19 Webcomics To Keep Kids and Teens Engaged

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Looking for ways to keep your comics-loving kids and teens occupied? These free webcomics promise to eat up hours of time. Middle Grade Audrey's Magic Nine Written by Michelle Wright and illustrated by Courtney Huddleston, Francesco Gerbino, and Tracy Bailey, this webcomic, now a series of graphic novels published by Farthing Press, centers on a black orphan adopted by a well-meaning but clueless suburban white couple.

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Canva: Elegant design tool with many templates

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Canva: Elegant design tool with many templates

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Browse through our professionally designed selection of free templates and customize a design for any occasion.

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Summative Assessment in Distance Learning

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Whether schools are using regular grades or not, teachers need to accurately assess learning while their students are at home. These are some helpful ideas to consider.

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EdWeek: Virtual Education Dilemma: Scheduled Classroom Instruction vs. Anytime Learning

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EdWeek: Virtual Education Dilemma: Scheduled Classroom Instruction vs. Anytime Learning

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With schools shut down across America, K-12 teachers faced with a question many likely thought they'd never have to ask: When and how often during the school day do my students need to see me?

Distance education can be broken down into two broad approaches: synchronous and asynchronous. The former consists of the teacher offering a lesson to the class of students at the same time; the latter provides the student with tools to complete the work on their own time, and direct involvement from the teacher can happen anytime.

(For more details, check out this guide from Wisconsin educators, such as Diane Doersch, the technical project director for Digital Promise and a former chief technology officer in public schools. And read this guide from Educause about research on the two different approaches.)

The bottom line: Neither approach is sufficient all on its own, but there are situations and subjects that do tend to favor one of the two strategies. Experts say the best recipe for success is to mix the two-but in what proportions? And for which students?

Education Week put this dilemma in front of longtime practitioners and observers of online learning. Here's what they advised.
Don't waste students' time.
Asynchronous communications, like emails and text messages, can be useful for teachers setting deadlines, offering instructions or even launching a discussion question. Synchronous communication works better for brainstorming or more spontaneous conversations, said Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the Aurora Institute, formerly the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.

"It doesn't make a lot of sense to do a 15-minute lecture live," Patrick said. "Make a slide-deck, do a voiceover-have that delivery of content be done asynchronously so that you're actually using your time together in a videoconference to interact and share ideas and build off each other's ideas."

The added benefit of delivering a lecture in this way is that students can watch it at their own pace, rewinding if necessary if they feel like they missed an important point, or watching the lecture multiple times to make sure they understand the content of the presentation.
Don't go overboard with synchronous teaching.
It won't be possible for most K-12 schools to replicate the traditional classroom experience under the current chaos, but they can take lessons from it. Too much synchronous teaching-a lengthy Zoom meeting teachers expect students to attend in full, for instance-could be "overstimulating" for students and maddening for teachers alike.

Teachers also need to keep in mind the unusual logistics of the COVID-19 outbreak: Expecting students to be glued to their computers all day is especially unrealistic in households with more children than devices. So relying too much on this approach could contribute to equity gaps, with students who have easy access to technology getting an edge over those who don't.
Asynchronous learning offers pacing flexibility.
Fully asynchronous education can give students "ownership of their own learning" that isn't possible in a more traditional classroom environment, said Megan O'Reilly Palevich, head of Laurel Springs School, a private, nationwide, fully online K-12 institution based in California and Pennsylvania.

Jennifer Kolar Burden, curriculum director for the Illinois Virtual School, believes "almost every single piece of content can be delivered asynchronously," but it's ideal for the content to be presented in multiple ways: an interactive game, a practice quiz, a supplementary video. A wide range of optional activities will help cover students with diverse learning needs.

"You're going to have a lot of students who typically may not pay attention very well in class, and now they're supposed to pay attention to a recorded video?" Burden said. Some might, but others won't, she said.

This format can also be helpful for students who tend to take longer to complete exams, says Molly Yowell, an online educator and former digital learning specialist at the Indiana Department of Education. She has a 6th grader at home during the outbreak. "I think he's really enjoyed being able to take his time at home and not feel rushed by his peers as they all sit and wait for him to finish a passage or a math quiz," she said.

Give parents clear direction.

When making the case for asynchronous learning, O'Reilly often tells parents that, instead of spending roughly seven hours in a school building each day, students at her school can be learning 24/7. A student could choose to do all their English work on Sunday and all their math on Monday, for instance.

Parents will likely need to be more involved with students in lower grades. Asynchronous exercises for those students could be practicing their handwriting, letters, and numbers: "You don't want a kindergartener to be in front of a computer all day."
Synchronous learning can be a little more informal.
Teachers can conduct virtual "office hours" by inviting students to join them at any point during a couple-hour window, or they can arrange for a lunch period that students can join at their leisure, O'Reilly Palevich said.

Teachers can conduct virtual "office hours" by inviting students to join them at any point during a couple-hour window, or they can arrange for a lunch period that students can join at their leisure.

Real-time video or text chatting can also be useful for keeping tabs on individual students--"checking in on them, how are they, do they need help with something?" she said.

Synchronous experiences, even for less than half an hour, also allow students to check in on their fellow classmates and get assurance that their teacher is doing okay, Burden said. Particularly for younger students, it can be useful to maintain the rhythm of a traditional school day with an introductory chat, mimicking the transition from getting off the bus.
Some subjects work better in one mode than the other.
O'Reilly Palevich thinks English is the easiest subject to teach online because so much of it involves students thinking and writing on their own. Math is tougher, and might require the most synchronous periods for students to ask questions and see problems worked out at the pace that works best for them. It also gives students opportunities to ask questions in the moment, if they are confused by a teacher's explanation of a concept, saving them the frustration of having to wait hours or longer for a teacher to clarify a concept.

Complex subjects that tend to prompt immediate questions or dynamic discussion among students-like AP math or computer science, or world-language courses-also lend themselves to synchronous instruction, Burden said.
Asynchronous doesn't mean absent.
Online videos can help supplement a teacher's synchronous lesson and vary what students are experiencing throughout the day. Science lessons benefit from those video supplements to reinforce demonstrations of lab exercises.

Students might be hesitant to "bother" a teacher with an email or a call if they have a question, unless the teacher proactively offers opportunities for students to get in touch. Younger students might also never have considered that their teachers exist when they're not physically present with them in a classroom.

Yowell suggests teachers plan to meet one on one with students by phone or video chat "a handful of times a month."

Those communications are more effective if they're more personal than rote, O'Reilly Palevich says. Teachers can create a goofy video or use Bitmojis to keep the mood light.
Tailor instruction to your students' needs.
Some students are more prepared to handle asynchronous instruction than others. Montana Digital Academy, the state's K-12 online learning unit, provides an online readiness assessment that anyone can use, with several scenarios that help determine whether a student is likely to thrive asynchronously or needs more support.

Effective synchronous teaching can be powerful, approximating the experience of being in a classroom without the physical environment, said Bob Currie, executive director of Montana Digital Academy. But it's not foolproof. Some of Currie's colleagues who have taught via videoconference have "found it difficult sometimes to really keep people engaged. They may be listening but they may be kinda checked out."
Teachers: Don't get frustrated.
It will be tempting to get frustrated if students aren't paying attention during a live meeting-but Currie recommends patience, particularly during a time of heightened stress and anxiety.

Teaching asynchronously can be an adjustment for classroom teachers who are used to getting the instant feedback of students either appearing engaged in an assignment, or getting bored and misbehaving.

Online teachers serve more of a facilitator role, Burden says. Teachers accustomed to in-person instruction will get more comfortable with this role over time, whether they're teaching synchronously or asynchronously.

"You're not leading through the learning process, you're guiding them, you're pointing them in the right direction, you're letting them explore on their own," she said.
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Virtual Education Dilemma: Scheduled Classroom Instruction vs. Anytime Learning

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With schools shut down across America, K-12 teachers faced with a question many likely thought they'd never have to ask: When and how often during the school day do my students need to see me? Distance education can be broken down into two broad approaches: synchronous and asynchronous.

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Global Online Academy: COVID-19 Resources

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Global Online Academy: COVID-19 Resources

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Resources and Strategies for Schools Dealing with Coronavirus-Related Closures

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Amazing Educational Resources: Events Calendar

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Amazing Educational Resources: Events Calendar

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Events for May 2020 - Amazing Educational Resources Calendar

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The Best Place To Find Educational Events

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What started as a Google Sheet is now a searchable online database!

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Share educational resources and support each other as a community of educators.

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Cult of Pedagogy: Everything You Need to Know About Building a Great Screencast Video

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Cult of Pedagogy: Everything You Need to Know About Building a Great Screencast Video

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Sponsored by World101 and ViewSonic

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Early in March, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a domino effect of school closures. Overnight, educators were forced to rethink their instruction as they moved online. Thankfully, most aren't comfortable simply replacing themselves with cookie-cutter, ready-made content built without the unique needs of their students in mind. They miss their students, and their students miss them, so they are willing to put in the hard work to ensure that their authentic teaching styles remain intact. This should not be a surprise to anyone who understands the art of teaching; technology simply cannot replace teachers.

One of the most effective ways to move instruction online is to build screencast videos. Screencast videos are unique because they are actual recordings of your computer screen or tablet as opposed to a video of an in-person lecture. They are a powerful way to deliver instruction, but they do require a fair amount of time and planning, which I have learned through a lot of trial and error. Building effective screencasts continues to be the barrier that stops educators from making a smooth transition to distance learning, so I have put together the following tips to help guide you through the process.

My Own Screencast Journey

As an educator myself, I spent several years developing screencasts and making mistakes along the way. I was fed up with lecturing and was determined to find a better way to tailor my instruction to students' needs. I knew technology could be a powerful tool to amplify my impact, but I wasn't willing to replace my lectures with a disembodied voice on a screen who didn't know my students. So five years ago, I made the commitment to eliminate lectures from my classroom and replace them with instructional videos I created myself. This allowed me to facilitate a blended, self-paced, mastery-based classroom built on the backbone of high quality feedback and differentiated instruction:

Years later, I left the classroom to launch The Modern Classrooms Project, a nonprofit that equips and empowers educators to create blended, self-paced, mastery-based classrooms of their own. Through our in-person trainings and our Modern Classroom Essentials* course, we have supported teachers as they learn how to:

Plan and record their own instructional videos

Build student-friendly websites for instructional content

Design effective self-paced learning experiences for students at all levels

The following tips align with what we teach participants about creating their own instructional videos.

Start with the Research

When launching distance learning and meeting students' needs, it can be tempting to dive head first into instructional video creation without actually understanding what works. But before you start investing countless hours of time and energy constructing videos, it's important to understand what the research says about cultivating engagement.

Video Length

The research on how long instructional videos should be is incredibly clear and tells a simple narrative: Keep it short. The ideal length should be under 6 minutes. Between 6 and 9 minutes, engagement drops slightly.

Image from Brame, 2015.

After 9 minutes, engagement drops considerably, and if your video is over 12 minutes, you have a real problem on your hands. It is important to note that the majority of these studies have been conducted on young adults, so for younger students try to keep it 6 minutes or under (Brame, 2015).

These time recommendations can make educators anxious. It can be hard to imagine how to synthesize concepts or skills in such a short span of time. One of the beauties of instructional video creation is it forces you to think about delivering content in a lean way. What is essential? What is not? And where can students discover the content for themselves without you walking them through the process?

A simple way to make videos short is by chunking more frequently. Educators are used to thinking about lessons in 45-, 60-, or 90-minute blocks of time. When you use instructional videos, those constraints disappear. A 10-minute lecture that is designed as part of a 60-minute lesson can be chunked into two 5-minute videos, each of which then becomes part of a 30-minute lesson (Ibrahim et al., 2012).

It also helps to speak quickly and enthusiastically. Teachers are used to speaking slowly and enunciating very clearly, but that is not necessary in a screencast; in fact, it can be quite boring. Instead, speak fast and use conversational language to bring your authentic self into the picture (Guo et al., 2014). Don't worry that students won't be able to follow if you speak too quickly; they can always rewind the video and watch sections again. And don't be afraid to make mistakes-a few of these will make your video sound more genuine.

Video Design

Next let's talk about design principles. First off, minimize text (Guo et al., 2014). Nothing is less engaging than an instructional video with a whole bunch of typed up text. It is especially redundant when you simply read the text during the recording. You might as well just send them a document and have them read it over instead. When possible, always accompany what you say with visuals (Brame, 2015).

Second, instructional videos do not need to be pretty; they need to be personal. Your students want to hear from you; otherwise you could just send them existing videos from YouTube. Research has shown that engagement increases when students know their own teacher is behind the screen delivering the instruction (Li et al., 2016).

Lastly, interactivity is engaging. Embedding pop-up questions into your videos provides great checks for understanding. Moreover, accompanying videos with guided notes helps kids stay focused and ensures that the information travels with them to their next task or assignment (Lawson et al., 2006; Vural, 2013; Zhang et al., 2006).

Don't Forget to Plan First

As with any lesson, good advance planning is essential. Don't just find a software, fire it up and start screencasting. This usually leads to long, dry videos that generally disregard the research. When we train educators to build instructional videos, we tell them that the large bulk of the work will be equal parts planning and recording. The rest of the time is devoted to enhancing your videos and sharing them out with your students.

In most cases, planning your video means putting together the visuals. We find the easiest tools for this are PowerPoint or Google Slides: You'd design the slideshow, then present that as the visual component of your screencast while narrating with your voice. Depending on the content area, these slide decks can look quite different from one another, but the best ones are highly visual and include a nice balance of new information and examples, with as little text as possible.

Other educators will use guided notes instead of slides. If you have already built a nice series of guided notes that would accompany your in-person lectures, those can work really well as the background of your instructional video. Whether you use a slideshow or guided notes, about 40 percent of the time you spend building your screencast should be spent preparing this part.

Finding the Right Recording Tool

If you haven't noticed already, there seems to be an endless stream of edtech products that all allow you to accomplish very similar tasks. This is especially the case for screencasting, so to keep things simple, I'll just recommend a few tools I know are good. Once you've learned those, it's pretty easy to transfer those skills to other tools you might want to try.

The big distinction in screencasting tools depends on whether you have a touchscreen device. While not required, touchscreen devices with styluses (tablets and 2-in-1 laptops) unleash a whole new frontier of functionality. Here is how you should think about the two options:

Interactive Whiteboards

(for touchscreen devices only)

If you have a touchscreen device, we encourage educators to use screencasting tools that serve as interactive whiteboards. Our favorite is Explain Everything. The beauty of a tool like Explain Everything is it acts like a highly interactive digital whiteboard with a built-in recorder and editing tool. More importantly, you get to control the background of your whiteboard. Instead of writing on a blank canvas, you're able to upload visuals-slide decks or guided notes-to become the background of your interactive whiteboard.

Here is an example of one of my Explain Everything videos: Independent vs. Dependent Variables.

For educators looking to learn how to use Explain Everything and all of its tools, you can access our comprehensive tutorial on our online course* or by clicking directly here: Explain Everything Tutorial. If you do go this route, make sure you have a stylus to annotate. We recommend the Meko Universal Stylus because it is affordable but allows for really clean and clear annotations with a high level of precision.

Traditional Screencasters

If you do not have a touchscreen device (most people don't) then do not worry! Traditional screencasters will still get the job done. With the right planning in place, you can create really high-quality, engaging videos. When picking an effective screencaster, you want to look for one that gives you a high level of flexibility, strong editing tools, annotation capabilities, and a webcam function. The most important editing function is the capacity to "truncate." This allows you to scroll to a specific point in a video and re-record when you make an inexcusable mistake without having to redo the whole thing.

Our favorite screencaster is Screencast-O-Matic. It is really easy to use and has all the functionality you need. The free version is ok, but the paid version is worth the upgrade for the added features. Here is our full Screencast-O-Matic Tutorial which can also be found on our online course*. There are many other screencasters out there with similar functionality. The product does not really matter much if it covers all the key components; in the end, it will come down to how you use it.

Since it is difficult to annotate or write using a traditional screencaster, you have to make up for that lack of functionality with animations; these allow you to show lines of text or bullet points one at a time, as you're speaking, rather than all at once. This minimizes the stress that students feel to write down everything immediately, and keeps them focused on each point of your video as you discuss it. Slide decks that are animated to slow-release information lead to far more engaging videos for students. But make sure the animations are simple and have a purpose. Avoid flashy animations and unnecessary sound effects; they prove to be more distracting than beneficial.

Recording: The Most Relaxing Part

Once you have selected your screencasting program and completed the planning process, it's time to start recording. For some educators, this is anxiety producing. Do your best to relax; the more authentic you are, the better.

Before you start, make sure you are in a quiet room and try to get headphones with a mic. For years I have used simple apple headphones with a mic. If you are looking for a more advanced option, consider a headset with an adjustable mic. When you are recording, you should have one goal in mind: Never speak without doing something on the screen.

Interactive Whiteboard (only if you have a touchscreen device): When using an interactive whiteboard, this is a relatively easy task. When possible, write on the screen. If you are reading text or images, constantly annotate.

Traditional Screencasters: When using a traditional screencaster, this can be a little more challenging. As you read text or discuss images on the screen, consider using your on-screen pen or cursor-just as you might use a finger in person-to follow along with the text. When possible, underline and circle key information. This is when animations will make your life a lot easier (Ibrahim et al., 2012).

Remember not to get bogged down in little mistakes. When they do happen, use the truncate function as opposed to re-recording. If you're feeling nervous, consider writing out a script for yourself. Speak quickly and genuinely and before you know it, you will have a solid and engaging video.

Making it Interactive

Once you are done recording your video, consider how you can make it interactive. You can build a fantastic video that follows all the right research, but without tools designed to ensure students are following along, there is a good chance they will inevitably check out.

Research shows that two simple strategies can increase student engagement with instructional videos:

Embedded Questions

One of the most important features of in-person lectures or discussions is the check for understanding. It is both an opportunity for teachers to get a temperature check on student learning and a chance for students to identify their own misconceptions. The problem with most checks for understanding is that they only engage a small percentage of students. That is not the case with instructional videos. When you upload your videos to a platform like Edpuzzle, you can embed questions and comments at key points in the video that EVERY student has to engage with. We recommend that you use closed-response (multiple-choice) questions so that students get immediate feedback on their responses. If you want to track responses, you can build classes on Edpuzzle to track the data. Here's our tutorial on how to use Edpuzzle.

Guided Notes

An easy way to ensure kids are paying attention during an instructional video is to require the completion of guided notes. The challenge is making sure that your notes support learning as opposed to being an unnecessary and tedious barrier. (For an overview of how to put guided notes together, click here.) As your students watch your videos, they should take notes on key content. If you require students to take freehand notes, you will find that some will flourish, but the large bulk will struggle. It will also extend the video watching experience and in turn take away from the rest of the lesson which is likely more engaging. Instead, consider simply providing students with copies of your slides-on paper or digitally-and allowing them to annotate these slides with you as they follow along. If you are not comfortable with that, provide an explicit note-taking model for students, such as Cornell notes, to provide them with a clear structure.

The enhancing phase of building instructional videos is easy to overlook. But it should only take 10-20 minutes per video and can have a major impact on engagement.

Next Steps on Your Screencasting Journey

Like any new skill worth learning, screencasts require planning and practice. But with time they can become an essential teaching tool - whether you're physically in the classroom or not. Research on our Modern Classroom Fellows has shown that when you use screencasts to allow for self-paced learning and mastery-based grading, it substantially improves your capacity to effectively differentiate instruction.

If you are looking for more resources and support through this process, we can help. For educators who are looking to dig deeper into our resources, see exemplar units, or learn how to incorporate videos into a fully self-paced, mastery-based classroom, our free online course can be accessed here, which includes unlimited access to our content and tutorials.

Finally, for any teachers who want help creating videos and running a self-paced, mastery-based class, we offer our Modern Classrooms Mentorship Program*. Every participant in this program is matched with an expert mentor from our Modern Classrooms team, who provides:

1. Feedback on every assignment you submit, from instructional videos to progress trackers to mastery checks

2. On-demand, 1-1 personalized virtual coaching

3. Three Continuing Education Units (CEUs) from George Mason University upon completion

Our mentors have experience creating instructional videos for students across a wide range of grade levels and subject areas, and they stand ready to share their expertise. If you're interested in enrolling, you can save $50 at any time with the coupon code CULTOFPEDAGOGY.

Whether you take our free course, pay for additional support, or simply read this article, we hope you'll join us in using instructional videos to create better learning experiences for all students.

* Cult of Pedagogy has an affiliate relationship with the Building Modern Classrooms Project. Although the Modern Classroom Essentials course is free, if you purchase one of their paid offerings through the links on this post, Cult of Pedagogy will receive a percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.
References:
Brame, C. (2015). Effective educational videos. Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/

Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014, March). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50). Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2556325.2566239

Ibrahim, M., Antonenko, P. D., Greenwood, C. M., & Wheeler, D. (2012). Effects of segmenting, signalling, and weeding on learning from educational video. Learning, Media and Technology, 37(3), 220-235. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ980817

Li, J., Kizilcec, R., Bailenson, J., & Ju, W. (2016). Social robots and virtual agents as lecturers for video instruction. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 1222-1230. Retrieved from https://rene.kizilcec.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/li2015social.pdf

Lawson, T. J., Bodle, J. H., Houlette, M. A., & Haubner, R. R. (2006). Guiding questions enhance student learning from educational videos. Teaching of Psychology, 33(1), 31-33. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top3301_7

Vural, O. F. (2013). The Impact of a Question-Embedded Video-based Learning Tool on E-learning. Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice, 13(2), 1315-1323. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1017292

Zhang, D., Zhou, L., Briggs, R. O., & Nunamaker Jr, J. F. (2006). Instructional video in e-learning: Assessing the impact of interactive video on learning effectiveness. Information & management, 43(1), 15-27. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378720605000170

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Everything You Need to Know About Building a Great Screencast Video

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Moving some of your instruction to video? Learn how to plan, record, and enhance screencast videos students will actually watch.

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Short topical videos to generate discussion

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The Game Gal: Games to play during social distancing

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The Game Gal: Games to play during social distancing

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I don't know about you, but this COVID-19 pandemic has brought some major changes to our family. We're practicing social distancing, seriously cutting down on our social time with friends and trips out of the house. My husband, three kids, and I are going to be spending a LOT more time at home (meaning...practically all our of time at home).

There have been a few times during this pandemic already that games have helped us out, providing a chance to laugh and play together, to do more than chores or jobs or worrying.

I want to do a roundup post on games of all sorts that could be good to play during this time. If any of you have games you're playing or want to see posted, let me know! I'd love to hear about them! For now, here's a giant list of games that might see you through COVID-19...

For so many of these games, a word list would come in super handy! My word generator has TONS! You could create whole new games with some of the word lists on the page. Check it out!

Games to play with family members at home

Paper games

Talking games

Active games

Other games to play at home

Cleaning games - These definitely might come in handy if you have young kids...

Tape on the nose - Very silly, good for any age

Photo scavenger hunt - Very adaptable!

Don't Eat Pete - Fun, easy little kid game

Claps - No supplies needed, for older kids to teens, not really much competition involved

The cup game - Also for older kids to teens, also not much competition involved

Rock-paper-scissors

Speed Scrabble - For teens to adults

Animal signs - Tweens to adults; no supplies needed, and it's fun!

Clothespins - A game that could fill a whole day

I spy - Great for young kids, also very adaptable

Marshmallow toss - You need marshmallows and a muffin tin

Monkey see, monkey do - No supplies required, but best with a slightly larger group

Mystery gift pass - Could make a fun reward activity for kids of any age

One hundred - Fast-paced, easy, and fun

Simon says - Great little kid game

Spoons - Face cards and spoons required

The candy bar game - Some supplies required, but it can be a lot of fun! Great for kids, too

The human knot - Need a slightly larger group

Skittles - If you have a lot of Skittles...

Murder (winks variation) - Tweens to adults, slightly larger group

Murder (hand-squeezing variation) - Tweens to adults, slightly larger group

Walk on the ceiling - Any age kid, and kind of a one-player game

Penny in the flour - Can make a trivia game more exciting!

Eat a donut from a string - A funny challenge game

Water in the face - A guessing game

Alliteration adventure - A type of versatile activity

Who am I? - A guessing game; can be good for kids who can read

Memory - Any age, various supplies required

Play doh blow darts - Great for kids!

Games to play with friends or family virtually

You could of course also play any of these games with people in your home.

Games you could play over video message

Games you could play over phone calls

(or over video message)

Games you could play over text message

These are games that would also make great talking games, in person or over the phone.

And finally, games NOT to play right now 😉

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COVID-19 survival: Games to play during social distancing

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I don't know about you, but this COVID-19 pandemic has brought some major changes to our family. We're practicing social distancing, seriously cutting down on our social time with friends and trips out of the house. My husband, three kids, and I are going to be spending a LOT more time at home (meaning...practically all our of time at home).

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Infographic Maker Trusted By 11 Million Users - Piktochart

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With Piktochart AI, you can create stunning infographics, reports, presentations, and more in seconds. No design experience needed. Start for free.

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If you're having trouble accessing a Google product, there's a chance we're currently experiencing a temporary problem. You can check for outages and downtime on the G Suite Status Dashboard.

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If you're having trouble accessing a Google product, there's a chance we're currently experiencing a temporary problem. You can check for outages and downtime on the G Suite Status Dashboard.

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A fantastic collection of resources, from live events to subject-specific content links.

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Wide Open School's mission lives on at Common Sense

With schools back in person, we have closed this dedicated distance-learning site designed to guide families and educators through the sudden shift to remote learning.
Discover More Great Resources for Families & Educators
Common Sense is dedicated to providing teachers and families with free resources to help kids learn, grow, and thrive with media and technology. Join our community for more tips and resources to support kids' learning and healthy development.

More Resources You'll Love

Get more free content like what you found on Wide Open School.
For Families For Educators
Thank You to Our Supporters & Partners

We are grateful to our supporters and partners for helping to bring these resources to kids, families, and educators everywhere during a global crisis. It is a testament to the power of creativity, collaboration, and a shared commitment to education and digital access for all.

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Wide Open School's mission lives on at Common Sense With schools back in person, we have closed this dedicated distance-learning site designed to guide families and educators through the sudden shift to remote learning. Discover More Great Resources for Families & Educators

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connects the SEL community with experts to address how SEL can be most helpful in response to today’s circumstances.

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The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated feelings of isolation, stress, loss, and more among young people, adults, families, and communities. Social and emotional learning (SEL) offers a powerful means to support one another during these challenging times as our communities work to address the impact of the pandemic on students' learning and development.

Now, more than ever, we understand how important it is to demonstrate empathy and resilience, build relationships across distance, and call upon our collective resolve to strengthen our schools and our communities.

So, how can SEL support you and your work during this time? Find resources and guidance in Reunite, Renew, Thrive: SEL Roadmap for Reopening School (July 2020).

Our recommendations follow the four core focus areas for schoolwide SEL and districtwide SEL:

First, create a foundation for SEL.

Work with students, families, and communities to envision how education can more holistically support all learners.

Prioritize strong, two-way communication between families and schools.

Second, attend to well-being and mutual support among adults.

Pay close attention to our own social-emotional needs in order to be the community of adults who best serve our young people.

Foster supportive adult relationships to process emotions, share challenges, and offer support to one another.

Third, promote SEL for young people.

Provide consistency in daily routines to foster a sense of safety and predictability.

Listen to young people and support them in building or maintaining a sense of community and connection.

Incorporate social and emotional skill-building into learning (such as CASEL's SEL 3 Signature Practices).

Fourth, reflect on how things are going and adjust as you learn.

Listen to students, families, and your wider community of stakeholders as valuable sources of information about what is or isn't working.

Analyze results with a lens of equity to meet needs using our SEL Data Reflection Protocol

How is CASEL advancing this work?
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Guidance on School Transitions and Reopening

To aid in this time of continued transitions, CASEL collaborated with more than 40 partners to illuminate a way forward through Reunite, Renew, Thrive: SEL Roadmap for Reopening School (July 2020), centered on relationships and built on the existing strengths of a school community. As we prepared for Spring 2021, we offered three strategies adapted from the SEL Roadmap to re-examine efforts for a successful second semester: Refocus on the SEL Roadmap: Actions for a Successful Second Semester (January 2021).

CASEL CARES Webinar Series

In response to the pandemic, CASEL mobilized to provide social and emotional support to our communities and share best practices through an initiative called CASEL CARES. We offered weekly practical guidance and information on topics that were sourced from the field and relevant to the needs of today. Our CASEL CARES Webinars covered a wide range of SEL topics and attracted more than 100,000 people. View the on-demand series

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The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated feelings of isolation, stress, loss, and more among young people, adults, families, and communities. Social and

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Harvard GSE: Confronting the Coronavirus Outbreak

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Harvard GSE: Confronting the Coronavirus Outbreak

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Many articles and resources here

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An ongoing series about how schools, families, and communities can respond, support young people, build resilience, and keep the learning going during the Coronavirus pandemic.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

-- John O'Donohue

A few years ago, a student of mine lost his father to an unexpected illness that took a wrong turn. Two days later my student came to class. Surprised, I let my student know that if he needed to take time off to be with his family, I would later work with him to help him catch up on materials he would miss. I was giving him permission to be absent from class. He didn't want to. In fact, he said that being in class helped him forget about his problems.

His reason resonated with me. As a student, and even now as a teacher, being in class has always offered me a sanctuary where I could tune down everything else and immerse myself in a community of knowledge seekers, if only for a few hours each week.

Today, growing numbers of colleges and universities all across the country -- including Dartmouth College, Rice University and Stanford University, among many others -- are temporarily canceling their face-to-face classes to deal with the impact of the COVID-19 situation. The conversations on our campuses, as well as on professional Listservs, have turned to the topic of academic continuity plans as the nation continues to deal with the impact of COVID-19. As I look through the materials put together by various teaching and learning centers and instructional technology groups, I have noticed that the resources have focused almost exclusively on the hows of technology: tools to record lectures, create discussions and proctor exams. Yet while the technological know-how to virtually connect with our students is necessary, it is not sufficient to continue the teaching and learning endeavor.

Beyond the electronic connection, we need to connect emotionally -- especially in times of anxiety and uncertainty. As a neuroscientist, I know that emotions are key to learning. In Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio asserts, "We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think." Recent literature affirms the importance of the affective domains in teaching and learning.

So I began to wonder about the impact such transitions will have on students and colleagues emotionally, psychologically and even physically. The current situation hits close to home for me. During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, I was a student in middle school in Baghdad. When the bombing started, schools shut down abruptly. We didn't have internet or the ability to attend school virtually. One morning, one of my teachers showed up at my house, hand-delivered homework and reminded me to keep studying. To this day, I remember how her dedication and acts of resilience and hope helped me feel a tiny sense of normalcy during that turbulent time in my life. At night, I would sit by the candlelight to study and dream of going back to school and all the conversations I would have with my friends.

I do not question any higher education institution's decision to move their classes online or close their campuses. Rather, I am thinking about how we can teach in times of uncertainty and how we can ensure that our students continue to learn most effectively.

More specifically, I am thinking about students who don't have a safe environment at home -- for whom residence halls and classrooms have served as a sanctuary, students who have found a community within college, or students who rely on college for their sustenance and security. In other words, most students. So how can we, teachers, be that "dancing clays" to balance our students' mental and emotional loads, so that they may stumble just a little bit less?

Reflecting on that experience and my questions, I came up with a short list of what I would've liked my teachers to do had I been a student who was sent home due to COVID-19.

1. Email your students to remind them that you are still there for them.

2. Tell them how you are shifting your schedule to deal with the new situation and that change is part of life. Humanize yourself and make it casual and lighthearted. For example, you might talk about how, in between reading their discussion posts, you decided to start your spring cleaning, which you've been putting off forever.

3. Reflect on the notion of rigor and continue to challenge and support your students. As instructors, we often must balance rigor and support, and this situation might be one where students will need more support than rigor. Establishing continuity doesn't mean you increase the amount of work required of them. I say this because I worry that some of us might be fixated on the rigor of the materials presented. Let's face it -- the rigor may suffer, and that's OK considering the situation.

4. Repeat some of the lessons you taught in class. Especially for those students who are missing the classroom environment, this will probably help activate their memory of being part of a community and remind them that they are still part of one. For example, in your email you can say something like, "Remember when we talked about this and ..."

5. Use hopeful and optimistic language, such as, "When you come back this fall ..." This will help students look forward to coming back to the campus.

6. Offer students an opportunity to exchange phone numbers and, for those who are interested, help them create a WhatsApp chat group. It can sometimes be difficult for a student to ask for a classmate's phone number.

7. Don't ignore the elephant in the room. If possible, talk about COVID-19 and fear. This is an opportunity for you to remind your students to consider the sources of their news and to beware of the large amount of misinformation.

8. Remember that students have left behind more than just their classes and academics. On both residential and commuter campuses, there are important spaces where students meet and talk about their nonacademic lives -- sports, upcoming concerts, recently discovered shows and so on. Consider creating a community discussion board for them to share what is happening in their lives, especially given the stress, fear and strains in these uncertain times.

9. Let your students know that you are there for them and that if they need help to reach out to you. Let them know that you are (I hope) in touch with counselors or mental health experts that can help them should they need to speak to someone.

10. Most important, ask each of your students how you can help them. The Persian poet Rumi says, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." Likewise, in times of uncertainty and unknowing, we can create a space where our students' voice and insights can illuminate the path we are carving out for them -- and us.

Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list, and I invite you all to add to it in the comments section below or at #hopematters4learning. Think about yourself as a vulnerable student who is trying to learn and complete a degree on an already thinly spread set of obligations. What might help you?

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10 strategies to support students and help them learn during the coronavirus crisis (opinion)

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Mays Imad offers 10 teaching strategies to support students and help them continue to learn during this time of uncertainty.

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Edutopia: Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment

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Edutopia: Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment

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The thought ended almost before it started: "This is so overwhelming." It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem. In the pregnant pause that followed, undoubtedly, every teacher tracking the unspooling thread-about the dizzying, rapidly escalating viral crisis that was closing schools across the country-recognized the chasm they were all facing as well, and took a deep breath.

In the next few hours, over 500 teachers joined two Facebook conversations about teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, spilling out their concerns and anxieties: What will we do if the schools close for months? How can I shift to online learning if we're closing tomorrow, or even in a few hours? How will special education students be cared for, and IEPs administered? What about children who have no internet access, or who will be required, as Keith Schoch thoughtfully noted, to "become de facto babysitters" for their brothers and sisters. "There is no digital divide, but there is a digital abyss, and America's rural poor are living at the bottom of it," said Anne Larsen, with devastating concision. What if, in the end, the school systems decide that online learning is working just fine, and never reopen?

The panic was all perfectly understandable.

But there were plenty of teachers in the mix who had weeks of crisis experience under their belts by that time-several in Hong Kong and Italy and the state of Washington, for example-and others who had long careers in online and distance learning. In the end, too, there were many fantastic, highly creative teachers providing strategies as fast as the obstacles appeared.

At the highest level, a shift in mindset would be required-even the most optimistic educators conceded the point. There are plenty of strategies and tactics we're covering at Edutopia-and we'll continue to-but here are the crucial emotional and psychological scaffolds that our audience agreed would be needed to teach in this new paradigm.

Expect Trial... and Plenty of Error

Start by being reasonable with yourself. It is, in fact, impossible to shift to distance learning overnight without lots of trial and error. Expect it, plan for it, and do your best to make peace with it.

"I can tell you, now that we're in week 7 of online learning, that much of what you will do will be trial and error," wrote Stacy Rausch Keevan, who was teaching in Hong Kong. "Don't stress about that-it won't do you any good. For my middle school English and humanities classes, I'm offering the same lessons I would normally do live, but in smaller doses."

Acknowledge the Extraordinary

Reset your baseline. We're all operating in the shadow of a global pandemic, and it is disorienting and limiting. Business as usual is unrealistic.

The real "points to consider" are not "the strict adherence to 'regular' conditions and norms," wrote Amy Rheault-Heafield in a reply to a question about how to structure distance learning like more typical learning experiences, "but how to provide a rich experience to all learners who are now without 'traditional' teachers standing beside them in classes."

So while you should try to provide "meaningful activities," cautioned elementary teacher John Thomas, "we should remember that on short notice-and because many of us have limited PD utilizing these tools-we can't tackle everything immediately. In other words, we should give ourselves the time and the permission to figure this out."

Reduce the Workload (for Yourself and Your Students)

If your district allows it, you should plan to do less. Students won't be able to work as productively, anyway-so if you can't scale back you'll be sending them work they cannot do-and your own life and family need added care.

"Feedback from students and families over the last 10 days in Italy is 'less is more,'" commented Jo Gillespie. "Consider that parents are trying to work from home, and siblings are vying for computer and Wi-Fi time. Try Google quizzes using Forms, a reading log, some short live sessions with teachers and classmates, maybe vocabulary extension, maths and geometry problems (but not too many). And that's probably enough."

And Keevan, the teacher in Hong Kong with weeks of experience, confirmed that time and distance play funny games during a crisis: "What would normally take you one class period to teach in the classroom will probably take you twice as long."

No Person Is an Island

Humans are social animals. Working from home, or worse, from quarantine, is isolating and often depressing for both teachers and students.

Make a concerted effort to speak to other colleagues and trusted professionals to provide emotional and psychological context to your work. Teaching at this moment is extraordinarily hard, and you'll need the virtual company of people who are experiencing what you are.

And don't forget to "reach out to students as often as you can," said Keevan, who still teaches classes live despite a (slightly inconvenient!) 13-hour time difference. Or you can facilitate peer-to-peer communication. John Thomas assigns pen pals in his first- and second-grade classes, so that kids with no internet can feel like they belong.

Everyone Thinks They Can't-Before They Can

Some degree of pessimism and self-doubt comes with the territory. Teachers in the Facebook thread advised more perspective-taking and being more patient with yourself: You know how to teach, and you will figure this out in time.

"We are in week 7 and I have three children of my own at home," wrote Salecia Host, a teacher in Tianjin, China, reflecting on the arc of her emotional response to the crisis. "Just take it day by day. It gets less overwhelming and more routine."

Try to remain calm-though you'll have a few moments where that goes out the window-and keep plugging away: "Being open-minded and flexible is key," said Kaz Wilson, who also works in China. "Everyone thinks you can't until you pause, talk it out with folks who are doing it, and know that you'll get through it."

Mind the Gap

Your work will be hard, but there are students facing more severe challenges. Students with no internet or no computer will need support, as will those with learning differences or other circumstances that make distance learning especially difficult. Supporting these students was on almost everyone's mind-it came up dozens of times in the Facebook thread.

"I'm in Italy. Our schools closed a few weeks ago without any previous warning. We shifted to online immediately. It is hard and exhausting," admitted Eleonora Borromeo, before providing a ray of hope. "Equity is an issue. Assessment is an issue. But the students are doing their best and giving us the strength to go on."

Solutions from our audience of teachers focused on the old analog approaches: paper-and-pencil tasks, workbooks and activity packets that can be mailed home, and updating parents and students via phone calls daily.

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Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment

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The thought ended almost before it started: "This is so overwhelming." It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem.

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Draw a picture together with your friends in real-time over the internet in your browser

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EdSurge: Teacher, Interrupted - Leaning into Social-Emotional Learning Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

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EdSurge: Teacher, Interrupted - Leaning into Social-Emotional Learning Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

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Dear educators,

There was life before COVID-19, and there will be life after.

We didn't choose to have our schools and colleges closed; our carefully constructed routines halted in their tracks; our field trips, concerts, sporting events, fundraisers and finals all canceled. We didn't expect this and had little warning.

We weren't ready for this either. Or were we?

At this very moment, there are so many questions swirling through our own heads and the education ecosystem across the globe. What impact will this have on student learning, on families, on the economy-now and in the long-term? How will we support students who rely on school for meals or the stability that their classroom provides? How will our students without access to computers or technology continue to learn? What will this do to our school and campus communities? How will this impact our school's funding, our careers?

And then there's the uncertainty around when teachers and students will be allowed to return to school-and what school will be like when we do.

As psychologists, we at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence are concerned about everyone's emotional state. How will students and educators cope with life being turned upside down so quickly?

Right now our media feeds are being inundated with anecdotes of our nation's parents jumping on the homeschooling and digital learning bandwagons. They are at the mercy of the information available to them and the technological tools their children and households may have access to. Districts and colleges across the nation are requiring educators to provide plans and digital resources, despite their varied levels of knowledge about and support for which instructional technologies are most effective for whom, how and under what conditions. All of this is rapidly evolving with a finish line that gets pushed back daily.

This is not a snow day. It's not a holiday break. It's a crisis.

So what can we do to support ourselves and our students in getting through these difficult times? We need to look to social and emotional learning (SEL) for evidence-based practices to help us now and to support us when we eventually return to school.

SEL is for everyone. It's especially critical for students with the greatest needs-the ones who will be severely impacted by the psychosocial and fiscal effects of this pandemic. But it's also for teachers and students in the most well-resourced districts and institutions.

The crisis around COVID-19 is leaving an indelible footprint on the hearts and minds of multiple generations of children and adults-even our youngest ones who are not yet old enough to realize it. The impact and ripple effects across our collective livelihoods is likely too vast to comprehend.

It's scary. But it's not hopeless.

Now is when we need to apply everything we've learned about SEL. Recognizing your emotions and leveraging the science of SEL is more important now than ever. SEL skills are real skills that can support us in managing the roller coaster of emotions we will be having over the coming days and months. For many of us it's dealing with daily uncertainty and new ways of interacting socially.

Be Cognizant of Stress and Its Effects

Fear manifests in our actions, including well-intentioned, research-based mandates to engage in social distancing with our world and all the people in it, including our own families. In times of high stress, negative emotions like fear, anxiety and panic diminish our mental resources and ability to think clearly, make healthy decisions and behave prosocially and productively.

Stress, in moderate doses, is healthy. It's our body's way of responding to events that threaten or challenge us. But chronic stress impairs our ability to function well and impacts the quality of our relationships. Navigating uncontrollable, unpredictable, ambiguous situations like the new coronavirus, in addition to being confronted with many new demands, is challenging and for many of us amounts to chronic stress.

As educators, practicing social distancing during a pandemic while implementing digital learning with your students-in some cases, for the first time-is overwhelming in itself. Then add juggling your own family and their evolving physical, social and emotional demands while bracing for the unknown, and it becomes exhausting, if not impossible.

These intense and seemingly insurmountable demands can make us feel insecure and inadequate. In school, safety is both physical and psychological. Clorox wipes, toilet paper and social distancing are only going to get you so far in the promotion of your safety. We must also ensure psychological safety for ourselves, for our students and for our families. SEL can support us here, too.

The RULER Approach

Briefly, SEL is the teaching of an interrelated set of cognitive, affective and behavioral competencies that underscore our capacity to learn, develop and maintain mutually supportive relationships, and be both physically and psychologically healthy. The field of SEL is replete with programs and approaches, which support schools in embedding five large dimensions into teaching and learning. These include self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making.

At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, we use the power of emotions to create a healthier, more equitable, productive and compassionate society, today and for future generations. Our approach to SEL, the RULER Approach, provides tools and resources grounded in the theory of emotional intelligence to promote the psychosocial health and well-being of educators and their students and parents.

RULER is an acronym for the components and process of emotional intelligence, including:

Recognizing emotions in self and others,

Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions,

Labeling emotions accurately,

Expressing emotions appropriately, and

Regulating emotions effectively.

These skills can help us navigate this uncharted territory in our socially-distanced world and do our part to control the imprint it leaves on the mental health and well-being of our students and school communities. You can find additional resources here from our center to specifically support your well-being and manage your anxiety during this sensitive time.

Routine Reminders and Checks

You can make choices every day to support yourself, your students and your families. First, check in with how you are feeling a few times per day. Avoid judging your own and others' emotions. From an emotional intelligence perspective, all emotions are information. Accept them all. They are information to be attended to, not denied.

Be kind to yourself and flexible (as permitted) with your schedule. Look for easy and small ways to bring yourself and your loved ones joy. Make breakfast a different way. Take creative pictures from different angles. Find a new way to organize your closet. Call old friends and family members to check-in. Try a new exercise routine at home.

There also are things you can monitor carefully, including your media consumption. Digital platforms are pretty incredible at enabling us to connect with people in a socially distant world. We have perhaps never been more prepared to practice social distancing as we are today. But keep in mind there are over two decades of research correlating social media usage with loneliness, depression and unhealthy behaviors including addiction. After using technology, ask yourself this question: Is this helping me feel greater well-being and connection, or is it making me feel more isolated? Find the "tech" routine that works for you and your family. And leverage resources and expertise across networks for support.

If the thought of being home for a couple of weeks or months-or returning back to school-is overwhelming, take a meta-moment. Try to imagine your best self-visualize a positive image of yourself, who you want to be and how you want to be seen and experienced by your family and students. And in each of your interactions, whether face-to-face at home or when connecting with others through technology, try to be that person for your students, for your families, for your community.

While the world is turned on its head, we have the opportunity to leverage the power of emotional intelligence to keep our feet on the ground and our minds directed toward building the future that we want for our students and ourselves. We can't control what has happened, but we can control how we respond to what is happening. Give yourself and everyone around you the permission to feel all emotions. It starts and ends with self- and social-compassion. Lean into SEL.
Christina Cipriano, Ph.D., Ed.M., is the Director of Research at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and a research scientist at the Child Study Center at Yale University. Follow her on Twitter @drchriscip.
Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. He's also on the board of directors for CASEL and the author of the new book Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive.

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Teacher, Interrupted: Leaning into Social-Emotional Learning Amid the COVID-19 Crisis - EdSurge News

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Dear educators, There was life before COVID-19, and there will be life after. We didn't choose to have our schools and colleges closed; our carefully constructed routines halted in their tracks; our field trips, concerts, sporting events, fundraisers and finals all canceled. We didn't expect this and had little warning.

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Harvard Medical: How to talk to children about the coronavirus

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Harvard Medical: How to talk to children about the coronavirus

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Every news outlet seems to be talking nonstop about the new coronavirus, which is causing an illness called COVID-19. Many parents understandably are sharing concerns, too - at least among friends and families. Even at school, children are hearing about this new virus and registering that some adults seem worried.

Given all the discussion about this coronavirus, your children might have heard about it and have questions for you. Below are some tips on how to respond to their questions. (A separate post will address tips for talking with teens about the questions they might have.)

Provide just enough information about the new coronavirus

Try to strike a balance between answering questions well enough without fueling the flame of anxiety. Children have elaborate imaginations that may lead them to create unnecessarily catastrophic stories in their minds if parents do not talk at all, or enough, about a topic like this. At the other end of the spectrum, providing too much information may create extra alarm.

So what can you do? Think about what your child absolutely needs to know to understand what the virus is and what to do about it. If you have your own questions about the coronavirus, check reliable sources, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which offers a range of information about the virus. The World Health Organization's myth busters page can help you give correct answers to some surprising questions and misinformation that is spreading.

Four questions children may have about the new coronavirus

Before you start, ask what your child knows so far in case you need to clarify anything, and find out what questions your child has. Below are four common questions your child might ask and suggested responses.

What is the new coronavirus? The new coronavirus is a kind of germ that can make people feel sick. Remember how the flu made (you/your classmate/anyone your child knows) feel? It can be a lot like getting the flu. Some people feel just a little bit sick. Some people get a fever and a cough. Sometimes, the cough can make it hard to breathe easily.

How do you catch this coronavirus? The virus spreads like the flu, or a cold or cough. If a person who has the coronavirus sneezes or coughs, germs that are inside the body come outside of the body. That's because sneezes and coughs can send tiny drops carrying germs into the air.

There is a lot of traveling those germs would have to do to get inside another body, though, and make someone else sick. A healthy person would need to touch those germs that came out of the sneezes and coughs, and then touch their mouth, eyes, or inside their nose. Those are places where the germs can get inside the body.

Kids and grownups can try their best to stay healthy by continuing their usual activities and practicing these healthy behaviors:

Sneeze or cough into tissues (and throw them away) or sneeze or cough into your elbow. This helps keep germs from traveling and making other people sick.

Wash your hands with soap and water at the same times you usually do, like after going to the bathroom, before eating, and after blowing your nose. When you wash your hands, remember to count slowly to 20. (Parents can help by singing the ABCs or "Happy Birthday" with their children the number of times it takes for 20 seconds to pass. This helps children remember to wash for a sufficient amount of time.)

Try to keep your hands out of your mouth, eyes, and nose.

Why are some people wearing masks? Should I wear a mask? Masks are for people who are sick to wear so that they don't share germs. The masks also are for medical staff, like doctors and nurses, to wear so they can help people who have the virus. You do not need to wear a mask.

Can you die from the new coronavirus? Most people who have caught the virus have not died, just like with the flu. Doctors are working really hard to keep an eye on anyone who is feeling sick. They want to make sure everyone gets the help they need and to keep the virus from spreading.

What is important is that you keep doing what you love to do and not let worries about the virus boss you around. If you're doing what you love while practicing healthy behaviors like sneezing into your elbow and washing your hands after you go to the bathroom, then you're showing the virus and the worries who is boss instead!

Model calmness about the new coronavirus

Even though you may be concerned yourself, it is important to model calmness when talking about the virus. Children will look to you to see how afraid they should be. Think about flying on an airplane when there is turbulence. A flight attendant that appears terrified may make you think there is something really wrong and you should worry. If a flight attendant calmly offers you a beverage with a smile, you might think there's just some windy weather that will pass soon.

Limit news exposure on the new coronavirus

Although the news can be helpful by keeping everyone informed, sometimes news stories can use wording that is strong and scary for children. Try to limit news-viewing to the hours after children go to sleep, or read the news independently so that children do not hear the stories.

Keep an eye out for reassurance seeking

It's natural for children to ask questions, particularly about something that is new to them. Sometimes, though, a child's anxiety seems to be asking the questions, prompting a behavior called reassurance seeking. It may look like a child repeatedly asking the same or similar questions, yet the child's distress increases no matter how many times you answer the questions. If you notice repeated reassurance seeking (repeated asking of the questions above, for example), then it might be helpful to seek support to help your children manage anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can offer your family strategies for handling and easing reassurance-seeking behaviors. Ask your doctor to recommend mental health professionals who practice CBT and have experience working with children struggling with anxiety.

Remember, everyone is working hard to manage the virus. You can show your children that you, too, can continue to do what is important to you while practicing healthy behaviors.

For additional information, see our blog post on what parents should know and do about the coronavirus and our Coronavirus Resource Center.

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How to talk to children about the coronavirus - Harvard Health Blog

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Every news outlet seems to be talking nonstop about the new coronavirus, which is causing an illness called COVID-19. Many parents understandably are sharing concerns, too - at least among friends and families. Even at school, children are hearing about this new virus and registering that some adults seem worried.

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What is Minecraft | Minecraft: Education Edition

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Make game-based learning part of your curriculum. Find out how Minecraft for schools can help your students learn valuable skills in a whole new way.

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The Teaching Channel: Seven Practices to Swiftly Move Learning Online

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The Teaching Channel: Seven Practices to Swiftly Move Learning Online

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If you're in the process of modifying your courses to an online platform right now, I have seven practices to help you smoothly transition your courses for instructional continuity. Taking all your courses remote is a big task but we're here to help you decrease your work time so you can get back to teaching.

Take a breath. The last thing you need now is more stress, so try not to add to your load. Work one or two weeks ahead. You don't need to modify whole courses today, just staying a couple of steps ahead of your students is perfectly fine. Give yourself some time to learn the platform your school is using.

Keep current projects/assignments the same as they were for your onsite course. Presentations can be video recorded and linked. Slideshows can be published online. Small groups can still meet via online group apps. Written assignments, quizzes and exams can be easily submitted on your platform.

Consider modifying your lecture format.

Give your students the material in a variety of ways. Linking to articles, videos, and infographics that are already out there is an easy way to help them interact more deeply with course concepts.

If you must deliver information directly from you to them, try creating short informal videos. Phone recorded videos are perfectly fine for this. In fact, an informal approach can help students stay connected and interested.

Beware of adding extra writing. Often, instructors just translate student attendance, participation, and discussion requirements into written response requirements (for example, chapter summaries). This increases both their workload and yours in ways that don't benefit learning.
Allow students to participate through other formats to deepen their learning and keep them more dynamically engaged with the material. Asking them to post a video response, lead a discussion thread, or share some extended learning on social media are all ways you can foster deeper interaction with course concepts and create more meaningful student learning.

Be ready to give up some control and trust your students.

Give your students choices. When it comes to assignments, projects, readings, and other materials, giving the students options can increase their sense of responsibility and intrinsic motivation.

Have the students lead.

Ask students to respond to a discussion prompt you create or have them generate their own threads of discussion based on their ideas and questions that have come up as they've explored course materials.

Have students evaluate and give feedback on peers' presentations and projects. It inspires the students to be more innovative and thoughtful in their work. We tend to be more motivated to perform well for a group of our peers than for a single instructor.

Stay connected.

Use quick check-in videos: 3 to 5 minute videos including reminders, key vocabulary for the week, updates on course materials, shoutouts to specific students who are doing a good job, and highlights of particularly interesting discussion threads help the students know that you are present in the course and following their work.

Have real time office hours in the discussion forum. Each week, specify a time that you will be in your "Office Hour" discussion thread so they can find you there and ask their questions in real time. When they know they can have immediate access to you for at least an hour a week, students are less likely to ding you with constant messaging for help.

Offer online video chat to your students who need to speak with you privately.

Protect your time.
Just because you could be available to your students 24/7, doesn't mean you have to or that you should be. Be clear about your schedule, when you will be available to answer questions, and what the students can expect in terms of response time. Then stick with what you have said!

And if you're looking for a platform that can enable you to continue professional learning with your team and want to learn more about Teaching Channel Plus:

Contact us: tchplus@teachingchannel.com

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Seven Practices To Swiftly Move Learning Online

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If you're in the process of modifying your courses to an online platform right now, I have seven practices to help you smoothly transition your courses for instructional continuity. Taking all your courses remote is a big task but we're here to help you decrease your work time so you can get back to teaching.

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing - Zoom

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Zoom makes video and web conferencing frictionless. Founded in 2011, Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with a secure, easy platform for video and audio conferencing, messaging, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution for conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Zoom helps businesses and organizations around the world bring their teams together to get more done.

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View Live Training Please click here to register for upcoming live training or access recent recordings for Zoom Meetings, Webinars, Zoom Rooms and Administrators. Zoom Meetings Zoom Meetings...

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Welcome to Corwin's Resources for Teaching Online! As many schools and districts are rapidly transitioning to online learning in response to COVID-19, this toolkit will provide you with the resources you need to adapt and provide exceptional online instruction for your students.

It's important to remember to stay calm and to maintain as much normalcy with your students as possible. They take their cues from you! As you'll see in this guide, many of our best practices for teaching and learning can easily be adapted for online learning. You do not need to start from scratch!

Take a step back to breathe and refocus. You've got this. See this short video from Caitlin Krause if you'd like a 1.5-minute guided breathing practice.

Stay Connected as We Update This Page!

For further resources to support leaders, please visit our School Leaders' Toolkit for Responding to COVID-19. We will be updating this page in the weeks to come with more resources. Sign up to receive notifications when new resources are added.
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Instructional Best Practices for Online Learning

Good news! Our best practices of face-to-face teaching still apply when teaching online. We do not have to start from scratch. The resources linked below will help you think through your current classroom practice and how it might best translate to online teaching.

Quick Tips

During online lessons, maintain a balance between instructional time and student practice. Consider allowing online class time for students to complete work that you would normally assign for homework. Remember that students will be learning on a screen all day, so we want to mitigate the amount of time they have to spend online after school hours.

Encourage students to keep a physical planner to keep track of assignments and class schedules. During online learning, students are getting a lot of input with instruction and assignments posted online for all of their classes. This has the potential to be information overload. Writing down key information in their planners will force them to process and prioritize the tasks at hand.

Utilize the Learning Management System your school already has to post instructional content, the learning calendar, and assignments. There is no need to reinvent the wheel!

Resources
Setting Up Your Digital Classroom Designing Remote Learning Experiences Instructional Tools & Best Practices Back to top ↑
Assessment in Online Learning

There are some new factors you may have to consider as you plan assessment for online learning, such as students' access to the internet and learning resources. However, these factors shouldn't have a huge effect on how we measure learning if we are employing best practices in assessment.

Students will have all of their learning resources at their fingertips, and we should embrace this instead of attempt to control or limit access for the sake of assessment. Instead, design assessments that measure higher level thinking and students' ability to transfer their learning - not the ability to recall basic facts they can easily look up online or in the instructional resources.

Use online tools to collect students' self-assessment throughout each unit. Because you aren't meeting with students face to face, this feedback will be crucial in your formative assessment process.

Make the most of your Learning Management System by designing assessments within the program and asking for students to share all deliverables through that system.

Resources
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Student Engagement in Online Learning

How do we get a sense of student engagement and learning when we aren't spending time with students face-to-face? This set of resources will help you plan to promote and assess student engagement throughout the online learning journey.

Quick Tips

Use online polls (like Poll Everywhere) to encourage thinking and participation during an online lesson

Engage students by asking good questions that prompt higher level thinking. Higher level thinking is crucial in online learning! Students will have the internet and all their resources at their fingertips. How can we design instruction and assessment that makes use of their access to those resources, and how can we ask questions in a way that promotes engagement and critical thinking skills?

If you are posting short instructional videos instead of hosting live online class sessions, consider asking quick questions in each video (with a specific time students must respond by) to ensure student participation. If a student doesn't send in a response, make a note to touch base with that student - this is a good opportunity to make sure all students have access to the online classroom environment.

Resources
Lean on Self-Assessment to Get Students Engaged in Their Own Learning Ask Questions that Will Engage Students in the Learning Take Brain Breaks!

Here are just a few Energizing Brain Breaks you can do with students during an online class to get them moving and refreshed.
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Feedback in Online Learning

Providing students with ongoing, individualized feedback can actually be easier and more effective when using online tools! Here are some resources to help you design feedback cycles for online learning.

Quick Tips

Schedule miniconferences with individual students throughout each week. Use the self-assessment tools (linked in Student Engagement tab) to help students communicate where they think they are at in the learning journey. Their self-assessment will help guide you to give them appropriate and needed feedback.

Send students your plan for online feedback. When can they expect to touch base? What will you be providing feedback on each week? What are the ways you'll be providing feedback?

Resources
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Family Communication and Engagement in Online Learning

Your students' families will likely have a lot of questions about the online learning environment! The resources below will help you keep families in the loop and communicate important ways they can support their children's learning.

Quick Tips

Be proactive! If you get word that your school will be moving to online learning, send an update to your students' families as soon as possible. Use this email template to get started.

Let parents know how they should contact you. You may want all parent communication to come through your LMS or another platform so that internal communications and updates about your school closure are not lost in your email inbox.

Set a threshold grade that will determine when you should make additional contact with a student's family (i.e. if a student is currently receiving a grade under a B, I will make a call home)

Resources
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Connecting With Other Teachers Online

Finally, it's important to remember that YOU ARE NOT ALONE during this time! You can find new resources and support from fellow teachers online with the following resources:
Twitter/Social Media Hashtags Facebook Groups Other Online Resources Back to top ↑
Further Reading

If you'd like to read more, here are links to all of the books referenced in this guide:
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Stay Connected as We Update This Page!

For further resources to support leaders, please visit our School Leaders' Toolkit for Responding to COVID-19. We will be updating this page in the weeks to come with more resources. Sign up to receive notifications when new resources are added.
Sign up for page updates Back to top ↑

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Free online resources for school teachers responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Find support and best practices for online teaching and learning, setting up your digital classroom, how to flip the learning, how to assess in online learning, how to keep students engaged, provide feedback in an online environment, resources for communicating with families, and more.

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Digital Trends: The best Zoom videoconferencing tips and tricks

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Digital Trends: The best Zoom videoconferencing tips and tricks

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As many people are navigating the new reality of working from home, videoconferencing has become a go-to method of communication.

For those who work from home, online tools like Zoom allow employees and students to work together, offering a virtual collaboration space in a situation where face-to-face meetings would not be feasible. If your school, employer, or colleagues rely on Zoom to conduct meetings, these Zoom tips will make you look like a pro.

How to apply a background in Zoom

If your workspace at home isn't quite so tidy, you can apply a background to virtually clean up the real clutter. It's like being a news anchor sitting in front of a green screen. Zoom's selection of landscapes can add a bit of whimsy to your meetings too.

Executives who need to portray a more professional appearance when doing video calls with clients can even upload their company's logo for use as a background, making it look like you're having the call in an actual conference room at work.

The feature is simple to use, and the camera on your handset or computer can apply the background even if you're not sitting in front of a green screen. Here's how to get start:

Step 1: Launch Zoom on your computer

Step 2: Go to the cogs button on the upper right-hand corner of your display to launch the Settings menu.

Step 3: Select Virtual Background in the left menu pane.

Step 4: After you do that, you can choose from a number of built-in background, like a scene from the beach, a view of San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate Bridge, or even the Aurora Borealis. A live preview will show how you will look in front of the background.

Step 5: To choose your own custom background, click on the + icon next to Choose Virtual Background. The option will let you upload your own custom video or photo for use as a virtual background. If you have a video of an aquarium, you can conduct your meeting in front of what would appear as a live fish tank, as an example. If you need inspiration for some fun animated backgrounds to use, Lightricks, the maker of popular photo editing app FaceTune, has uploaded some content to Dropbox that you can use.

Using a live background will reveal some artifacts around the edges, which can look choppy if you're moving around a lot during video calls. Additionally, virtual backgrounds shouldn't be used if you're planning on demonstrating or pointing to things with your hands - hands get canceled out with the use of virtual backgrounds. The background will appear more smooth if you're sitting in front of a green screen.

How to use shortcuts in Zoom

From years of experience using a computer, we all know popular keyboard shortcuts for copy, paste, and undo. Zoom has its own set of popular shortcuts that help you quickly mute and unmute the microphone, start or stop your camera, and more. There are a number of shortcuts that you can enable and use, but here are some of the most popular shortcuts to get you started in Zoom.

1. Mute or unmute audio: Alt + A

2. Start or stop video: Alt + V

3. Pause or resume screen sharing: Alt + S

4. Pause or resume screen recording: Alt + P

5. Switch camera: Alt + N

6. Raise or lower hand: Alt + Y

The shortcuts commands are listed for Windows PC users. Mac users will want to substitute the Apple or Command key for the Alt key above.

A full list of the keyboard shortcuts can be found by navigating to the Zoom settings menu and choosing Keyboard Shortcuts on the left pane.

Touch up your appearance in Zoom

You may not be a newscaster on the evening news, but you'll still want to look your best during your virtual meetings with colleagues. A feature that's borrowed from the beauty mode from the selfie cameras on many popular Android smartphones, Zoom's Touch Up My Appearance helps to smooth out your skin, remove the dark bags under your eyes, and help you look your best.

Best of all, the results look fairly natural, so you don't look like an over-sharpened blob of pixels when viewed on the screens of fellow collaborators.

Step 1: Go to Zoom's settings menu

Step 2: Click on the Video option in the left panel

Step 3: Under My Video, select the option for Touch Up My Appearance.

Pro tip: If you have the internet bandwidth at home, increase your stream by also selecting "Enable HD" under the Video option. Additionally, if you're meeting with a large team, you can increase the gallery view of your video conferencing session by choosing "Display Up to 49 Participants Per Screen in Gallery View." By default, Zoom only shows 25 participants per screen, but you can view more if you select this option and have fast enough internet at home.

How to record and transcribe your Zoom call

If your business subscribes to a more advanced Zoom plan with cloud recording, you can record your meeting's audio to the cloud. Zoom's A.I. will help transcribe your meeting - complete with timestamps - and save the transcript as a .vtt text file. The meeting notes can be edited, if needed, for accuracy.

When you review your meeting video, there's even an option to display the transcription directly within the video, making it look like closed captioning.

Step 1: Open the Zoom web portal and sign in.

Step 2: Click on the Recordings tab on the left-hand side and choose Cloud Recordings. You'll need a premium Zoom account to use this feature, so you may have to inquire with your IT administrator or manager to see if your business is a subscriber.

Step 3: Enable Audio Transcript under Cloud Recordings, and save your changes.

Step 4: When you start a meeting, be sure to hit the Record button and choose Record to the Cloud.

Step 5: After the conclusion of the meeting, you'll receive an email alerting you that the transcript is ready.

How to share your screen on Zoom

Even though you may not have access to a projector, you can still make presentations and show meeting attendees what's on your screen. You can start a screen sharing by hitting the Alt+S keyboard shortcut, which will cut from your webcam feed to displaying to all meeting participants what you're seeing on your screen.

This is useful if you're trying to show an important graphics, for example, in a meeting, or want to display a PowerPoint deck. If you're the speaker, you can enable additional settings to give an even more polished presentation.

Step 1: From the Zoom Settings menu, navigate to Share Screen.

Step 2: Enable Enter Full Screen When a Participant Shares a Screen.

Step 3: If you want to show a video feed of the speaker along with the shared screen, you can also enable Side-by-Side Mode.

Step 4: Be sure to select the Silence System Notifications When Sharing Desktop. This way, your presentation will not get interrupted by all your alerts and system chimes. Also, pro presenters may also want to enable Windows 10 's Focus Assist feature, which will help hide notification sounds and pop-ups from the system or your email and calendar apps.

If you're collaborating on an project, you can also use a digital whiteboard to work together. Once you're in a meeting, you can click on the Screen Share button and then choose Whiteboard. After that, annotation tools will appear, allowing you to draw and plan ideas and projects with collaborators. Whiteboard sessions can be saved as separate images or compiled into a single PDF. In the Whiteboard control, hit the Save button, and you can choose the format you desire. Enter an email address to share the saved whiteboard.

Make sure to have what you're trying to present queued up and ready to go before the meeting starts. This way, you can jump into the PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet, or web document immediately when you hit the screen share button.

And if you're anything like me and have a cluttered desktop, use Windows 10's Desktop feature to launch Zoom in a new, clean, clutter-free desktop space. This way, you're not revealing any confidential files you may have saved on your desktop, and you'll also look more professional in the process.

How to schedule meetings in Zoom

While impromptu meetings are sometimes needed for big changes, if you're working on long-term projects, it may be useful to reserve some virtual time to have regular Zoom check-ins.

If you have regular standing project meetings, you can schedule them in advance. This way, everyone will have a set time and virtual place to convene on a weekly basis.

Step 1: From the Zoom homescreen, click Schedule.

Step 2: Fill in the meeting details, including time, topic, and duration. You can also set this as a Recurring meeting.

Step 3: If it's a confidential meeting, assign a meeting password to be shared with participants.

Step 4: If you're creating the meeting, you may also want to explore the Advanced Options as well. This way, you can Enable Waiting Room and Enable Join Before Host to allow attendees to join the meeting early. An important option to select is to Mute Participants on Entry to minimize distracting background noise.

You can also download the Chrome browser extension and Microsoft Outlook extension to schedule meetings without having to launch the Zoom app.

How to set up breakout rooms in Zoom

Useful for larger groups, breakout rooms allows smaller teams to tackle different areas of a big project simultaneously. For example, if you're working on a new product launch, you can schedule a product launch meeting, and then create breakout room for the marketing team to come up with a marketing plan, the finance team to run models and make sales projections, and a third room for sales to come up with a sales strategy.

Up to 50 separate breakout rooms can be created, and the host can pre-assign attendees to specific rooms. A total of 200 participants can join between all the rooms, and each room will function like a stand-alone Zoom meeting. Cloud recording, however is limited to the main room. Like some of the more advance Zoom features, your organization will need to be a subscriber to a paid plan to have this feature.

Step 1: Sign into the Zoom web portal.

Step 2: Click on Settings.

Step 3: Under the Meeting tab, make sure that the Breakout Room option is enabled. You may also want to select the Allow Host to Assign Participants to Breakout Rooms When Scheduling option as well to give your meeting host the ability to pre-assign you to specific room(s) before the meeting starts.

In a Zoom session, the host will have access to the Breakout Rooms in their video conferencing menu. The host will be able to jump between the different rooms to talk to the participants.

Whichever advance features you enable in Zoom, remember to always follow common best practices for video conferencing to ensure all your team meetings run smoothly.

Editors' Recommendations

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The Best Tips for Using Zoom | Digital Trends

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As many people are navigating the new reality of working from home, videoconferencing has become a go-to method of communication. For those who work from home, online tools like Zoom allow employees and students to work together, offering a virtual collaboration space in a situation where face-to-face meetings would not be feasible.

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More than ever before, the world is searching for 'how do teachers do it.' Whether in a classroom or at home, we are grateful to everyone helping to keep students learning.

To teachers everywhere, thank you for all that you do.

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Giving teachers and families the tools and tips they need to help keep students learning.

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A new REALM: IFSEL's TIPS FOR DISTANCE LEARNING

With many schools moving to Distance Learning during this pandemic, IFSEL is pulling from our collective and creative forces to support teachers to help students have virtual experiences full of human connection and joy in learning.

We know that when it comes to Distance Learning there is an inequitable distribution of resources and tools. For our most vulnerable and disadvantaged, school closures pose many critical risks to the physical, social, and emotional health of our whole community.

The team at The Institute for Social and Emotional Learning has created and curated ideas that, we hope, will address some of the social and emotional needs that students and educators are experiencing.

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Rituals

Start and end virtual class meeting with opening and closing rituals. Rituals provide a grounded and predictable form for connection - essential in a Distance Learning classroom. Repeated over time, rituals invoke meaning and create a space for students to enter each day.

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Invite students to sit back in a chair. Say: "Feel your feet on the ground for a few breaths. Pull shoulders up to your ears and then gently let them fall back down. Again. Breathe some easy breaths with your own timing - in.... And then with the out breath."
Offer one of the following Check-in prompts at this point. Vary them throughout the weeks. Do every day, or every other day - whatever you feel is best to build buy-in.
Say: "Let's spend the next 8 minutes giving everyone 20 seconds to share how they're feeling, and a little bit about why they feel that way, if they wish. It's ok to pass."
Emotional/Physical Well-being Check-in - Metaphors
- What color or blend of colors best represents how you're feeling today? Why?

- If your feelings were described by a specific shape or two, what would it be?

- If you made or used an Emoji that best represents your moods right now, what is it?

- Imagine the way an animal of your choosing looks, lives, moves; which one best matches your feelings this morning?

- Across our planet there are many landforms - geysers, streams, craters, mountains, hills, forests, valleys; which one or blend of forms represents your feelings at the moment.

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For any of these check-in's, students could find an image of their check-in (animal, emoji, landform etc.) and, when it is their turn, share it through the chat/message function of the online platform.
Emotional/Physical Well-being Check-in with specific materials or things from around the house.
- Find a favorite item from their room or kitchen that provides a good memory or comfort for the moment.

- Create a drawing or sketch that uses line, color, shape, to represent your feelings.

- Showa piece of ribbon, scrap of cloth/fabric, buttons that make you think of the emotions you are having now.
Emotional/Physical Well-being Check-in with items from Nature.
- Ask your students to come to Check-in with something from Nature that resembles the emotions they are feeling that day.

- Leaves, rocks, collection of sticks, a flower blossom, etc.

- An image of a place from the natural world.

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You may also wish to design your Check-ins around their worries or excitement around academics, social experiences, etc.

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Share a word that describes a quality you are feeling right now. Write it down on an index card and hold it up to the camera. Teacher reads them.

Create a frozen sculpture pose to show how they're feeling right now.

Energize

Bringing energy for focus and on-screen effort during the learning sessions will challenge our students and ourselves.Pausing to be "off-task" for a few minutes can actually create more on-task behavior, not less, during the rest of the lesson.

Say: "Reach and stretch your hands up to the ceiling and imagine touching the roof, even the sky. Take in a big breath. Sweep your arms out to the side like you are pushing the air down or making a large arc like a rainbow. Breathe all the air out and as you do, feel yourself get taller. Repeat a few times.

Then, feel your feet firmly planted on the ground and stand for a few breaths. Imagine breathing in through your feet and pulling the breath up to your head and breathing out, back through your feet.

Notice how you feel. When you are ready, sit back in your chair. Sit up tall and place both feet on the ground. Pull your shoulders up to your ears and then away from your ears."

Say: "Stand as if you are a tree. Deep roots. Many branches outward. At first, sway with a gentle breeze. Now, as the wind picks up, twist and bend, yet stay rooted."

Appreciation and Gratitude

Gratitude and practices of appreciation have been shown to physiologically increase our sense of well-being. Being grateful can become a contagious mindset and will help connect your students to each other.

Say: "Think over what we did and learned so far during the Distance Learning class today. What is something you are grateful for? Consider someone or something you've noticed who supported your learning, helped you to think differently, or kindly encouraged you."

- I liked it how...

- It was cool when...

- Thank you for the way that you...

- I miss seeing you... and... I am appreciating...

- Even though we're not together...

Journal Writing Prompts for Gratitude

Say: "Choose from any of the following prompts and write and sketch your response for 10 minutes."

Then, ask for volunteers to read aloud.

- I assumed after we left school ..., and worried that..., but today I appreciated how...

- I have been surprised about how... and I hope...

- I want to appreciate and remember the time at school when...

- I'm really thankful that...

- Being away from school is so different now and what I didn't think about that I can appreciate is that I get to....

Lighten

If your students come to know your virtual learning lessons as offering a few minutes of playful interactions, it will raise motivation, and help to keep the group bonded, all essential at this time.

Goosechase (9-12) is an online scavenger hunt recommended from Hong Kong Academy, a school that is just now transitioning back to classroom work.

An online collaborative puzzle game is Edpuzzle (6-8).

GoNoodle (K-8) offers educational physical and mental health practices.

Have students use "snail mail" and write and send each other an uplifting, handmade card. You can choose the person they will be writing to and send the name via email, or there can be a random selection done together, with students keeping the name of their persona surprise.

Take a laughter break. Do something silly like play "Sound Ball" in a pre-determined order from person to person or play a version of Pictionary using Aggie.io.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of being present in the moment, aware of the emotions, sensations, and insights one is experiencing. Mindfulness is based in research and can help people feel more at peace, become less stressed, and shift perspective.

Invite students to stand up and find as mall or large open space near the computer screen where they can walk around. Play some music... maybe try Vitamin String Quartet... and ask them to notice placing their feet on the ground with every step...

Remind or teach students a range of breathing practices they can do. Share videos or articles about athletes and celebrities that talk about the importance of breathing exercises, or tell students about your own preferred practices.

Some examples:

- Diaphragmatic Breathing (Deep Belly Breathing)

- Long Exhale Breathing

- Humming Bee Breathing

- 4-7-8 Breathing

Instructions for all of these can be easily found online.

The IFSEL Team is pulling together more resources and ideas and will be sharing these here and through webinars in the days ahead.

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A new REALM: IFSEL's Tips for Distance Learning

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With many schools moving to Distance Learning during this pandemic, IFSEL is pulling from our collective and creative forces to support teachers to help students have virtual experiences full of human connection and joy in learning. We know that when it comes to Distance Learning there is an inequitable distribution of resources and tools.

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KQED: Resources For Teaching and Learning During This Period of Social Distancing

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KQED: Resources For Teaching and Learning During This Period of Social Distancing

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Leaders can best serve their schools and districts by prioritizing mental health over curricular efficiency. The anxiety produced by the evolving crisis is compounded with teachers who may now have their own children to care for at home, ill family members, the stress of managing household resources to comply with social distancing measures, or they may fall ill themselves. This is the context in which some teachers are asked to quickly redeploy their classes. Ideally, they will be granted sufficient time to organize their lives and reconfigure their classes before resuming teaching. It is also important for administrators to actively check-in with teachers to maintain personalized communication and take the pulse on how to best provide support.

Likewise, teachers should try to maintain personal connections with their students, which can be a challenge when mitigated by the Internet. But strong student-teacher relationships positively affect school engagement and achievement , and meaningful connections are particularly important for high schoolers, and vulnerable students in particular. Online learning can feel isolating and lacks the warmth of a busy classroom; however, teachers who transition from face-to-face classes have the advantage of having established relationships with their students. These can continue by facilitating informal interactions, such as sharing class-room appropriate memes, comics, images, or humorous short videos that may not be entirely relevant, but can help maintain the community and set an uplifting tone. Similarly, the class can use for formal discussion, but also to post pictures, stories and updates. Rather than whole-class meetings, organize periodic video meet-ups with smaller groups of students to chat, check-in and provide help, support and assistance. Finally, if school policy allows, individual calls and check-ins to support struggling students is crucial, as distance learning particularly disadvantages students who struggle . On the flipside, online formats might be an advantage for some kids with autism.

Most importantly, be kind and forgiving of yourself and your students. The next few months will be emotionally taxing, so pedagogical energies are better directed to the heart than the mind. Subject learning is important but, as the world is reshaped in the foreseeable future, there will be opportunities to learn invaluable lessons about community, family, civic responsibility, and social health: central components of human life that can be woven into the curriculum.

The Home/Work Routine: Workspace, Calendar, and Survey

First step: organize your space and time at home to accommodate your new work environment. As many veteran telecommuters will attest to, there's an art to working at home . Basic daily practices like showering, changing into work clothes, setting up a firm work schedule and a designated work area are all advisable. There are countless websites and blogs devoted to advising on the trials and triumphs of working at home. Online learning is often asynchronous and can involve variable timetables, so using a shared calendar such as or Google Calendar will not only help organize a dynamic schedule, but also afford easy sharing with parents and students.

Glen Irvin, an Instructional Coach at Sauk Rapids-Rice Public Schools in Minnesota, who has taught and learned online, suggests that schools should circulate a preliminary survey to gauge student connectivity.

"The best advice I can give you is to do an audit of your school community's technology capability," in a recent webinar. "In our district, we wanted to make sure we dug deep into what kind of access our students have and what does that mean for the delivery of teaching and learning in these online environments."

Teachers who want to poll their students can use Google Forms or the free trial version of Survey Monkey . The survey might also invite student recommendations of platforms, tools or viable social media that might be used to meet them where they are.

Leverage the Power of Community

While waiting for survey results, explore at least one of the online communities that have recently sprung-up to share resources in response to school closures. Facebook groups such as Educator Temporary School Closure for Online Learning or Online Teaching Tips for the Plague-Averse are great places to start. They are spaces to share material, ask questions, trade stories, commiserate, vent, and connect through shared experience. Many of the groups are international and North American educators can benefit from their counterparts in , Japan and Italy who are several weeks into emergency online implementation. It's also advisable to maintain contact with immediate colleagues to provide mutual support. Also, for teachers looking to keep their children occupied while they work at home, Participate , a community-building company, recently launched a free and open Learning at Home group.

Educational communities are also circulating shared documents that offer an array of resources to help teach online. For example, this document of shared resources for virtual learning in emergency school closure was co-authored by educators from around the world, and organizes most of its resources according to age categories. Some keep updated lists of companies offering free subscriptions due to school closures, and this handy chart organizes web-based tools according to the 5Es of online learning .

Quick Start Guides, Platforms, and Tools

Several organizations and companies have published quick start guides to help teachers hit the ground running. The Academy of Active Learning Arts and Sciences (AALAS), which specializes in supporting flipped classrooms, offers a free Rapid Transition to Online Learning (RTOL) program to help educators efficiently transfer their courses to an online format. Global Online Academy (GOA) recently published an excellent comprehensive playbook that targets school leadership, but also has value for teachers. Similarly, the Khan Academy also has a Remote Quickstart Guide to leverage their extensive course offerings.

Some teachers will have existing learning management systems (LMSs) and web-based apps that can be repurposed for online classes. Extending the use of the same tools online saves the trouble of students having to navigate new software. If teachers must adopt a platform from which to deliver their classes, there are many free options. National School Choice Week (NSCW) recommends these free online communication platforms as well as other useful tools to get educators up and running. Google Classroom is a user-friendly option that is designed for classroom use but works well for online environments. , a free open source learning platform, offers a robust toolbox that can be leveraged for distance learning. For group video conferencing, , , Hangouts Meets and are good free options.

Teachers who want to keep it simple can DIY their own delivery system using shared work platforms like Google's software. A shared class agenda with links to tasks and resources can be created and shared on a single Google Doc. PDFs, images and other files can be stored on Google Drive and linked to the class agenda. Formative tests, quizzes and polls can be created and circulated with Google Forms, and lessons can be organized on Google Slides. Microsoft's Office 365 Education would also do the trick, but it's not free.

Beyond platforms and content delivery systems, an Internet search will yield countless free applications and online tools. The Tech Against Coronavirus site curates an thorough list of online tools to facilitate COVID19-era communication. The CATO Institute curated a list of free online resources to support learning at home, while UNESCO jumped into the emergency toolbox game with this well-organized list of educational technology resources. Scholastic announced that it is offering a free 20-day Learn at Home program for K - 8 students.

Has there been a better time for students to take field trips to virtual museums , play in the playground, run through a few rounds of , or tune-in for a Skype lecture by a special guest speaker? "Everything is the technology of online education," said Joanna Dunlap, Assistant Director of Teaching Effectiveness University of Colorado - Denver, alluding to the vast spectrum for enhancing online instruction.

And, if all else fails, there's always email and telephone.

The Silver Lining

The sudden shift to online education will undoubtedly pose a challenge for many, but there's also an upside. Disruption and discomfort are the enemies of complacency and can spur intense professional growth. Some teachers may be surprised to discover new tools, resources, and approaches to nourish their practice. They'll also get the chance to see their students in a new light, and maybe better connect with their own families. In the case of younger students, there will be a need to more deeply involve parents in the learning process. Schools may want to explicitly communicate that any parents in a position to support their children's learning should do so with some helpful guidelines to proceed.

Another positive is that remote learning can be carried out asynchronously, meaning that both teachers and students can work and contribute when it's convenient for them if they don't have to be in a specific place at a specific time. This flexibility can allow educators to manage life at home while doing school, and it might even allow kids to get that sleep that seems to be in short supply.

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Resources For Teaching and Learning During This Period of Social Distancing | KQED

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Leaders can best serve their schools and districts by prioritizing mental health over curricular efficiency. The anxiety produced by the evolving crisis is compounded with teachers who may now have their own children to care for at home, ill family members, the stress of managing household resources to comply with social distancing measures, or they may fall ill themselves.

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http://www.wgbh.org/authenticate/login

WGBH Distance Learning Center

As schools and students, families and educators adapt to the current health crisis, WGBH - in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, WGBY/New England Public Media, and The Basics - is supporting them by gathering some of our free, trusted digital resources from PBS LearningMedia and our award-winning educational preschool programming. PBS LearningMedia resources span disciplines for grades PreK-12, are aligned to national and state standards, and include videos, comprehensive lessons, and other activities. Family Activities support learning and development for children ages 0 to 8. Start exploring your resource options below.

Browse Resource Collections

In Partnership With:

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http://www.wgbh.org/authenticate/login As schools and students, families and educators adapt to the current health crisis, WGBH - in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education , the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care , WGBY/New England Public Media, and The Basics - is supporting them by gathering some of our free, trusted digital resources from PBS LearningMedia and our award-winning educational preschool programming .

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Teaching Tolerance: Teaching Through Coronavirus

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Teaching Tolerance: Teaching Through Coronavirus

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On Monday we asked our community of educators what they need in the face of uncertainty caused by school closures and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearly 2,000 educators responded, and the range of those responses illustrates the incredible responsibilities they feel for their students' learning and well-being. More than 98 percent were facing school closures-and the ensuing consequences fell on educators quickly.

What Educators Are Asking For

"I think people are going to feel helpless," one respondent told us. When asked what resources they'd recommend, another said, "At this point, I'm feeling overwhelmed. In the course of 72 hours, our school district shut down, we had to scramble to prepare lessons for students and now we're on a shelter-in-place order. I don't know of any resources right now. We NEED resources!" It was a sentiment we saw time and time again in the responses.

Overwhelmingly, these educators requested resources they could easily share with students, be it online or in packets delivered during food drop-offs. More than 80 percent requested "Do Something" projects that could easily be adapted for distance learning. And half asked for articles about ensuring equity during a time of school closure, distance learning and racism directed at Asian American students.

We also want to stress the range of specific needs educators brought up in this survey. Educators wanted recommendations for online resources and platforms. They wanted emotional support for students and educators alike. They wanted materials on the intersections of COVID-19 and social justice. Educators asked for best practices for distance learning. They asked for physical and printable resources for students without online access. They asked for information they could send families about basic necessities and resources for families trying to do their best to take on the role of educator in the household. Below, you will find links to resources that address these asks.

Amid the calls for specific resources to help with learning, there was also an overwhelming need for hope, for reminders of our collective resilience, for ways to cope with the intersecting anxieties students and educators are facing. We aim to address these requests as best we can-and to call on the education community to help where we feel less equipped.

Coming together begins with responding to what our community needs right now.

Resources to Share With Students

Teaching Tolerance has a bank of resources that can be adapted for take-home or online learning. Our Student Text Library has more than 500 texts (including readings, read-alouds, images and videos), filtered by grade level, subject and social justice topic. Our film kits include student-friendly documentaries and discussion guides. For copyright reasons, some of these texts and films require an account to access-but anyone can create a free account, whether an educator or a caregiver. Educators are welcome to create class accounts and share the login and password with students or to save texts as PDFs and email them to students or upload them to a password-protected course management system like Canvas or Blackboard.

Teaching Tolerance also has lessons that can be adapted for students with or without online access. While we are currently undergoing an evaluation of these resources, we feel confident that any of these can strengthen your lesson planning:

lessons based on the book The Color of Law, which can add depth to any unit on segregation, government-sanctioned discrimination or systemic racism;

Teaching The New Jim Crow, lessons about the criminal justice system that can help students understand the connections between historical and present-day injustices;

lessons on digital literacy and online citizenship, which are designed for students K-12, whether they have online access or not.

"Do Something" Projects

Our website features 34 "Do Something" tasks. Most of these are adaptable to distance learning and homeschooling. They are designed to allow students to apply their knowledge to real-world issues. Here are a few of our favorites:

Oral History Project, in which students can conduct interviews at home to see how personal experiences intersect with something they are studying;

Buddy Share, in which students could share art or writing with an online classmate;

Identity Artifacts Museum, in which students can create a display of items from home that represent aspects of their identities.

Articles With Recommendations About Equity

We know that-with such little time to plan-the absence of school programming or the implementation of distance learning may threaten equal resource access for a wide range of students. We know that students experiencing poverty, students with disabilities, English language learners, students living in food deserts, students with elderly caregivers and families without work flexibility are particularly vulnerable. In the coming weeks, we hope to produce or share articles and resources with recommendations for ensuring equity for these students and families.

Today, these resources may prove useful:

We cannot predict how the spread of coronavirus will affect schools tomorrow, next week or months from now. But we feel reassured by the knowledge that social justice educators have always been leaders in building our communities up. So we stand alongside you in not letting this crisis keep us down. To the extent that we can, we will humbly face this unknown with you and strive for a better tomorrow.

We hope these resources help.

Resource List for Educators
Note: This list is drawn from survey responses, TT staffers and youth-serving organizations. TT has not vetted all third-party lists. Please take special care in selecting online learning platforms and checking for equity, accessibility and-as we teach students to recognize how their personal data is monetized-privacy.
Coronavirus Resources: Teaching, Learning and Thinking Critically - New York Times Learning Network
This ever-updating resource includes items for staying current on coronavirus news, teaching media literacy around the coronavirus, essential questions and discussion suggestions, and advice for teaching and learning online.

Emotional Support
"We need to be sure our students have their fears acknowledged. ... We need to focus on their mental health along with their physical health." -TT survey respondent
Crisis Text Line
This resource offers 24/7 crisis counseling to those who text HOME to 741741.

The Trevor Project
For LGBTQ students-especially in non-accepting families-social isolation at home may be difficult. The Trevor Project provides them support.

Talking to Children About COVID-19 (Coronavirus): A Parent Resource - National Association of School Psychologists
This site offers guidance for talking to young people about the coronavirus in a way that is factual and anxiety-reducing.

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Information and Resources - National Alliance on Mental Illness
This thorough resource includes tips for how to deal with anxiety caused by COVID-19 news and special considerations for people experiencing homelessness, people with vulnerable family members and people who feel isolated.

Care for Your Coronavirus Anxiety
A website with resources for addressing anxiety that educators may be feeling, including that induced by xenophobia, financial fears, isolation and more. It also includes a special portal for parents.

Parent/Caregiver Guide to Helping Families Cope With the Coronavirus Disease 2019 - The National Child Traumatic Stress Network
This printable resource, available in several languages, includes information for families and caregivers that educators can use and share. Particularly helpful is the section outlining common reactions to stress and recommendations for supporting children that are broken down by age group.

Resources Students Can Use Online
"[I need] any online resources that students in grades k-12 can use at home." -TT survey respondent
Amazing Educational Resources
This crowdsourced document lists education companies that are offering free subscriptions during school closures.

Free Online Learning Resources for Schools Affected by Coronavirus/COVID-19 - Tech Learning
This list includes hundreds of free e-learning platforms and resources that cover a wide range of grade levels, subjects and needs, including topics such as sex education, drama and language learning.

125+ Amazing Online Learning Resources - We Are Teachers
This list includes sites with ready lesson plans and activities for all grade levels, as well as e-learning platforms.

Free Educational Resources for Distance Learning - California Department of Education
This is a list of education publishers offering free distance learning resources.

Discovery Education
Offering free access through the remainder of the school year, this platform includes digital textbooks and multimedia resources for online K-12 learning.

Doc Academy
Doc Academy features free clips from documentary films, including social justice topics, with accompanying toolkits and lessons.

TED-Ed
On the TED-Ed site, users will find free videos on a wide range of educational topics, with portals for students and educators.

Storyline Online
This website offers read-alouds of books for young readers. Books include a diverse range of authors and characters but should be vetted by educators.

Storytime From Space
On this site, astronauts read children's books aloud. It's out of this world cute, and the options include diverse representation of kids who love science.

Printables for Pick-Up
"[There are] issues of equity in access to online learning." -TT survey respondent
Curriculum Associates
This website includes printable activities for grades K-8 in math and reading.

All Kids Network
Mostly geared toward young learners, this website offers printable activities and worksheets.

Scholastic
This page offers printable activities for students in grades K-8.

COVID-19 and Social Justice
"Our school has several students from China who will not be able to go home during this break. I saw a few Chinese students out at a local restaurant and heard a few old white men at a table nearby grumbling about how the kids should have on face masks. How can we protect our Asian students against bias?" -TT survey respondent
Since February, we have stressed the need for educators to understand the historical context of the rhetoric surrounding the coronavirus-and to interrupt it. Even in online or distance learning contexts, our Speak Up at School and guides can help you formulate responses to such rhetoric from students and facilitate conversations about where that rhetoric is coming from.

When Xenophobia Spreads Like a Virus - NPR
This article provides personal narratives of how xenophobia has affected people across the United States during the coronavirus outbreak.

Support for Teachers During the COVID-19 Outbreak - Facing History and Ourselves
This collection includes resources on standing against racism surrounding the coronavirus and readings that can help students ground this moment in the history of crises and community care.

Coronavirus School Closings Expose Digital Divide - U.S. News
This article explains how some members of the Federal Communications Commission are advocating for ways the FCC can and should step in to mitigate tech inequities during quarantine.

COVID-19 and the Education of Students with Disabilities - National Disability Rights Network
This collection of resources from NDRN can help educators ensure equal access to online education for students with disabilities.

COVID-19 Response and Resources - The Justice Collaborative
This page helps explain how marginalized and incarcerated populations are more endangered by COVID-19.

Best Practices for Online or Distance Learning
"We are not ready for distance learning." - TT survey respondent
Learning Keeps Going
A coalition of education organizations developed this website that hosts tips, webinars and resource lists for transitioning to digital learning. It also contains a help desk for educators and a hotline for parents and students.

3 Ways to Turn Your Classroom Remote in a Hurry - KQED
This succinct resource from KQED includes a compilation of online learning tools and recommendations for implementing them.

Resources for Teaching and Learning During This Period of Social Distancing - KQED
This thorough article offers resources and suggestions for educators to transition to distance learning.

How to Teach Online Courses - Future Learn
These free courses can help educators learn strategies for remote and distance learning with students.

Resources for Families in Need
"The more vulnerable populations may be more at risk of environmental, natural crisis/disasters. How to become proactive and an advocate?" - TT survey respondent
These Organizations Are Helping People Get Food and Medical Help During the Coronavirus Pandemic - Buzzfeed News
This article includes a list of organizations working to deliver food, medical supplies and aid to people locally, nationally and internationally.

Coronavirus: Multilingual Resources for Schools - Colorín Colorado
These resources can help educators provide communication around this crisis to families in multiple languages.

Talking Points
This app can help educators send text messages and communications to students and families in their home languages.

Talking to Kids About Coronavirus: ASL and English Resources - American Society for Deaf Children
Resources in ASL that provide information on the coronavirus as well as its impact on the Deaf community.

Supporting Families During COVID-19 - Child Mind Institute
This collection of services includes video chats with clinicians, telemedicine services and tips for managing anxiety and discipline as kids are isolated at home.

Resources for Caretakers
"Lesson and online learning that parents can access as well. The teachers are putting things together, but the parents are at home implementing it." -TT survey respondent
Talking to Kids About the Coronavirus - Child Mind Institute
This article offers basic tips that include open and honest conversation.

Coronavirus and Parenting: What You Need to Know Now - NPR
This ever-updating guide from NPR includes advice for both health and education during the coronavirus outbreak.

Scholastic Learn at Home
This free resource includes days of projects for children in grade bands of PK-K, 1-2, 3-5 and 6+.

Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers free courses for kids in subjects such as math, science and history.

Free Resources and Subscriptions for Remote Learning and Home Schooling Due to Coronavirus- QNS
This is a curated list of free remote learning and homeschooling resources for a variety of subjects and grade levels.

Coronavirus: Learning Resources for Kids Home From School - KIRO 7
This article provides advice for structuring the home learning environment as well as a list of free online activity websites.

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Teaching Through Coronavirus: What Educators Need Right Now

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On Monday we asked our community of educators what they need in the face of uncertainty caused by school closures and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 2,000 educators responded, and the range of those responses illustrates the incredible responsibilities they feel for their students' learning and well-being.

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Google Teacher Center: Tips for Enabling Distance Learning

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Google Teacher Center: Tips for Enabling Distance Learning

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Click through - there is so much here!

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Resources | Teacher Center | Google for Education

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Learn technology tools, inspire creativity, and propel learning with resources for educators

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Harvard: Best Practices for Online Pedagogy

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Harvard: Best Practices for Online Pedagogy

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This section provides principles and tips to help you teach, regardless of whether your class is fully in person, fully online, or a little bit of both.

Below you'll see general advice, a variety of course types, and tips on encouraging student engagement. To keep things simple, we're focusing on the most common and most effective online teaching practices. Reminders that are equally relevant to in-person instruction are marked with an *asterisk*. You can also find a comprehensive guide to Designing Your Course for Online Instruction: Principles and Tips, as well as resources on teaching with masks.

We've broken up the teaching tips according to the common teaching styles (lecture, case, small group discussion, and hands-on). Feel free to jump to the section most appropriate to your course.

Some General Advice

Teaching with Masks

We recommend:

Getting Started: Recommended Process

1. *Determine your content, pedagogy, and assessment.

2. Plan your asynchronous-synchronous mix, including video, non-video, and peer learning communities.

3. Decide - for both asynchronous and synchronous instruction - when and how you will:

Content, Pedagogy, and Assessment: Guiding Principles

Let's start with some fundamentals. See also Designing Your Course for Online Instruction: Principles and Tips.

*The basis of teaching is the same for every modality: strong emphases on content, pedagogy, and assessment. Careful planning on these three factors remains central to successful teaching - both residential and online.

The forms of teaching interaction may change: even as the online instruction often precludes certain forms of in-person contact, it creates opportunities for new ways to interact. Well-planned, intentional uses of online technologies can encourage and facilitate even more "lean forward" behaviors and more interaction with and among students. For example, as described below, you can increase learner engagement by:

Identifying learners' questions about the material

Using polls and other interactive technologies to get a sense of students' experience, comprehension, and reactions ("reading the room")

Inviting specific students' answers (cold calling)

Opening the floor to general discussion of particular questions

Having students engage in small "buzz group" conversations via breakout rooms

Creating opportunities for synchronous or asynchronous student collaboration via tools like Google Docs, Miro, etc.

Focus on your pedagogy, not the medium: the principles of pedagogy that are effective for online teaching - video, simulation, text, etc. - are similar to those that are effective in the residential classroom. They allow students to engage with material dynamically and across multiple learning styles. These principles apply not only to synchronous teaching but also, importantly, to asynchronous content creation.

Asynchronous-Synchronous Mix

Based on your own pedagogy and teaching style, you can be flexible in choosing the right mix of synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Online teaching can heighten interactivity. Take advantage of the opportunities for students to "lean forward" and to engage with you, your TFs, your guest speakers, and each other. Long lectures, on the other hand, do not work well in online teaching, either in synchronous sessions or asynchronous materials. Your school's Teaching and Learning Center can help you develop course content, lesson plans, and asynchronous approaches.

Norms and Expectations

Set classroom norms: if using Zoom to convene your course, circulate clear expectations for student participation. For example, consider including language like this in your syllabus.

Our class will meet through the Zoom online conference system. Our success as an online class will depend on the same commitment we all bring to the physical classroom. We will adopt the same rules and norms (take notes; participate by asking and answering questions; wear classroom-ready clothing). For everyone's benefit, join the course in a quiet place whenever possible. Turn on your video whenever possible. Mute your microphone unless you are speaking. Close browser tabs not required for participating in class.

Audio quality matters: use a good headset or a USB microphone. (See Configure Your Teaching Space for more information on optimizing your audio.)

So do time zones: remember that students may not be in the same time zone as you. Consider amping up your energy (especially in synchronous teaching) to engage students who are participating very early or late in their day. For students who don't or can't attend a live session live, create opportunities to engage in a peer discussion, write an individual response, or simply watch a recording of the class.

In technology, less is more: it's often better to use a few tools well than many tools ineffectively. Familiarizing yourself with a handful of important features of Zoom and Canvas can take you a long way.

Accessibility

Students have a range of abilities, and not everyone will disclose their challenges. Your course likely has students with learning or sensory disabilities. They are not required to tell you, and they may not feel comfortable telling anyone. Rather than asking them to identify themselves to you, employ practices (like those below) that reach a wide variety of learners.

*Text is universal: assistive technologies (such as screen readers, magnifiers, etc.) are nearly always designed to work with text. If you send images to your students, include textual descriptions so that students using these technologies can follow along. If you use video chat such as Zoom, assign someone (ideally a TF) to create a transcript or closed captioning throughout the session.

*Some students need additional processing time: don't expect everyone to understand everything after being told once. Share slides, transcripts, chat logs, videos, and images for students to download and examine afterward. This will especially help students with dyslexia and other reading impediments.

*Select accessible resources: some online resources have already had substantial work done to improve accessibility. Videos produced by HarvardX (available through DART via your HarvardKey) have captions, and images have alternative text descriptions included. YouTube allows viewers to suggest caption improvements on many videos. Virtual meetings can be accessible in Zoom due to the available keyboard shortcuts for navigating without a mouse and closed captioning created either by a third party service or a meeting member. Interactive simulations such as the PhET tools are usable by the blind. Check to see whether your resources indicate WCAG AA 2.0/2.1 compliance, or Section 508 compliance.

*Take care of your own hands and posture: pay attention to your tendons (and your shoulders). Take breaks, and encourage your students to stretch periodically. For more suggestions, visit Harvard's Environmental Health & Safety group, which has a self-assessment for computer ergonomics.

Course Types

Lecture-oriented Courses

If you are preparing to move your lecture-based course online or to rethink online or asynchronous elements of it, it is helpful to remember that long lectures do not work well in online teaching, either in synchronous sessions or asynchronous materials. (See Designing Your Course for Online: Principles and Tips.)

Creating and uploading your materials

*Break up text-heavy presentation slides: be aware that online, perhaps even more than in the classroom, students will read first and listen second. Consider PowerPoint's "Animation" feature (or equivalent) that allows you to show just a bullet or two at a time.

*Organize your course materials using Canvas modules.

*Integrate library resources and other digital materials.

Asynchronous: Prerecording

Although they take time to create, prerecorded lectures can be as engaging as the best live lectures: you can do multiple takes, edit the recordings, and integrate graphics or animations. They are also less vulnerable to unanticipated bandwidth issues that may arise with live sessions. You can even use them in future versions of your course, whether online or face-to-face. Here are a few simple tips to get you going.

Provide an explicit roadmap at the beginning, outlining the content you're going to be covering.

Break down the lecture into shorter segments (3-5 minutes). A long pre-recorded lecture can be deadly to watch.

Intersperse the lecture clips with reflection questions, polls, action prompts, and other interactive elements. Try to make the learning experience "inductive" rather than entirely didactic.

Insert yourself - a personal story, humor, or editorial commentary - into the lecture.

Prerecorded material and live content can complement each other powerfully. Consider prerecording certain segments of your lecture (some material you want the students to reflect on before class, or an explanation of key terms or concepts) and leave the rest for synchronous sessions. For detailed guidance, see Prepare Your Content in Advance.

Synchronous: Presenting your lecture

*Create a detailed agenda, including how much time you will ask students to spend on collaborative work, solo writing, or group discussions.

Practice (at least once) in advance: if you are lecturing online and have assistance from a TA/TF, rehearse using the Share Screen and switching among windows you intend to display. If you're teaching solo, practice clicking between Zoom's presentation mode, screen share mode, any slides or presentation materials, and any other technologies like whiteboarding tools, polls, or videos.

*Make your transitions explicit: be sure to provide clean, well-defined transitions between activities or discussion topics.

*Watch your pace and keep an eye on students' comprehension and engagement (see Engaging Students Remotely). Some instructors report that students absorb and process information at the same rate as in person; others have found they can only cover one-half to two-thirds as much material as they can in the physical classroom. Check in with your students more frequently than you might normally, to make sure that they follow the material and remain engaged.

Configure your Zoom settings and preferences to support your teaching: you can turn off the entrance/exit chime, allow or prevent students sharing their screens, pre-mute everyone, etc.

Close all the computer windows you won't be using (particularly personal email, messages, etc.) prior to the class.

Keep your students in front of you: Zoom's gallery view lets you see 25-49 students at a time (depending on your screen and computer's capabilities). You can also move from screen to screen to see even more.

Be visible: it helps your students remain engaged if they can see your face as you present your material. Set up your devices so that even when you're using Screen Share students can see your face at the same time as the materials being displayed. If you want to be able to see your students while you share your screen, you may need to log into Zoom via two devices at the same time. This allows you to share your screen on one device (e.g., a tablet for whiteboarding) while having the gallery view of students on the other.

Adapt your board work: if you usually use a blackboard or whiteboard as part of a class session, you have a number of options. Note that if you're accustomed to multiple simultaneous boards you may need to adapt to showing a single screen's worth at a time. See Boardwork from the Bok Center for suggestions.

Engaging students in lecture-oriented courses

It is difficult to listen to a lecture attentively on a small screen. Consider taking advantage of pedagogical tools in Zoom to keep them engaged, such as breakout rooms, questions and discussions via Chat, polling, annotations, or invited Q&A (using Raise Hand). See Engaging Students Remotely for more tips and opportunities.

Assessing participation in lecture-oriented courses

In classes where participation is a heavy component of the grade, be sure to let students know early and often what forms or participation you will be tracking and how often you expect them to participate.

Encourage students to use Chatto participate. Chat can draw in students who have great ideas to contribute yet may be somewhat quiet during discussions or debates. Reminding students that the quantity and the quality of their chat comments contribute to their participation grade can help limit frivolous chat and improve the sophistication and quality of the chat threads.

One-on-one or small-group meetings can be held using Zoom almost the same way as in-person. But it is important to maintain the same norms around minimizing distractions as in the classroom. Your level of engagement will determine the students' level.

Case-based Courses

Several features of small or large case-based courses transfer well to an online because Zoom and other technologies have various interactive features built in. Here are tips to consider when teaching a case-based course.

Calling Patterns and Practices

Keep your students in front of you: Zoom's gallery view lets you see thumbnails of 25-49 students at a time (depending on your screen and computer's capabilities). You can also move from screen to screen to see even more.

*Discussion transitions: be sure to state clean, well-defined transitions between discussion topics.

Use Chat to decide on calling patterns: tracking the Chat feature can be useful in deciding which students to call on next - for example, if a particular student notes through Chat that she/he disagrees with the student speaking, or has some additional data to provide. As one faculty member noted, the advantage of Chat is that it's like "reading students' thought bubbles" - an advantage over the physical classroom.

*Role plays/debates between students: you can request two students to "role play" a situation like you would in the physical classroom.

*Warm and cold calls: you can "cold call" a student just as you would in the traditional classroom, instead of waiting for them to raise their hand. For "warm calls," you can message them privately in Chat before you call on them.

Raising hands: this feature works like the physical classroom. Have students use the Raise Hand feature in Zoom to answer questions. When you open up a conversation to students, you can pause a beat to let a number of people raise their hand and then pick according to whatever calling pattern you want. Call on students by their names.

*Polls (private or public): with Zoom's polling features (or other tools like Mentimeter or PollEverywhere) you can get group results in real time, then reveal them later.

*Checking in/reading the room: unmuted students can inadvertently start talking at the same time; you will not be able to read body language easily; and those less inclined to speak may disappear more easily. To address these issues, be more diligent about pausing and asking if anyone else has more thoughts before jumping to the next topic.

Board Plans

if you usually do "board work" as part of a class session, you have a number of options. Note that if you're accustomed to multiple simultaneous boards you may need to adapt to showing a single screen's worth at a time. See Boardwork from the Bok Center for suggestions.

Closing the Case

Summary slides work as they do in the physical classroom. In addition, consider inviting students' reflections on the case too through Chat or a shared space like a Google Doc. Such written summations can be powerful complements to the discussion portion of the class, so consider archiving these reflections for each class.

Assessing Participation

In case-based classes, participation is a heavy component of the grade. Student comments can be more easily recorded since Zoom retains a video archive of the entire class.

In an online setting, consider using students' Chat comments and reflections as additional inputs to a student's participation grade, and a supplement to the spoken word. This can help draw in students who may be somewhat quiet in "speaking," and can also help limit frivolous chat. If you decide to use Chat in participation grading, you should be sure to let students know about this norm before you start teaching.

Small Group Discussions

One-on-one or small-group meetings: virtual one-on-one or small-group meetings can be held using Zoom almost the same way as in-person. But it is important to maintain the same norms around minimizing distractions as in the classroom; your level of engagement will determine students'. If you're using open office hours, the Waiting Room allows you to provide a single Zoom session ID and the ability to invite only selected individuals into the discussion.

*Code review: you can use Screen Sharing to meet with an individual or group of students to review code. Authorizing Remote Screen Control enables one to take control of the other's shared application and allows for navigation, text entry, etc. on the remote computer. When you cannot meet synchronously with a student to provide feedback, consider resources such as Pastebin and JSFiddle, where students can upload their code and you can create revisions with comments.

*Collaborative problem solving and brainstorming: digitally annotate using the Whiteboards feature. Allow others in the session to annotate on the same board to share ideas and problem-solving methods. A tablet (used as a second screen) is useful for handwriting.

*Ask questions: have students use the Raise Hand feature in Zoom to answer questions. Call on a student by name and "Allow to talk" (unmute).

Cold call: you can "cold call" a student just as you would in the traditional classroom, instead of waiting for them to raise their hand.

Keep your students in front of you: Zoom's gallery view lets you see thumbnails of 25-49 students at a time (depending on your screen).

Hands-on Courses

Lab courses: one of the biggest challenges of teaching online from anywhere is sustaining the lab components of classes. Since many labs require specific equipment, they are hard to reproduce outside of that physical space. Consider the following as you plan to address lab activities:

*Define what the lab should achieve: different lab activities serve different purposes. See Remote Labsfrom the Bok Center for scenarios.

Take part of the lab online: many lab activities require students to become familiar with certain procedures, and only physical practice of those processes will do. In such cases, consider whether there are other parts of the lab experience you could take online (for example, video demonstrations of techniques, online simulations, analysis of data, other pre- or post-lab work). Save the physical practice parts of the labs until access to campus is restored.

Investigate virtual labs: online resources and virtual tools might help replicate the experience of some labs (e.g., virtual dissection, night sky apps, video demonstrations of labs, simulations, YouTube videos). Those vary widely by discipline, but check with your textbook publisher, or sites such as Merlot for materials that might help replace parts of your lab during the closure.

*Provide raw data for analysis: in cases where the lab includes both collection of data and its analysis, consider showing how the data can be collected, and then provide some raw sets of data for students to analyze. This approach is not as comprehensive as having students collect and analyze their own data, but it can keep them engaged with parts of the lab experience during the closure.

*Increase interaction in other ways: sometimes labs are about providing time for direct student interaction. Consider other ways to replicate that type of interaction or create new online interaction opportunities, including using available collaboration tools like Breakout Rooms, Annotation Tools, and Whiteboards in Zoom, Slack, etc.

Chat: keeping a simultaneous chat stream can bolster the conversation and allow more students to get their questions answered - and voices heard.

Using Video

Effective video can be asynchronous, synchronous, and a complement to other forms of engaging with students. For overall guidance, see Designing Your Course for Online: Principles and Tips. For specific recommendations, see The Fundamentals of Video and Audio Production for Online Teaching.

Engaging Students Remotely

During Class: Engaging and Energizing

*Reading the room: unmuted students can inadvertently start talking at the same time, you will not be able to read body language easily, and those less inclined to speak may disappear more easily. To address these issues, be more diligent about pausing and asking if anyone else has more thoughts before jumping to the next topic.

*Amplify your course with guest speakers: online, experts are one click away. Inviting guests to join your course session can promote engagement, diversity, inclusion, and enthusiasm.

*Encourage community: the sense of presence will be enhanced when everyone shows their face via their webcam. Consider asking students to turn on video as a key part of participation, since it is easier to engage with the class if you can see them, and students are more likely to pay attention if they know they're on camera. The gallery view can be helpful here. However, recognize that some students may feel uncomfortable sharing their living/studying circumstances. Remind your students that virtual backgrounds can help protect cybersecurity, improve equity, and reduce visual distractions.

*Stretch times: consider encouraging students to "stretch" every 20-30 minutes for 30 seconds. It can be harder to focus attention on a screen than in a classroom, and you and they will benefit from a brief moment of physical activity.

*Breakout groups: if you want students to participate in smaller "buzz groups", you can consider using Slack or twitch as a chat platform that complements Zoom, and/or provide a prompt for group work via collaborative tools like Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets. Alternatively you can use Zoom's Breakout Rooms functionality for discussions or video-enabled group work.

During Class: Questions and Discussions

*Invite and respond to questions: if your class normally is a large-class lecture format with Q&A, consider inviting students to ask their questions in Chat. (See Additional Tips on Engaging Students.) If you have a TA/TF, they can pick a few questions for you to answer at the appropriate moments or, say, every 10-15 minutes. You can also consider asking students to use the Raise Hand feature in case they have an urgent question. (Zoom makes this easier than a standard lecture hall.)

*Use polling to get many responses quickly: poll tools like Poll Everywhere, Mentimeter, and Zoom's polling features let you ask students questions and use ScreenShare to show the distribution of responses. When used well, this can be a powerful complement to the lecture or discussion.

*Encourage students to reflect: for example, say "I'd like you to think about ....", take a short pause, and then if appropriate, provide an answer, or solicit answers from the students. Again, the Chat feature can be helpful in having students record their reflections.

*Post answers later: consider posting responses after class to particular Chat questions that you didn't have time to address during the session.

*Code review: you can use Screen Sharing to meet with an individual or group of students to review code. Authorizing Remote Screen Control enables one to take control of the other's shared application and allows for navigation, text entry, etc. on the remote computer. When you cannot meet synchronously with a student to provide feedback, consider resources such as Pastebin and JSFiddle, where students can upload their code and you can create revisions with comments.

*Collaborative problem solving and brainstorming: digitally annotate using the Whiteboards feature. Allow others in the session to annotate on the same board to share ideas and problem-solving methods. A tablet (used as a second screen) is useful for handwriting.

Ask questions: have students use the Raise Hand feature in Zoom to answer questions. Call on a student by name and "Allow to talk" (unmute).

*Cold call: you can "cold call" a student just as you would in the traditional classroom, instead of waiting for them to raise their hand.

*Office hours: if you're using open office hours, the Waiting Room allows you to provide a single Zoom session ID and the ability to invite only selected individuals into the discussion.

Outside of Class: Discussion Boards and Student Collaboration

Not all classroom discussions need to be synchronous. In these cases, you can use the Canvas discussion forum feature. Decide what kind of discussions will be most beneficial to your course: topic-driven or social-driven. Your discussion prompts and how you evaluate your students' responses should reflect that decision.

*Topic-driven: this type of discussion board works especially well for highlighting readings or helping your students focus on key parts of your course content. Provide specific conversation points and prompts that may relate to a reading or a lecture. Make sure to build in space for reflection or debate in your discussion prompts. Students should want to know what their classmates are thinking about!

*Social-driven: this type of discussion board works especially well if you want your students to connect the course with current events or their own projects or work. Your discussion board serves as a digital "water cooler" for your class. Your discussion prompts can be more general, such as asking them to post about the specific topic of the week.

You can also enable and encourage student-to-student collaboration through tools like Slack.

Assessment

Consider the following approaches. See also Designing Your Course for the Fall: Principles and Tips.

Additional Resources

Below are additional tools and materials that you may find useful depending on the kind of course and pedagogy you use.

*Overall guidance: Harvard's Office of Undergraduate Education (OUE) provides recommendations to help you teach your course, plan your class, and create a meaningful online experience.

Case-based courses: Harvard Business Publishing offers a portfolio of resources to help you move your class online.

*Reading-intensive courses: Perusall allows instructors to upload documents for learners to read and annotate. These annotations become discussions on the document as students comment on each other's ideas.

Lab courses: Remote Labs from the Bok Center

*Digital resources: Using digital resources to augment course materials

*Math and physics simulations: PhET, QuVis, Falstad

Flipping your course: the term "flipped classroom" describes the case when instead of using an in-class lecture format, instructors make their pre-recorded lectures available for students to view online, then use in-classroom time for discussions. The Harvard Kennedy School SLATE program has developed resources that may be useful as you consider this shift.

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Pedagogical Best Practices: Residential, Blended, and Online

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Below you'll see general advice, a variety of course types, and tips on encouraging student engagement. To keep things simple, we're focusing on the most common and most effective online teaching practices. Reminders that are equally relevant to in-person instruction are marked with an *asterisk*.

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Sea Change: Ten Strategies for Educators' Wellbeing

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Sea Change: Ten Strategies for Educators' Wellbeing

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Educators' Well-Being During the COVID-19 Outbreak

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When a crisis or a disruption like the COVID-19 school campus closures occur, we all respond differently and our responses will change over time. These closures may remind us of past traumatic experiences like the outbreak of a war or civil unrest, or the sudden destruction of an earthquake or terrorist attack.

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EdSurge: A Letter to Educators Teaching Online for the First Time

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EdSurge: A Letter to Educators Teaching Online for the First Time

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Dear Teachers,

Last week, the two of us had a conversation about school leaders who would be leading and making decisions related to the spread of COVID-19. That conversation turned into a set of guidelines that we published first with Global Online Academy and later with EdSurge.

We have tried to be clear about our intent to share our thinking, since some schools have very different priorities than the ones we have been projecting. To be clear, some school leaders serve children who depend on their institutions for safety, food and other basic human needs. Those children and their needs should always be the priorities of the schools that serve them-not some online version of education.

We are continuing to share, therefore, because we are also observing schools preparing or acting upon school closure plans for one reason or another. And once those plans are in place, teachers are often being asked to perform their responsibilities in a new way. We're thinking about those teachers (about you) who are beginning, or are mid-flight in, some new journey. We're not debating the merits of that journey for now-just acknowledging and looking to support the people who will be teaching online if their schools decide to go that route.

Simply put, if you're asked to teach online, we encourage you to find ways to be present for your students. Your presence is all that many of them have ever needed, and this does not change if you are teaching from your living room or local library.

When you teach online for the first time, the first thing you'll miss is the chatter of your physical classroom. Or maybe the hushed breath, ever so subtle, when you enter the class and change the dynamics, the air pressure even. No, you'll miss most the quicksilver comedy, the way words twist into grins and spill out as jokes. You probably wouldn't think that you would miss the smell or the slouches or the occasional snuck-in naps...

But you will.

You'll miss looking at all of your students at once, the sound of them laughing all at once, the way it feels when understanding cracks open and a yawn becomes an "ah" becomes an "aha."

So when you're asked to teach online-against your will, as many of us may soon be-we would first say: hold on to all of that subtle input, the stuff that helps you know a class is alive and thriving. Then, from the first time you send an email to the class or enter an online forum with a class, look for it. Listen for it. Acknowledge it. Enjoy it.

In the first online course we designed and taught together, one of us had never taught in a strictly online environment before, and the other had only designed asynchronous online learning experiences (i.e., self-paced experiences with very little instructor engagement).

As we started to plan our teaching, we fell into old habits. We organized and sequenced our materials. Then we created phases of learning that would build on top of each other and ultimately create what we hoped was a coherent experience, an experience that would raise the understanding and skill level of everybody involved, including the teachers.

Once we understood the what (the curriculum), we started to think about the how (the connection). This is where things got interesting, and quickly. We were not ever going to be in the same room with our students. We had not ever met most of them. They were relying on us.

And we were expected to deliver instruction. Whatever that means.

"To deliver instruction" is an awful phrase when you're teaching face-to-face. It can be even more nefarious when you're teaching online because the online world is built to hold and move information. You can share reams of text and bucket loads of data. You can record lectures. And more lectures. You can stack links on links on links, embedding hypertexts in between.

At first, when you're beginning to teach online, please don't do all of these things. Please resist the easy affordances of the online world. Instead, try to connect.

The job of an online teacher is the job of an offline teacher is the job of a teacher. Connect to people and help them to feel connected to you and to the dimension of the world you are leading them to experience. Connect your students to one another in a way that enables them not only to learn content from one another, but also to catch life experiences from one another-to shape one another in the way that only peers can. It's that simple ... and it's that complex.

We're getting a little lost, on purpose, so let's think back to your original, in-person class (you know, the one in Room 13 or Lab B) and what you'll miss about it.

If you were walking into that classroom and you suddenly had lost your voice, but you had to stay, you would figure out ways to connect with the people in front of you, right? And if you were walking into that classroom and you suddenly lost your ability to see what is in front of you, you would find ways to connect with the students in the room. Online teaching is similar to those scenarios in that you lose certain attributes that you may normally take for granted. But you have to be in the room and you have to continue.

Figuring out your first few go-to moves can help. Maybe you'll use a video conference, a digital whiteboard, a collaborative document peppered with comments, or email in order to connect. Great teachers of the past have used chalkboard and chalk, water and wine, or circular tables and folding chairs: elemental resources that prove that it doesn't really matter what you use to teach, so long as you understand how you're trying to connect (or at the very least, that you're trying to connect).

Having that deep motivation will help you with what typically comes next: frustration. Things won't work the way you want them to. You'll find yourself Googling "how do I ...?" or emailing a colleague and asking for help. If you start to feel a sense of frustration, though, take heart: that's how you know you're teaching online. That's how you know that you haven't lost the desire to teach-and learn-in the first place.

We don't want to minimize the challenge. But we also want to acknowledge that thinking about tools, bells and whistles is less important than acknowledging that, once you start, wherever you start, you'll build capacity just like you have, and had to, in a face-to-face classroom. At first, the tools you choose will be all that you think about. You'll only see them as you bump up against their limitations.

Soon, though, you'll only see your students. Their personalities will return. Some formerly silent or quiet students may share their voices. Some formerly disengaged students may jump out as leaders.

You'll find new things to do-things you couldn't do offline. Students will show you their learning in ways they wouldn't or couldn't offline. Students will take risks in their learning that they would never take if they were in a physical room with one another. You'll be able to assess in new ways, ways that may help you provide better feedback.

We know we're saying these things as if there aren't dozens of steps embedded in each of them. But we think that if you're willing to ask questions along the way, if you're willing to Google and search things and watch videos and educate yourself as you're going, you'll pick up the thread of your former teaching.

When you are in a physical classroom and you are teaching history or math, part of the action stems from the history and the math, and part of the action (okay, most of the action) stems from the socializing, the communication, and what kids are picking up from each other and from you-which has nothing to do with your subject. (Sorry if you didn't know that!)

The same holds true for online environments. By being in these spaces with students and asserting your unique voice as a teacher, you are actually doing the work, even if you are not presenting it perfectly.

What's more, when you are back offline, when you walk into your old brick-and-mortar classroom, one last surprise awaits. You might keep some of what you found in the online wilderness. You might use collaborative documents in new ways. You might find new ways to access student voice ... or allow students to show their thinking in ways that they-and you-never could have imagined.

- SV & RR

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A Letter to Educators Teaching Online for the First Time - EdSurge News

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Dear Teachers, Last week, the two of us had a conversation about school leaders who would be leading and making decisions related to the spread of COVID-19. That conversation turned into a set of guidelines that we published first with Global Online Academy and later with EdSurge.

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Going Online in a Hurry: What to Do and Where to Start

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Going Online in a Hurry: What to Do and Where to Start

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from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but relevant

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CharacterStrong 30 Days of Kindness Journal

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We must demonstrate abundant hope. We will combat the spreading shadow with the fullness of our light. We may not all be doctors, but we can each use our platform to make Kindness a bit more normal and the world a bit more bright.

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Parlay is an AI-powered instructional platform that helps teachers facilitate meaningful, measurable, and inclusive class discussions. Join over a million teachers and students. Start using Parlay for free in your class today.

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During this unprecedented time, educators are being asked to support their students and school communities while adapting to an entirely different way of teaching almost overnight. This can be especially challenging when working with young adolescents, who are already going through a transformative time of development. At the same time, we know the power of AMLE members to support one another and share resources that are working well to keep our students on track, both academically and personally.

Explore and add to AMLE's crowdsourced and curated resources for advisory and online learning. And don't forget to join us for an upcoming webinar or roundtable to hear from experts on a range of topics related to COVID-19 and share your own perspective.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

Upcoming AMLE Webinars

AMLE learning events and collaborative online spaces to support you through the pandemic.
Webinar: Promoting Student Wellness during COVID-19
Hosts: Phyllis Fagell
Tuesday, March 24, 2020, 3:30-4:30pm ET
Join us as Middle School Matters author Phyllis Fagell leads a conversation on student wellness and provides tips for helping young adolescents manage stress during the pandemic.
Leadership Roundtable: Health and Wellness for Your Staff during COVID-19
Hosts: Robin Coletrain and Stephanie Patton
Thursday, March 26, 2020, 5-6pm ET
What strategies and tools do you provide to support the physical, emotional, instructional, and institutional needs of your staff?

Recorded AMLE Webinars
Webinar: Promoting Personal Wellness during COVID-19
Host: Jennifer Piela

Corporate wellness consultant and owner of Dalai Mama Yoga provides tips for stress management and staying well during the pandemic.

Webinar Slides
Recommended Relaxation Apps
Leadership Roundtable: Responding to COVID-19
Host: Dr. Laurie Barron
Moderated by Superintendent Dr. Laurie Barron, attendees at this open forum shared how they have been responding to the outbreak and transitioning to remote learning.

Parent COVID-19 Communication Log
Webinar: COVID-19 - Choosing the Right Remote Learning Resources for Young Adolescents
Hosts: Todd Bloch and Erin Scholes
Todd Bloch and Erin Scholes provide tips for selecting remote learning resources and how to effectively use them to keep students engaged outside the classroom.

Remote Learning During COVID-19

Tools for keeping young adolescents on track, crowdsourced and curated by your middle level colleagues.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

Remote Advisory During COVID-19

Activities designed by middle level educators to help students continue to develop personally while they are out of the classroom.

Title Description

Parent COVID-19 Communication Log

A great way to ensure school staff are collecting vital information to both check-in on student well-being and identify those in need of additional support.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

Remote Instructional Resources to use During COVID-19

Check out these videos and other resources to aid you in teaching remotely.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

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During this unprecedented time, educators are being asked to support their students and school communities while adapting to an entirely different way of teaching almost overnight. This can be especially challenging when working with young adolescents, who are already going through a transformative time of development.

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Padlet: Collaboration,  Collections, Backchannel discussions

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Padlet: Collaboration,  Collections, Backchannel discussions

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pssst! this collection is a padlet!

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Hypothes.is: Online text annotation/ discussion tool

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Hypothes.is: Online text annotation/ discussion tool

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Comment on and highlight what interests you.

Annotate articles, websites, videos, documents, apps, and more - without clicking away or posting elsewhere. Hypothesis is easy to use and based on open web standards, so it works across the entire internet.

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Collaborate with anyone, anywhere. Use Hypothesis to annotate anything online with classmates, colleagues, or friends. Create a free personal account, or talk to our sales team about Education solutions. Get [...]

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Loom: Video discussions and Screen Recording

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Loom: Video discussions and Screen Recording

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Free screen recorder for Mac and PC | Loom

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Best free online screen recording tool with advanced video editing and video storage trusted by over 21 million people and easy sharing from Loom.com.

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Hippocampus: Aggregates videos, lessons, etc. from a variety of sources

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Hippocampus: Aggregates videos, lessons, etc. from a variety of sources

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HippoCampus - Homework and Study Help - Free help with your algebra, biology, environmental science, American government, US history, physics and religion homework

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The best multimedia instruction on the web to help you with your homework and study.

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USA Science & Engineering Festival: XSTEM Videos

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USA Science & Engineering Festival: XSTEM Videos

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Newsela: SEL Informational Articles for Students

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Newsela: SEL Informational Articles for Students

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We take authentic content from the world's most trusted providers and turn it into learning materials that are classroom-ready.

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Newsela: Informational Texts for Social Studies, Language Arts, Science

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Newsela: Informational Texts for Social Studies, Language Arts, Science

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Browse different examples of Newsela content custom made for specific subjects and reading levels. Find content for social studies, science, ELA, SEL and more.

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Teach and learn with The Times: Resources for bringing the world into your classroom

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Including in-site graphing calculators

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GeoGebra - the world's favorite, free math tools used by over 100 million students and teachers

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Free digital tools for class activities, graphing, geometry, collaborative whiteboard and more

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Desmos: Digital Math Lessons & Activities

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Desmos: Digital Math Lessons & Activities

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Teaching Tolerance: Speaking Up Against Racism around the New Coronavirus

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Teaching Tolerance: Speaking Up Against Racism around the New Coronavirus

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A conversation about coronavirus is happening among young people right now, and the focus isn't solely on health. When reports of this novel virus-first detected in China in December of 2019-started spreading to other countries, racialized fear began to manifest in public discourse.

Since the virus began to spread, people who identify as Asian American or Pacific Islander (AAPI) have been subjected to racist comments and jokes online or in person, and to isolating behavior from those who are afraid of catching the virus.

Times like these remind us that we must continuously disrupt and address issues of hate and bias, which often find their way into schools.

It's important to get ahead of harmful discourse because we know students are watching or listening to this rhetoric online and on social media. Many children spend hours a day on devices, so information-and misinformation-is likely in the hands of most of your students.

What Our Students Are Hearing

So we can assume our students are seeing posts like this one from a college student who considered dropping a class because "only Asians" were in the classrooms, stating, "I hope I don't catch coronavirus."

They may also observe the racist tropes that falsely point to Chinese people's eating habits as the cause of the spread of the virus.

And these messages don't come only from misinformed youth or social media trolls. For example, the University of California at Berkley apologized after an official Instagram account shared a post that was supposed to inform students about the virus. Instead, it listed xenophobia when "interacting with someone who might be from Asia" among "common" or "normal" reactions to anxiety around the illness.

Anti-Chinese sentiment and any racist or xenophobic rhetoric about the AAPI community is not new. Associating this marginalized group of people with disease is also not new.

Educators need to understand the historical context as they prepare to address this narrative in the classroom or other school spaces.

The Historical Context

Members of the AAPI community are targets right now because public health events have always been racialized. Pandemics that originate in areas populated by mostly people of color get more scrutiny, such as SARS in China or Ebola in West Africa. However, when pandemics occur in the United States and other western countries, such as the novel H1N1, citizens in those countries were not viewed as innately diseased. Many people die yearly from the flu, but Westerners aren't seen as suspicious.

Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States related to disease goes back to when Chinese people began immigrating here. In efforts to bar Chinese workers from entering the country in the late 1800s, white labor unions argued that Chinese people carried diseases that were more virulent than those found in white people.

In the same way junk science was used to justify enslaving Africans, junk science about people from Asia was used to justify laws leading to exclusion and exploitation of Asian immigrants. It solidified fear and phobia against Chinese people. The " yellow peril " narrative was born. It's a racist term that plays on the idea that Asian people would disrupt or harm Westerners' way of life.

These racist tropes are directly tied to the oppression of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. They were used to justify the Page Act of 1875, which restricted East Asian women from immigrating to the U.S. And they served, in part, as justification for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned most Chinese people from immigrating to the U.S.

Coupled with racist tropes about health and culture, these laws led to racist violence against Asian Americans. The remnants of that legacy remain in public discourse today.

Interrupting Racism

Educators have a responsibility to interrupt any anti-AAPI and xenophobic narratives. Since students may be exposed to racist posts on social media or racist comments about the coronavirus, you might hear some of this discourse in your classroom or throughout the school building. It is imperative that you interrupt it every time it occurs.

Right now, it's important to have a heightened sense of what your students are saying in spaces inside and outside of the classroom. Respond immediately to any news of a student repeating racist or xenophobic language. It's also vital to attend to any students or colleagues who have been harmed by anti-AAPI speech or rhetoric.

Our Responding to Hate and Bias at School guide can help you address issues at any phase of a hate or bias incident.

Educating Students

Because you won't always catch xenophobic or racist comments as they occur, it's important to equip students with the historical context and relevant skills to discern when something is biased and how they can respond.

Our Speak Up at School guide provides resources to help both educators and students tackle discussions about bias and stereotypes. helps guide educators in facilitating critical conversations.

Even if no incident has occurred yet in your school or classroom, you must still be proactive. Create a welcoming and hate-free environment by ensuring that students can identify hate and bias and then encouraging them to disrupt it. Teachers can use our lessons about upstanders, which show students how to respond to hate speech.

This is also an important time to emphasize the necessity of digital literacy, as students may become aware of hateful or biased speech online. Students must learn how to glean credible news sources and spot biased reporting. Spend time going through the pitfalls of the internet and help sharpen their digital literacy skills with lessons and activities.

Even if your students do not represent the identities likely to be harmed by racist comments around the coronavirus, or you believe they're not spreading misinformation and repeating racist tropes, exploring anti-AAPI rhetoric around the virus is still worthy of critical conversations in the classroom.

The truth is all students are affected by hate and bias. It's up to educators to protect those who are targeted by it and give students and other adults the tools to stop perpetrating harm in the future.

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Speaking Up Against Racism Around the Coronavirus

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A conversation about coronavirus is happening among young people right now, and the focus isn't solely on health. When reports of this novel virus-first detected in China in December of 2019-started spreading to other countries, racialized fear began to manifest in public discourse.

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VoiceThread: Students  add their voices to a recorded discussion

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VoiceThread: Students  add their voices to a recorded discussion

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CLASSROOM

If you're an individual teacher and want to get started with VoiceThread for just your class, a Single Educator License is the way go.

SCHOOL

Give all your students an accountable and transparent learning environment. Easily integrate with Google Apps.

DISTRICT

A District License provides simple multi-school management, application of custom security policies, and integration.

A walled garden, with beautiful views. Ed.VoiceThread is the perfect online environment for students to practice their communications skills online, yet in a controlled, accountable, and transparent setting.

Accountability and transparency. Students working within Ed.VoiceThread are protected by student-centered policies that ensure a safe and supportive environment:

Students cannot private message other students.

All student work is transparent to administrators and faculty within the school or district.

Student accounts can only interact with users that educators and administrators approve.

Custom tailored policies. Administrators can set global and individualized policies for students, enabling them to either restrict or give more freedom and autonomy, as age and local school policy dictates.

Reporting and analytics. Track usage and trends for individual users or your entire institution.

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Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting.

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We express ourselves in different ways. On Flip, you can use our simple and fun built-in camera to record your thoughts, add effects and share within your Flip group as video, audio only or text in your web browser or mobile app.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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As the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread, schools around the globe are shifting to online learning in an effort to slow the spread of the disease.

Members of ISTE's professional learning networks have been hard at work identifying key practices for successful online learning. Here are some of the best ideas from educators from around the world, many of whom have already been teaching during coronavirus closures.

Prepare and practice

1. Ensure digital equity.

Equity is the biggest obstacle in preparing for online learning, and the first thing you should be thinking about. If your district is not 1:1 and does not have devices to send home with everyone, survey teachers and families ahead of time to figure out who will need devices and bandwidth.

Jenna Conan, technology integration specialist at All Saints' Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas, points out that most families don't have one computer per person. During a school shutdown, parents may also be working from home, meaning several people could be competing for one or two computers. Therefore, make sure all online apps work on mobile devices in case a laptop is not available.

For teachers or students who don't have Wi-Fi at home, districts must figure out how to buy or rent Wi-Fi hotspots and then have a plan for distributing both devices and hotspots. If you have advance warning that a shutdown is imminent, districts can send devices and hotspots home with students before the closure. If a shutdown happens abruptly, plan a pick-up time and location, and arrange to deliver devices and hotspots to those who cannot pick them up.

Keep in mind that students who have individual education plans (IEPs) need to have access to their specific accommodations during the closure, including video access to aides and logins for apps.

2. Practice.

Schools that regularly have digital learning days - and have worked through home-connectivity and device issues - are already ahead of the game, says Michael Flood, ISTE Digital Equity PLN Leader. But if your school has not laid the groundwork, consider this to be an opportunity.

Teachers not already using a learning management system regularly, need to dive in now so that there will be no interruption in communication in the wake of a sudden closure. Teachers should train themselves and their students on the apps and technology tools they may need to use in the event of closure. Practice in the classroom and then send students off to try using the tools from home, says Sandra Chow, director of innovation and digital learning at Keystone Academy in Beijing.

Chow, who has been teaching online since coronavirus shut down her school in early February, says educators won't regret spending time on this.

"None of this learning will go to waste moving forward," she says, "as many of the skills learned during the online learning period will be equally beneficial in a regular classroom."

3. Provide clear expectations to staff and parents.

During a closure, communication between administrators, staff, parents and students is more important than ever.

"In an online environment, everyone's anxiety is high and channels of communication need to be frequent, clear and succinct," Chow says.
For big-picture communications, prepare an FAQ outlining all the details of how the school will operate during a closure so staff and parents are on the same page.

David Lowe, a parent and former assistant principal whose children's district in Washington state switched to remote learning on March 9, recommends the FAQ include where to find the daily assignments; a list of sites and tools the students will need, how to log in and what to do if the technology doesn't work; and, finally, the expectations of parents. "There's a lot of information to sift through and parents are working hard to make sure they're clear on what they should be doing to best support their students."

In addition to posting and distributing FAQs, schools should set up communitywide texting to communicate quickly and then advise people where to find follow-up messages via email or on your website.

Next, prepare a step-by-step guide on how to access and use online learning tools and curriculum. Make sure you present this information in various formats including video and text and include screenshots and screen-casting tutorials.

Ask families to make sure all students - especially the youngest learners - know how to log in to the apps and know their passwords. Teachers need to know how to take attendance. Provide extra tech support and make sure parents and teachers know how to ask for help.

4. Take time to plan.

If a shutdown occurs before your staff is ready to teach online, invest some time - even if it's just a day or two - to prepare before rolling out online learning with the students. The brief delay in starting online lessons will pay off in the long run. In the Washington district where Lowe's three children attend, staff spent time getting ready for an impending closure.

"The district took a whole day for all the teams to get together to create a plan for online learning," he said. "It was a really smart move."

Teams divvied up and tackled everything from logistical issues, like the setup of Zoom meetings, to instructional ones, like different home support models, and then reported out to the larger group. When the district shut down two days later, teachers got two planning days before fully jumping into online learning with the students. The team and individual planning days helped smooth implementation.

Even if a closure is sudden and offers no time to plan before schools are shuttered, it is still prudent to plan before beginning online lessons.

5. Pack your bag.

Make sure you have access to everything you need from home in case you are not able to return to school or bring home your school computer and move your files into the cloud.

Implementation

6. Establish daily schedules.

Expectations should be clear about when teachers and students need to be logged on. A full day in front of a screen is a lot for kids and teachers, especially for families who may be sharing one device. Many schools are choosing two check-in times - a morning meeting and an afternoon check-in - and then allowing families flexibility about how they organize the at-home school schedule.

Other schools are reorganizing the school schedule, by spreading one school day over two days. Students attend three classes in the morning and have the afternoons to work independently and interact with those teachers during "office hours." The next day, they attend the rest of their classes online in the morning and then have office hours with those teachers in the afternoons.

Sometimes it can be difficult to anticipate the roadblocks that students might face while navigating this new territory. Nadine Bailey, teacher librarian and technology integrator at the Western Academy of Beijing, suggests picking one student per grade and monitoring their "expected" path throughout the day from tool to tool to make sure everything is working as it should. If not, be flexible and make changes along the way.

It can be trickier handling specialty classes like PE, robotics or art. Adam Hill is a blogger and teacher at Victoria Shanghai Academy in Hong Kong, which has been closed since Jan. 22 and began offering remote learning on Feb. 5.

Hill's school found that students were struggling to make time each day for specialist instruction so they decided to allocate one day per week for all elective activities.

7. Provide robust learning.

In extreme circumstances like an impromptu closure, it's tempting for teachers to upload worksheets for students to complete and return. But online earning during a closure - especially during extended closures - should be at least as engaging as the classroom experience (if not more) or students will suffer.

Educator Alison Yang developed an online learning guide, which stresses that online learning should never be an excuse to assign busy work, but rather to address clear engaging learning objectives. Bailey, the Beijing teacher-librarian, adapted Yang's guide into one for parents to help them understand the objectives.

For key principals that ISTE recommends are:

Break learning into smaller chunks.

Be clear about expectations for online participation.

Provide immediate (or at least frequent) feedback through online knowledge checks, comments on collaborative documents and chat to keep students motivated and moving forward.

Include virtual meetings, live chats or video tutorials to maintain a human connection.

Chow's leadership team in Beijing met virtually to design an online learning plan, which included training for video production and other tools, online learning pedagogy as well as social-emotional training.

She stressed that the community will need time to adjust. Provide manageable and achievable goals to work on each week, listen to feedback and communicate frequently, she says.

8. Design independent learning.

Keep in mind that parents might either be at work or working from home and unable to help much. It's important to design learning that does not require a lot of support from parents who might already be overwhelmed.

Lowe, the parent from Washington state, said expectations about parental support might be the biggest issue for him and his wife. Providing guidance for parents on how they can be supporting their kids in an online learning model is also helpful.

"It feels similar to homeschooling right now," Lowe said. "The biggest challenge is parents supervising what their kids are supposed to be doing and at what time."

Lowe acknowledges that his family is lucky. He's a consultant who can work from home and his wife is a teacher, so they are available to pitch in. Not all parents will be able to cope as easily, especially those with small children who can't work from home.

"One of the best things our schools have done to support parents is streamlining information by creating one place for all the assignments, schedules and expectations," he said. "The closer to a checklist you can make these resources, the better."

9. Address the emotional toll.

Check in with students and coworkers, especially those who are less comfortable with digital tools to see if they need any help or someone to talk to. Being sequestered at home can be isolating and exacerbate the fear of dealing with a global crisis. Taking time to check in about feelings of anxiety is just as important as checking on academics.

In his guide to online learning, Rushton Hurley, an ISTE member and founder of Next Vista for Learning, shares a story from expat teachers in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus. After weeks of largely being confined to their apartments, teachers began calling each other and leaving the lines open, even if they weren't talking. They simply wanted the comfort of being able to speak up and have someone hear their voices. If a closure lasts for a long time, you will miss your students, and they will miss you and each other, Hurley said.

While it may seem fun to work from home, it can be challenging to keep to a regular schedule. Some things that can help include:

Take regular breaks.

Making time to exercise.

Keep to a regular sleep schedule.

Limit distractions when possible (turn off social media notifications, for example).

Set daily and weekly goals.

Make time to socialize, even if it's virtually.

10. Choose the right tools and stick with them.

A wide variety of technology tools, many free, are available to help. Jason Reagin, edtech consultant and teacher in Incheon, South Korea, has put together a Wakelet of apps offering free upgrades during the global crisis.

With so much out there, it can be tempting to try to use everything. Instead, limit the number of tools, apps and platforms so students and their parents are not overwhelmed.

It may be a little harder for students to follow classroom assignments when you are not there face to face. Some ideas from Arizona State University for helping kids focus are using different colored fonts on-screen to help learners distinguish important ideas. Try to keep online instructions short, simple and clear. Consider making video instructions instead of text.

Videoconferencing will take you and your students into each other's homes so it's important to consider privacy. Some programs let users blur your background. Dress as you would for attending school and expect students to do the same.

Online learning also presents a great opportunity to review digital etiquette and embed digital citizenship into online collaboration activities.
Jennifer Snelling is a freelance writer based in Eugene, Oregon. Diana Fingal is ISTE's director of editorial content.

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10 strategies for online learning during a coronavirus outbreak

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As the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread, schools around the globe are shifting to online learning in an effort to slow the spread of the disease. Members of ISTE's professional learning networks have been hard at work identifying key practices for successful online learning.

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"I love all of the information about student performance I get as a teacher. It helps me to quickly identify stronger students and weaker students, as well as concepts at the class level that students struggle with. Thank you so much for providing such a useful platform for teachers to use to engage our students and measure their performance!!"

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Quizalize - The best quiz platform for remote or real classrooms that delivers game-changing results

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Engage your class with fun, standards-tagged quizzes. Get instant data on student mastery. Automatically differentiated follow-up activities.

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Common Sense Media: Media Balance in Uncertain Times

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Common Sense Media: Media Balance in Uncertain Times

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Tips and resources for news literacy, media balance, and healthy communication.

Given the uncertainty we're all experiencing due to the coronavirus outbreak, it's not easy to "keep calm and carry on," as teachers are expected to do. Most are preparing for (or already experiencing) a school closure. And students are worried as they try to make sense of the quickly changing situation.

To help reduce students' anxiety and your own about the COVID-19 pandemic, we've put together some ideas and resources focused on news literacy, media balance, and healthy communication. We hope they're helpful as you navigate this difficult time.

Talk about it.

Avoiding conversations about the coronavirus will only increase students' anxiety. It's important for kids of all ages to talk through what they're hearing and get developmentally appropriate information from a trusted adult. Helpful resources to try:

Focus on the facts.

For lots of students, their anxiety about the coronavirus is the result of incomplete or incorrect information. Talk through the facts about the coronavirus in an age-appropriate way. For older students, share the CDC website for the most up-to-date information on the outbreak. Helpful resources to try:

Build critical-thinking and news literacy skills.

Social media can be a hotbed of rumors and misinformation -- even more so when people are acting and reacting from a place of fear. Guide students to credible news sources and encourage them to fact-check what they see on social media or hear from their friends about the coronavirus. If you have time to add some news literacy instruction, consider teaching a lesson so kids can practice these skills. Helpful lessons to try (modify for target grade as needed):

Model and encourage media balance.

With this quickly evolving situation, we may be compelled to keep up with the latest headlines. But given the upheaval the coronavirus is creating across the world, this constant stream of updates might make us feel uncertain, anxious, or even afraid. It's important for you and your students to reflect on how your media use makes you feel, and adjust your habits if needed. Helpful lessons to try (modify for target grade as needed):

Stay active and have some fun.

When we're feeling worried or stressed, a little distraction goes a long way. Incorporating some physical activity into the school day can be a fun way to lighten the mood and get students' minds off the outbreak. From how-to dance videos to yoga for kids, you can find easy-to-implement activities to get students' bodies moving and their minds calm. Helpful resources to try:

Support parents and caregivers.

If parents and caregivers are stressed, kids are going to pick up on it. While it's not your job to manage parents' anxiety, it is important to be mindful of its impact on your students. Keep the lines of communication open as you deal with school closures (or at least the fear of them). And pass along resources and tips for parents and caregivers to help them deal with the uncertainty of the situation in a healthy way. Helpful resources to share:

If you have specific questions about digital citizenship or teaching with technology during the coronavirus pandemic, feel free to send them to our editors at [email protected] and write "Seeking resources to deal with coronavirus" in the subject line.

Best Tools for Virtual and Distance Learning

Tools to build great learning experiences for remote students.

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Reduce Student Anxiety (and Your Own) During Uncertain Times | Common Sense Education

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Given the uncertainty we're all experiencing due to the coronavirus outbreak, it's not easy to "keep calm and carry on," as teachers are expected to do. Most are preparing for (or already experiencing) a school closure. And students are worried as they try to make sense of the quickly changing situation.

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We are committed to supporting Art Educators and their students through any potential interruptions due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus). To help you develop a contingency plan for your school or district, we are offering FREE ACCESS to our Davis Digital platform through June 30th, 2020.

Teachers will have open access to the library of 25,000 fine art images as well as full use of student books and teacher editions of any of the following titles:

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COVID-19 Assistance: Free Resources for Impacted Schools

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We are committed to supporting Art Educators and their students through any potential interruptions due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus). To help you develop a contingency plan for your school or district, we are offering FREE ACCESS to our Davis Digital platform through June 30th, 2020.

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EdWeek: I've Been Teaching Online for Years. Here's How to Prevent Burnout During a School Closure

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EdWeek: I've Been Teaching Online for Years. Here's How to Prevent Burnout During a School Closure

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Opinion

5 essential tips to structure your day in this unstructured time

Yes, it is possible to experience burnout while teaching online.

With the current surge in schools turning to the web to keep instruction going while physical buildings are closed, many teachers are being thrust into teaching 100 percent online for the first time. For some, especially those on the outside looking in, this may seem like a dream. But this shift may take teachers who are already quite exhausted to full-fledged burnout.

In 2011, I made a bold move and began working completely online. My family and friends thought I had miraculously scored a piece of heaven when they saw me working in my pajamas, but what they didn't know was that the reason I had on those pajamas was because I had been up for over 24 hours straight trying to meet a deadline that had crept up on me-and I was severely burned out.

I know what you're thinking: Why did you wait until the last minute to get all your work done? Why hadn't you organized your time better?

It started innocently enough. I would wake up early to usher the kids off to school, then as soon as I returned and logged into the computer, I found myself answering one email after the next, clicking one link after another, browsing one website for information after another. Then, somehow I'd end up scrolling social media in the name of "researching to find valuable resources."

Days would roll by this way. Just because I was working from home didn't mean I was getting more rest. Then add a few all-nighters or near all-nighters, and you have a volatile mix of burnout juice.

So what can you glean from my experience?

You have to treat working from home the same way you would in your classroom-pajamas or not. Even though I was working from my dining room table and not my desk in a classroom, I learned that structure and time management are two of the most essential skills for efficiently teaching online.

I learned some important strategies along the way.

1. Conduct essential self-care activities first, preferably right after you wake. Yes, you should still get up and brush teeth, comb hair, shave, and/or even put on makeup (where applicable) if you know at some point you'll need to be seen-even if only by video. (Importantly, during this time of uncertainty, you do not want to find yourself in an emergency situation in which you have to leave your home quickly. If you're already dressed, you'll be able to do this at a moment's notice.)

You will be tempted to just roll out of bed and tiptoe downstairs for some coffee. Then while you're conducting your morning browse of your notifications, news, and a myriad of other things we check on our phones when we have a quiet moment, you'll be tempted to respond to emails. That morphs into trying to problem-solve, and then you've somehow shifted into completing work activities.

2. Plan your week, and schedule the tasks you need to get done. That means you need to set specific times for specific tasks to maintain structure for your day. While a to-do list is a useful visual tool, if your tasks are not set for specific times and lengths of time, you will ultimately find yourself struggling to get things done.

Schedule the most important, must-get-done today, essential activities first. Checking and responding to emails can seem essential, but it can become a rabbit-trail activity that leads to more rabbit-trail activities that could likely end in hours passing of unproductivity.

Remember to schedule your household chores to determine which chores will get done and when.

3. Set some alarms on your phone to enforce structure. There will be no bells ringing to remind you that valuable time is passing. The key to making this work, is setting realistic time limits on your work. We often underestimate how long a task will take.

4. Meal prep the night before or first thing in the morning, especially if you have children at home. And then be diligent about scheduling those meal and break times logically throughout your day.

Working from home can easily become a marathon of sitting in a chair and snacking while typing away at the computer until your body suffers. Just mindlessly snacking while you work can easily usher in an unhealthy eating habit. You can ward off burnout by carving out adequate time to take a break, actually enjoy what you're eating, and rest your brain.

5. Get out, and get some fresh air as much as possible. Seriously, take advantage of the flexibility that comes with working from home. You could even choose to set up your workstation on your patio or in your yard, if your internet range will allow it. If you have the capability to go to a park or another place you enjoy, do that, too.

Even though structure and time management are important, this is an unusual time in history, so allow yourself some flexibility. Every day won't go exactly according to plan, and that's okay. The point is to keep yourself healthy.

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I've Been Teaching Online for Years. Here's How to Prevent Burnout During a School Closure

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Opinion Yes, it is possible to experience burnout while teaching online. With the current surge in schools turning to the web to keep instruction going while physical buildings are closed, many teachers are being thrust into teaching 100 percent online for the first time.

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Genially: Templates for structuring and formatting content

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Genially: Templates for structuring and formatting content

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Google Arts and Culture: Collections and connections to exhibits

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Google Arts and Culture: Collections and connections to exhibits

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Explore all Collections on Google Arts & Culture.

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4K Video Downloader: Allows for pulling content from YouTube, etc.

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4K Video Downloader: Allows for pulling content from YouTube, etc.

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Enjoy watching videos anywhere, any time, even when you are offline. Downloading is simple and straightforward: just copy the link from your browser and click 'Paste Link' in the application. That's it! Save video and audio from YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, SoundCloud, Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, DailyMotion, Likee and Tumblr.

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Kialo Edu - The tool to teach critical thinking and rational debate

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Kialo is a free tool used by educators world-wide to teach critical thinking, facilitate rational classroom debate and explain controversial issues.

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Explain Everything: Post lessons & interactive media 

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Explain Everything: Post lessons & interactive media 

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Due to the recent, widespread, and constantly growing necessity to temporarily close schools, we've decided to officially express our desire to help. We believe that we can help teachers and children with online school scenarios, so everyone affected by these closures can avoid significant breaks in their educational programs.

We'd like to support any school in need. That's why we are offering extended free access to Explain Everything Whiteboard, a versatile tool which can be used for online school scenarios.

Nothing should disrupt education, and nothing has to. Remote teaching and learning solutions can be used in any case of temporary school closures. As a solid edtech tool which is already being used for online education by many institutions worldwide, Explain Everything can help avoid major interruptions.

Helpful Resources to Start Running an Online School

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🧘‍♀️Keep Calm and Teach Online - Free Explain Everything for Closed Schools

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Due to the recent, widespread, and constantly growing necessity to temporarily close schools, we've decided to officially express our desire to help. We believe that we can help teachers and children with online school scenarios, so everyone affected by these closures can avoid significant breaks in their educational programs. We'd like to support any school in need.

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Primarily Math, but new content in Humanities and Science

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Run pulse-checks with quiz, polls and other questions to collect valuable student feedback. For example, pre-assess knowledge, or find out how students are feeling in general. Kahoot!'s visual reports on live games and challenges will help you with formative assessment: see how the class performed, identify difficult questions that need followup, and reinforce learning.

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Online games | Kahoot! - Your distance learning platform

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Inspire your students to play thousands of online games. Reach students even when they're not at school with Kahoot!

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RULER (Yale): Managing Anxiety Around COVID-19

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RULER (Yale): Managing Anxiety Around COVID-19

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If you're noticing anxiety in yourself or those around you these days, you're not alone. With mention of COVID-19 (commonly known as coronavirus) filling radio and television news, social media feeds, and our email inboxes, it's no wonder we're all anxious. Between the uncertainty, the real health risks, and the hype, fear and anxiety are feelings that are both valid and common. We wanted to provide you with a few ideas for managing those feelings.

Start with yourself. Before you help others with their feelings, make sure you are okay-that you are calm enough to validate, reassure, and support others. Practice your calming strategies. Practice self-care. Talk to others. Breathe.

Be aware of your own emotions and accept how you feel. With widespread illness, real uncertainty exists. We may be worried about our own health and safety, the well-being of our family members, or even childcare or workplace issues. Remind yourself that a certain level of anxiety is grounded and normal. Seek professional help if you feel your anxiety or fear is getting in the way.

Focus on the facts. Consult reliable and up-to-date sources of information such as the Center for Disease Control website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html and your local news source for updates on closings, procedures, and guidelines.

Control the amount of information you take in. In times like these, we may feel like we have no control. One thing we can control is how much information we seek out and how often we tune in. Take breaks as needed from the news, social media, and conversations that make you feel anxious.

Don't be afraid to say no. If someone asks you to attend a social event or goes to hug you or shake your hand and you are not interested, this is not a time to push yourself past your comfort zone. Give yourself permission to say no, as your physical and mental health is the most important thing. At a loss for words? Try something like, "With all the germs going around, I'll take a raincheck."

Respect others' decisions but know what's right for you. We all handle the news differently. You may know someone stocking up on masks and paper goods; others may be continuing to host parties. Let them go about their business, and think about what you need to do for you and your own physical and emotional well-being.

Be your best self when dealing with stigma and fears. If you hear rumors or notice suspicion around certain groups of people being sick, question ungrounded assumptions and do your best to protect those who are stigmatized or judged. Have compassion for those who are ill and those whose lives have been disrupted by the virus or society's response to it, including having compassion for yourself.

Support others who are dealing with anxiety and uncertainty. When helping others with their anxiety, particularly your colleagues, students, or children, we suggest you:

Manage your own anxiety first.

Don't be afraid to discuss the situation-open communication sometimes is the best way to allay unpleasant emotions.

Don't assume you know how others, and particularly children, are feeling or why they're feeling that way. Ask.

Consider the age and developmental level of those with whom you speak. Take your cues from them on what to discuss.

Reassure children with facts. Remind them that adults, in particular capable scientists and health care workers, are working together to keep everyone safe. Discuss what you are doing and what they can do to stay safe and germ-free.

Dealing with the uncertainty of the current situation is difficult for everyone, and we want to support in any way we can. Please feel free to share the above with your school community, and do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have questions, suggestions, or seek additional guidance in this area. Below are links to other resources you may find helpful as you navigate this challenging time.

Sincerely,

The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence Team

Webinar Recording

Managing Anxiety around COVID-19
We have created a document of strategies attendees of the webinar listed above use to manage anxiety during this time. To access the document, click here.

Additional Resources

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If you're noticing anxiety in yourself or those around you these days, you're not alone. With mention of COVID-19 (commonly known as coronavirus) filling radio and television news, social media feeds, and our email inboxes, it's no wonder we're all anxious.

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Duke: Building Community in an Asynchronous Online Course

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Duke: Building Community in an Asynchronous Online Course

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In the face of the current Coronavirus outbreak, Duke Kunshan University (DKU) is moving all classroom instruction online. In order to support this effort, Duke Learning Innovation and DKU's Center for Teaching and Learning are creating materials to help faculty effectively transition their traditionally in-person courses to an exclusively online environment. We will share some of these materials via our blog in the coming weeks. Read more about the entire effort in this Duke Today article.
Welcome students to class

Students in online classes "come into" the online course through the course homepage, like students in face-to-face classes enter through the classroom door. Be sure there's a welcome statement on the course homepage, and that it's clear to students from the homepage what to do or read first, where they will find what they need, and how to get their questions answered.

Ask students to introduce themselves in a discussion forum for that purpose, including a photo or short video, and an audio pronunciation of their names. Post your own introduction, with a greeting for your students.

Since your students are used to being able to connect with you directly in person, it is important to clearly explain to them how they can "virtually" contact you; when and how will you hold office hours, what are the best ways to contact you other than office hours, and how they can get help if needed.

Set expectations

Be very clear about your expectations for activities and assignments. A key aspect of online courses is that instructions and expectations need to be exceedingly clear and consistent. Thoroughly explain each step of assignments so there is no confusion about what to do, where to post, etc. Explain how you will handle due dates and assignment deadlines (including the time zone you're using when you set the due date and time). Link to any necessary technical tutorial documents that students should view to complete course activities and assignments (these normally already exist; you shouldn't have to create them yourself).

Generally, put yourselves in your students' shoes and think about what information they will need to do the work you hope they will do in your course.

Foster respectful discussions

Use a set of community discussion guidelines designed for online courses to make clear to students what the expectations are for written and verbal discussions in an online classroom. You could have students agree to the standards, discuss them and propose additions, or just have a brief Q&A about them. See an example set of discussion guidelines here.

To build an active, connected community where students care about their peers, consider having a "social" discussion forum (sometimes called a "water cooler," "break room" or similar) for non-class-related conversation. DKU students may do this in WeChat groups, but having an option for it in the course site may also be welcome.

Organize and manage online discussion forums

A key tool in asynchronous teaching is the discussion forum, where students can respond to prompts, summarize their understanding, ask and answer peers' questions, and "think in writing" about any course content. Ideally, online courses use discussion forums frequently to engage students in critical writing and analysis.

Asynchronous discussions allow wonderful, rich interactions around course content and topics, and are particularly supportive for introverted students, those who have the class language (English, at DKU) as a second language, or who need time to process and develop their thoughts before responding.

Rather than having students respond only to the instructor (by answering a posted prompt, for example), have students post their own response and also read and respond to others' prompts in order to build rich discussion threads.

Be sure to consider the volume of others' posts that you are asking your students to read. If you have a class with 20 students, each of whom is asked to write a half-page to a page in response to a prompt, that can be a lot of additional reading and thoughtful commentary you are asking students to do, one or more times a week. Instead, consider breaking students into smaller groups of 6-8 students to discuss a prompt together - each group could perhaps post a summary of their key outcomes into a main course forum.

You can also assign students roles which vary by week. For example, different students may be assigned to post a readings summary one week, to take a "pro" or a "con" stance on an issue, to post an initial response to a prompt, to post a follow-up, to design some sample assessment questions about the readings, or other activities - with roles rotating in different weeks. Each student is doing SOMETHING each week, but each may not be doing all of the tasks.

Hold office hours, and reach out

Schedule online office hours once or twice a week at different times of day to accommodate students in different time zones. DKU faculty can use Zoom for live office hours; use Zoom's waiting room feature with your personal Zoom meeting room to control which student enters your meeting room for 1:1 meetings.

If you find that you're not hearing from some students frequently in live class meetings, you can set up some short reserved time slots and have students sign up, to get a better sense of how they are doing and what they need more information about.

Overall, learning online can feel disconnected to some students, so encourage student-student and student-instructor interaction and sharing in as many ways as possible. Consider more frequent announcements with reminders, check-ins, updates for the students. If there are social media tools or other ways that students use to stay connected, consider whether to have a class space in those tools, or a class "handle" for ad hoc interactions (but do set guidelines for the types of information to be posted in these tools - social only? or is academic content and discussion ok?)

Use synchronous class sessions for interaction

Often in online classes, synchronous class meeting times are reduced (or eliminated) compared to traditional face-to-face classes. This means it's even more important to use the virtual class meeting time for interaction rather than content presentation.

Instead of lecturing in your virtual class meeting, assign readings or pre-recorded videos that cover your usual lecture content, along with problems or prompts based on the material for students to work through on their own. Students can read or view ahead of time and be ready to discuss or ask questions when the class meets live (this "flipped" mode works well online - students can absorb their first exposure to the course content at their own pace prior to "class," and then in the short, live sessions the focus can be on diving deeper).

Before a live online session, ask the students to send you questions and to identify difficulties they had with the assigned readings or problems. During synchronous sessions, use the time to answer questions and guide the students through common misconceptions on the assigned material and problems, rather than lecturing.

Design online courses for student learning

When faculty first transition traditional classes to online, mostly asynchronous courses, they can find it difficult to conceptualize what the class will be like without in-class time. It's a good reminder that, even for traditional face-to-face courses, most of students' engagement with the course materials and activities is asynchronous (outside of the classroom, on their own time).

To think about how to move a class online, start by focusing on the existing learning objectives for your course. In your learning objectives, you have already stated what you want students to know and be able to do as a result of your course. Consider whether those will now need to change due to the change in course modality. Think creatively about how the same learning objectives could be accomplished in an online, mostly-asynchronous environment - you might be surprised by how little your planned course activities need to change.

Use individual assignments as an opportunity for students to engage with your topic, rather than just asking them to read or work through problems.

Give your students a case study or experiment to carry out or a multi-step problem they must solve through reading different material or watching videos that show the stages and steps involved.

Give students assignments that require them to work together outside of a synchronous session to solve a problem. Students can work together in ways that are accessible to them - chat, Zoom, email, or other tools. You can ask the groups to briefly report on their results at the next synchronous session, or in the discussion forum.

Author: Seth Anderson

Seth works with faculty in the Humanities, and across the university, in order to help them improve pedagogy and enhance meaningful student learning. His interests include active learning techniques, the educational use of mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc.), wearable technology, online course development and delivery, digital video and imagery, virtual and augmented reality, and Web-based educational tools. Read more posts by Seth Anderson " email

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Building Community in Asynchronous Online Courses - Duke Learning Innovation

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In the face of the current Coronavirus outbreak, Duke Kunshan University (DKU) is moving all classroom instruction online. In order to support this effort, Duke Learning Innovation and DKU's Center for Teaching and Learning are creating materials to help faculty effectively transition their traditionally in-person courses to an exclusively online environment.

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Curriki: Open Ed Resources - lesson plans and resources

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Curriki: Open Ed Resources - lesson plans and resources

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Curriki - Shaping the Future of Learning

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We welcome you to join in Curriki's mission to make the creation and distribution of engaging learning content accessible to everyone. Your contribution helps us develop new technologies and services that enable users across the globe.

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CommonLit: Readings/Articles with lessons and assessments

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CommonLit: Readings/Articles with lessons and assessments

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

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CommonLit | Free Online Reading Passages and Literacy Resources

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CommonLit is a comprehensive literacy program with thousands of reading lessons, full-year ELA curriculum, benchmark assessments, and standards-based data for teachers.

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WeVideo is offering support to schools affected by COVID-19

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As schools around the world temporarily close due to COVID-19, students are forced to stay home. WeVideo is ready to offer free accounts to those affected.

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EdTechTeam: Free Distance Learning for Faculty

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EdTechTeam: Free Distance Learning for Faculty

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This Introduction to Google Classroom is intended for beginners who are new to Classroom or want to refresh their skills.

Learn skills and earn Open Badges in Google Classroom (2020) including creating, reusing and grading content (e.g. assignments, questions, materials, quizzes).

Course sponsored by Acer for Education and featuring practical Howdou assessments.

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This Introduction to Google Classroom is intended for beginners who are new to Classroom or want to refresh their skills. Learn skills and earn Open Badges in Google Classroom (2020) including creating, reusing and grading content (e.g. assignments, questions, materials, quizzes). Course sponsored by Acer for Education and featuring practical Howdou assessments.

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ASCD: 7 Ways to Pass Your (COVID-19) Time Productively

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ASCD: 7 Ways to Pass Your (COVID-19) Time Productively

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Editor's note: In response to the enormous disruption caused by COVID-19, Naphtali is offering a free, two-part webinar series this week for educators on the topic of mindset. Details in his bio.
As with folks in many other industries, educators have been deeply impacted by COVID-19. Many are stuck at home with little to do while they wait for the other coronavirus shoe to drop.

Sure, we've been asked to prepare and deliver online classes, and have done so admirably, even if it's far from our first choice. But still, there likely is a lot of time left in our days where we could be doing things that will make the best use of our time, curb cabin fever, and position ourselves for immediate success as soon as the storm passes.

Here are some strategies for what to do with your newfound time:

1. Work on that neglected project. We all have things that we've wanted to FOREVER, such as craft that intricate lesson, write that article or book, organize that event, whatever it is. Use the newfound time at your disposal to do that thing as if it was your actual job. Schedule it with meaningful time blocks and pursue it as if you have a deadline. Divide the job into chunks (such as X number of words typed per day) and stay focused on your goal until it is achieved. Set SMART goals to keep you on track.

2. Read that book and/or take that course. Now is a great time to do that learning that you've been putting off. Whether the information you seek is tactical, like a new skill or how to use a tool, something in self-development, or a curiosity that has long interested you, go ahead and add new content and skills to your toolkit.

3. Rewrite your resume and LinkedIn profile. No one knows how this crazy situation will end. If you've been let go, worry that you might be, or just want to use this time to explore different opportunities, now would be as good a time as any to review and enhance your CV and LinkedIn profile. Prioritize the skills that are most valuable and transferable and make sure to emphasize the qualities, such as creativity, industriousness, collaboration and leadership skills, that most employers seek.

4. Network like crazy. Use the time to make new connections and to get to know them. Send personalized invitations and, where appropriate, request time (virtually or perhaps in-person) to become better acquainted. There are many people out there like you -- leaders, teachers, even introverts -- with lots of time on their hands that will be more open than usual to connecting and going deeper than the standard online "handshake." Get out there!

5. Add value. Whether you're already connected with someone or want to become so, focus on adding value. This could be in the form of liking, commenting on and sharing their content. It could also include sharing your own, such as a lesson plan or effective teaching technique, in a way that improves others' conditions. Doing this is a great way of demonstrating the usefulness of your connection and demonstrating why a deeper relationship would be mutually beneficial.

6. Find a mentor. If you want to take your life and career to the next level, get with someone who is ten steps ahead of you and can shorten your learning curve, point you in the right direction and make connections that will open up new opportunities for you.

7. Get organized. Many of us struggle with cluttered workplaces, especially if they were developed ad hoc as we scurried to get our new virtual workspaces set up. Use the time at your disposal to better organize your things, because a messy, disorganized workspace will lead to a messy, disorganized workflow and limit output.

No one knows when and how this craziness will end. But if you use the present gift of time to your advantage, you'll be able to look back at it with added comfort knowing that you did your best to use the time wisely and position yourself for future success.
Naphtali Hoff, PsyD and president of Impactful Coaching & Consulting, is launching a series of free webinars for educators. The series kicks off March 17 at 11 AM ET with a discussion on mindset. Future sessions will focus on active learning and engagement techniques, clarifying learning objectives and classroom management skills. Learn more about Naphtali and his work by connecting with him on Twitter or at his website. Like this article? Sign up for ASCD SmartBrief to get news like this in your inbox, or check out all of SmartBrief's education newsletters, covering career and technical education, educational leadership, math education and more.

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7 ways to pass your (COVID-19) time productively

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Editor's note: In response to the enormous disruption caused by COVID-19, Naphtali is offering a free, two-part webinar series this week for educators on the topic of mindset. Details in his bio. As with folks in many other industries, educators have been deeply impacted by COVID-19.

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Every day, a new batch of colleges announces that in-person classes are closed and teaching will shift online to try to halt the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19. This has thrust an unprecedented number of teachers into a format for which they may have little or no training.

So EdSurge asked our teaching advice columnist, Bonni Stachowiak, to offer a quick primer. Stachowiak is host of a long-running podcast called "Teaching in Higher Ed," and she's the dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California. Her campus is still open-for now-but she is bracing for disruption and sees it all around her.

We talked to Stachowiak for a bonus edition of the EdSurge Podcast, and you can hear it on our podcast feed wherever you listen.

Or read the highlights here, edited and condensed for clarity and readability.

First, the tips:

The Simplest Way to Go Online is to Shift to a Video Conference Platform

Stachowiak says that just lecturing to a webcam instead of an in-person class isn't the best way to teach online, but it is the easiest way to switch. Under the circumstances, it is better than nothing. "I'd rather that you do that for your students, for yourself than to cancel all the classes," she argues.
EdSurge is covering the latest updates and developments concerning the impact of coronavirus on education here.
So the first step is to pick a web conferencing tool, she adds, like Zoom or Skype. Often the college already pays for access to one of them.

Think Shorter

If it's hard to hold students' attention in person, it's even harder online, says Stachowiak: "You'll want to think about shortening that experience. The online environment tends to have shorter, more-compact opportunities and then other things to do that are more engaging than just sitting and listening."

One reason, she adds, is that students may be logging on through their smartphones, or watching a recording later instead of tuning in live.

Make Sure to Record Online Sessions For Those Who Can't Tune in Live

Because not everyone will be able to make it to class, and because it's easy to do, press record on whatever tool you use to offer remote classes, Stachowiak says. She has a habit of sharing the recording with students just as soon as a session is over, so she doesn't forget.

But don't just put a large video file on Dropbox, which can take students a long time to download. Either put the video on YouTube and share the link, or use a service that manages streaming, which some colleges already buy access to, she adds.

Lighting is Key, and Think About Virtual Eye Contact

When you're standing in front of a class via live video, make sure you aren't standing in the shadows. "Think about your webcam and having your light source in the room come from in front of you so that the light is shining on your face as opposed to turning you into this shadowy figure that looks a little scary," says Stachowiak.

"You should join the session early so you can look at yourself and ask, where's the light coming from? Is it the right positioning for that camera? And the other thing to think about is that you can simulate eye contact by looking at the camera that for many of us is sitting on top of our monitor-so put your notes at the top of your screen so you look at the camera more."

Use Polls to Keep Students Engaged

There are many tools available to pose multiple-choice questions to students remotely. Or professors can just ask students to respond to a prompt in the text chat included in most video conference platforms. Stachowiak suggests including at least three polls or opportunities to interact during each online class session.

Here's more of the conversation:
EdSurge: As colleges close physical classes and shift teaching online, we're seeing concern among online learning experts that the teaching will be done badly since so many of the professors doing it will be new to the format. Are you hearing that?
Stachowiak: I absolutely am. In fact, a lot of it's getting really critical, like, "What you're doing, that's not online teaching-you're not in the cool kids club."

I was really happy to see this morning that Jesse Stommel [co-founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab at the University of Mary Washington] tweeted in response to some of this. And his response was to remind all of us that yes, online teaching is hard. But then he comes back and says, teaching is hard. They're both hard, and we don't talk enough about pedagogy in general, let alone when that becomes digital pedagogy.

So one of the things I think we need to be saying is 'come on over [to online teaching].' There's a whole network of people that have been doing this for a long time and have failed and experimented and tried things. We would love to be able to help you just make that move.

Let's start with some small things. If you're going to make that kind of change, you're going to start small. I love what many of the universal design for learning people say. Tom Tobin is the first person who taught me about this, but it's a UDL principle, and that's "plus one." Don't think you're going to transform your entire course to the greatest online course that's ever existed. Do a plus one. Say to yourself, "What can I do this week? What can I do in the next two days to be able to meet the needs?"

It's almost like that frustration by somebody who is the longtime movie reviewer when somebody comes in and acts like they know everything about film history because they watched one artsy film. But you're saying that this is not a time to say, "go away from online learning."

I think that's such a helpful analogy and I'm going to be taking it with me after today, because I want to say to people, "Come on in, the movie theater is nice. I've got some popcorn for you. It's a large theater. There's lots of people that have been around watching many movies. And there are experts that may be showing you what you might not see initially, but also your perspective is valued and we welcome you into the show."

I can't tell you the number of times I come back to what's known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, that's named after researchers. But the idea is that the more you know about something, the more you realize that you don't know. But even if you've been doing this a long time, many of us still feel like there's so much more we could do and so much more to learn. And so being a part of a community and recognizing that you're part of many, many people working in solidarity together to help our students and help other faculty to make these kinds of transitions-whether it's the coronavirus today or some other thing that raises a sense of urgency tomorrow.
We're noticing a lot of resource sharing by folks in higher ed and in schools-and sharing information about what their campus or school is doing, including teaching tips. What kind of things are you seeing?
I've really been amazed at this. I'm on a task force now with our vice presidents and then a group of us that have been deemed as essential personnel. And at first I was thinking, "Oh gosh, I'm not sure I know what I'm doing here." But a lot of people have already really done this in prior iterations, whether it was campuses that were affected by fires or other kinds of crises. And so a number of individuals, including Daniel Stanford, who's the director of faculty development and technology innovation at the Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul University.

He's put together a whole spreadsheet that's curated from institutions from all around. And it was so great to me to watch it. Initially, it was over on a Google Doc. Remote resources for business continuity. Yeah. One of the common names that you'll see is keep teaching and you'll also see class continuity as a theme that comes up a lot, or academic continuity. It started out as a Google Doc and when I first went up there, it was really fun just to see in the upper right hand corner, if someone's logged in there, then you'll see their little avatar, but if they're not, you see the little characters.
You're continuing to teach in there and your classes are not canceled at your university. How are your students handling the uncertainty?
Just yesterday I had a meeting with my students and something didn't go as I had planned and I looked around at all of their faces and they are just, it's one week before our spring break. This is normal for one week before our spring break, for students to be feeling stressed during their semester. This is very normal. And so I had just decided, you know what? We can [do what we had scheduled later]. I just wanted to check in with them. So we have a little thing we do where they bring in business ethics news and as you could imagine, the coronavirus has been coming up a lot.

One of the young women shared about her mom being in a low-wage job and how her pay had just been cut 80 percent, because whatever industry it is that she's in, that there just isn't as much need for the services that she typically would provide. And then this overwhelming, just, feeling of angst. So I felt like I was able to answer some of their questions, but also re-emphasize that we need to be looking to science at times like this [to learn about the coronavirus]. We need to be looking to experts at times like this. So it was part of just an opportunity to reinforce, they're looking to me as a source of authority.
As you mention, there is this potential out there for misinformation about this coronavirus and COVID-19. That is something that seems like an educational teachable moment for professors and teachers.
There's a leadership author who writes a lot about change and his name is John Kotter, and that first step [he suggests] on how do you influence change is to create a sense of urgency. Well, the coronavirus is doing that for us.

But many of us have been concerned about misinformation long before this particular version of the coronavirus, the COVID-19, has showed up in our world. And Mike Caulfield is one of those experts. He's at Washington State University and also works with a number of nonprofits that are fighting against misinformation. And he has a wonderful resource called SIFTing Through the Coronavirus Outbreak. SIFT is an acronym that he tried to use to replace some of the acronyms that were less helpful in information literacy. So SIFT, it stands for Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims, quotes and media to the original content. So if you're interested in misinformation, Mike has a wonderful three-hour course. It's online, entirely self-paced and free that you can use. You can also download his materials and then customize them for any class that you were teaching.

It's just so important to talk about it with our students, to over-communicate, to leave plenty of opportunities open for them to have their questions answered.

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Coronavirus Has Led to a Rush of Online Teaching. Here's Some Advice for Newly Remote Instructors - EdSurge News

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Every day, a new batch of colleges announces that in-person classes are closed and teaching will shift online to try to halt the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19. This has thrust an unprecedented number of teachers into a format for which they may have little or no training.

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TED-Ed lessons on all subjects. TED-Ed celebrates the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Discover hundreds of animated lessons, create customized lessons, and share your big ideas.

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Class Hook: Topical Video Clips from Pop Culture sources

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Class Hook: Topical Video Clips from Pop Culture sources

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"ClassHook is the creative piece I've been looking for YEARS!! Anytime I see a clip in a movie that I could use, I try and make a mental note but usually have a hard time accessing the movie. Because I teach anatomy, there are SOOOO many possibilities. This is a fantastic site."

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ClassHook | Educational TV and Movie Clips

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Make learning relevant with educational scenes from TV shows & movies.

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UN RaderHalltoppers
PW WA*1834

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BrainPOP - Animated Educational Site for Kids - Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health, and Technology

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AMLE: Resources for Middle Level Educators

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AMLE: Resources for Middle Level Educators

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During this unprecedented time, educators are being asked to support their students and school communities while adapting to an entirely different way of teaching almost overnight. This can be especially challenging when working with young adolescents, who are already going through a transformative time of development. At the same time, we know the power of AMLE members to support one another and share resources that are working well to keep our students on track, both academically and personally.

Explore and add to AMLE's crowdsourced and curated resources for advisory and online learning. And don't forget to join us for an upcoming webinar or roundtable to hear from experts on a range of topics related to COVID-19 and share your own perspective.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

Connect with Colleagues and Experts

AMLE learning events and collaborative online spaces to support you through the pandemic.

Free Webinar for All Middle Grades Educators
Webinar: Promoting Personal Wellness during COVID-19
Host: Jennifer Piela
Wednesday, March 18, 2020, 3-4pm ET
During this unprecedented time, you as middle level educators are being called upon to support your students and their families through the pandemic and transform overnight how you teach. At the same time, you may yourself have stress and anxiety caused by how these events are impacting your own families. That makes it all the more important to prioritize your own wellness during this challenging time. Join us as corporate wellness consultant and owner of Dalai Mama Yoga provides tips for stress management and staying well during the pandemic.

AMLE Member Exclusive Roundtable Discussion
Leadership Roundtable: Responding to COVID-19
Host: Dr. Laurie Barron
Thursday, March 19, 2020, 3-4pm ET
Moderated by Superintendent Dr. Laurie Barron, join us for an open forum to share how we've each been responding to the outbreak and transition to remote learning. This is an informal opportunity for members to learn from, connect with, and support each other. Bring your perspective and questions to the group.

Remote Learning During COVID-19

Tools for keeping young adolescents on track, crowdsourced and curated by your middle level colleagues.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

Remote Advisory During COVID-19

Activities designed by middle level educators to help students continue to develop personally while they are out of the classroom.

Kindness Bingo
Help students remember to make kind choices by gamifying it with bingo!

Distance Check-In
We know the importance of checking in with our students on a daily basis to get a quick sense of how they're feeling that day. A simple Google form can help you accomplish that objective remotely.

*These resources have been submitted by middle level educators and curated by a team of non-staff AMLE members. Any linkages from this web site to the web site of another party do not constitute or imply AMLE's endorsement, recommendation, or favoring of said resource. Users should ensure that a resource is authorized for use by their respective school leadership.

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During this unprecedented time, educators are being asked to support their students and school communities while adapting to an entirely different way of teaching almost overnight. This can be especially challenging when working with young adolescents, who are already going through a transformative time of development.

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Meet Screencastify Record: The world's leading tool for recording video straight from your computer screen.

millions of teachers & students use Screencastify to create amazing videos

powerfully simple online screen recording

Whether you're a brand new or a seasoned video creator, you'll find that Screencastify can do it all. With just a click, you'll be on your way to creating professional looking screen recordings to improve the way you communicate. Start creating:

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Record has the tools to help your videos stand out for every viewer. Take advantage of our easy-to-use annotation tools to keep your audience focused on what's important. Enhance your video:

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See who watched more than once to measure effectiveness

Ensure your message is received with Interactive Questions

K-12's most popular and beloved screencasting tool. Quickly create and share recordings from a browser tab, webcam, or full desktop view.

Our blazing fast, browser-based editor empowers anyone to easily create powerful and professional videos - whether recorded with Screencastify or not.

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Screencastify Record is the simplest screen recording tool for educators, personal, or professional use.

frequently asked questions
How many videos can I make with Record?
You can create up to 10 videos with Screencastify Record. We also have flexible plans for those who want to create more videos.
Can I record just a browser tab with Record?
Yes! You can also record your entire screen and embed your webcam if you choose. In addition, you can record webcam only.
Can I record a Google Slides presentation?
Yes! You can record whatever is on your computer screen.

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Free Screen Recording Chrome Extension | Screencastify

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Add the Screencastify record extension to Chrome to start recording in seconds. No download required.

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Grades 6-8 | Interactive Lessons | PBS LearningMedia

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These interactive lessons span a range of subjects and grade levels. Each presents content from a public media production, specially tailored to the curricular needs of the classroom. Teachers can assign them to individual students, pairs, or small groups for self-paced work, or can present all or parts of the lesson to a full class.

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Pear Deck: Interactive Presentations in Google Suite

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Pear Deck: Interactive Presentations in Google Suite

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Resources & Community | Pear Deck Learning

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Looking for inspiration, support, tips and tricks, and more? Look no further.

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Class Dojo: Tools for communicating and interacting

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Class Dojo: Tools for communicating and interacting

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ClassDojo helps teachers, parents, and students build amazing classroom communities.

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Your browser either doesn't support Javascript, or you've turned it off. To use Mentimeter, please make sure to turn Javascript on. How do I enable Javascript?

Gain valuable insights from everyone around you with Word Clouds, Polls, and Quizzes.

Unlocking success with Mentimeter

For work

Maximize the value of your work-related meetings. Gather valuable input, feedback, and insights from your colleagues to make better decisions together!
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Want to become a better presenter?

Impress with Interactive Presentations

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Interact with your audience using real-time voting. No installations or downloads required and it's free!

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Listenwise: Podcasts with connected lessons

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Listenwise: Podcasts with connected lessons

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About Us

Harness the Power of Listening.

Listenwise is an award-winning listening skills platform. We harness the power of listening to advance literacy and learning in all students. Our collection of podcasts and public radio keeps teaching connected to the real world and builds student listening skills at the same time.

We believe in the importance of listening for student success.
We believe in the power of a great story.
We believe in literacy for all.

Listen to our story:

Team

Monica Brady-Myerov

Founder and CEO

Monica Brady-Myerov is a 25-year veteran public radio journalist and host and the founder of Listenwise. Before founding Listenwise, she was Senior Reporter and Assistant Managing Editor at WBUR in Boston and her reports have been heard on NPR, Marketplace and numerous other outlets nationally and internationally. Monica's reporting on education won two 2005 Edward R. Murrow Awards for her stories on closing the achievement gap and First Prize from The Education Writers Association in 2009 for her series on the high school dropout crisis.

Karen Gage

COO

Karen Gage is an education technology industry veteran with a flair for understanding markets and client needs. She is known for delivering high impact strategy during her 15+ years leading marketing and product organizations. Karen was instrumental in helping create and evolve the learning management system industry - from the early introduction to a ubiquitous core technology in education. Most recently she was VP of Technology Products for Pearson's School Achievement Services. There she saw that K-12 educators were ready to embrace digital innovation and that inspired her to join Listenwise in 2014.

Want to work with us?

We're hiring.

Partners

Listenwise's partnership with NPR brings one of the most trusted sources of news and insights on life and the arts, into the classroom.
Learn more about NPR and Listenwise's partnership.

Pearson myPerspectives TM, a Grades 6-12 English Language Arts curriculum features Listenwise connections that build on topics students are exploring in the program to make learning relevant and meaningful
Learn more about our partnership with Pearson.
Testimonials

"I love that public radio helps me keep my curriculum current. Whenever I'm driving to work or thinking about it I hear a story and think - Oh that has to do with immigration and we are studying immigration and it has to do with today's news. And I love that then on Listenwise I can log in and put in a key word and I've got a lesson plan, I've got the story I don't have to go searching back for it. It's just there for me. It's a great resource."

- Jenn KayGoodman, Cambridge, Mass
Read more great stories of teacher practice!

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Harness the Power of Listening. Listenwise is an award-winning listening skills platform. We harness the power of listening to advance literacy and learning in all students. Our collection of podcasts and public radio keeps teaching connected to the real world and builds student listening skills at the same time.

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OER Commons: Public digital library of shared educational resources

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OER Commons: Public digital library of shared educational resources

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Open Author helps you build and publish Open Educational Resources for you and for the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.

Learn more about creating OER

Groups provides a flexible environment to organize, create, share, and discuss resources with others in your network. Collaborate with group members, tag and add resources to shared folders, create your own collections, all within a public or private group.

Groups

Search through collections curated by our digital librarians

Collections

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Common Core

Hubs

A Custom Resource Center

Projects, districts, states, and initiatives make use of Hubs to bring groups of educators together to create, organize, and share OER collections that meet their common goals. Explore Hubs

Microsites

Custom Digital Libraries

Microsites are custom, flexible sites that include all the features available on OER Commons. Microsites allow your users to search resource collections using a custom taxonomy at a unique URL. Contact Us

Our award-winning OER Professional Learning programs support instructors and curriculum specialists to gain the necessary skills required to find, adapt, and evaluate high quality open materials.

In-person and virtual OER workshops help focus instructors to develop a "commons" mindset, to experience the benefits of open processes using the platform's tools, collaborative features, and workflows. This can include using Open Author for creating, remixing, and publishing shared curriculum.

Learn More

How to Search OER Commons

View all How-to videos

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OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement.

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Carone Learning: Physical Education Resource

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Carone Learning: Physical Education Resource

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Carone Learning | Online PE, Health & Career Classes

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Online PE, Fitness, Health & Career Education | Carone Learning

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Carone Learning and cFitness Academy provide quality online PE classes and online health classes. Visit us today to see how.

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BiteScis sparks interest in scientific research by connecting what students learn in the classroom to the questions scientists are currently pursuing, whether in the lab or the field; through a microscope, telescope, or the circuits of a supercomputer. And since they're classroom-tested, free, editable, and tied to standards, they are easy to incorporate into your classroom.

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BiteScis sparks interest in scientific research by connecting what students learn in the classroom to the questions scientists are currently pursuing, whether in the lab or the field; through a microscope, telescope, or the circuits of a supercomputer. And since they're classroom-tested, free, editable, and tied to standards, they are easy to incorporate into your classroom.

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American Experience: Thematic videos in US History

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American Experience: Thematic videos in US History

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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, the award-winning PBS series from WGBH Boston, brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America's past and present. Discover this country's rich history in this collection of media-based resources from the series.

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Participate in video meetings, virtual training classes, & remote interviews.

Get Meet: Web (meet.google.com), Android, or iPhone & iPad

Start or join a video meeting on a mobile device

In the Gmail or Meet app :

Note: If you don't see Meet in Gmail, select Settings See all settings Chat and Meet Show the Meet section in the main menu Save Changes.

In the Google Calendar app :

Open an event.

Tap Join with Google Meet .

To start or join a meeting from a computer, see Start a video meeting or Join a video meeting.

Schedule a video meeting

In the Meet app or on a computer (mobile app shown):

In the Calendar app :

Add or view participants or present your screen
Meeting organizers with Google Workspace for Education can prevent participants from sharing their screen.
In the Meet app , during a meeting:

In Meet on your computer, during a meeting:

Raise your hand, take a poll, and more

In the Meet app :

In Meet on your computer:

To ask a question, click Raise hand .

To change your background and other options, click More .

To create a whiteboard and other options, click Activities .

Split into breakout rooms, take a poll, start a Q&A session, record a meeting, or create a whiteboard.

Google, Google Workspace, and related marks and logos are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names are trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

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Google Meet cheat sheet - Google Workspace Learning Center

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Participate in video meetings, virtual training classes, & remote interviews.                

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Explain Everything: Webinars for using their tools

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Explain Everything: Webinars for using their tools

# data[].attributes.headline
LinkedIn: Lessons from Around the World: Remote Learning in the Era of Coronavirus

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LinkedIn: Lessons from Around the World: Remote Learning in the Era of Coronavirus

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Educational Leader / Head of School / Edupreneur

by Kirk Wheeler, Ed.D.

The impact of COVID-19 on schools across the United States, and the world, is shocking. Being in Seattle, the decisions to close school campuses and launch remote learning began weeks ago. I never imagined that hundreds of schools would face similar challenges so quickly. In the past week alone, many states and entire countries have closed their schools and businesses in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus.

During this international crisis, I remain committed to sharing insights, suggestions, and early lessons learned. It is one way I can help. I will continue to do what I can to support educational and organizational leaders, while also grappling with the very real challenges within my own school and community.

Some days, I feel as though I can't act and write fast enough - the world is changing that quickly.

My intention here is to bring together a range of insights and suggestions on remote learning gleaned from my own early experiences and from educators from around the world. While Seattle has been the epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States, with school's scrambling to close campuses and launch remote learning programs, some international schools are many weeks ahead of us and have valuable insights and perspectives to share as they move into their second and third months of remote learning.

Having spent 14 years as an educator and administrator at an overseas American/international school, I am fortunate to have colleagues who now work in schools around the globe. I am deeply grateful for their willingness to share their perspectives and lessons learned on remote learning, in addition to my own faculty's experiences right here in Seattle. We are all in this together. We are experiencing an overwhelming national and international crisis, and I am convinced that we need our teachers and schools now more than ever.

I want you to know where I stand. First, I am taking the long-term perspective. This is a global crisis, and I believe schools will be closed for much longer than we expect. I would be thrilled to be wrong on that point. The first few weeks have been a sprint - full crisis mode. Now, we are running a marathon. And to finish the race, we need to pace ourselves, hydrate, refuel at pitstops, and be cheerleaders for each other. No one runs a marathon alone.

Second, we must have a start-up, flexible mindset. We are launching new businesses. And like all innovative businesses, we must act, assess, pivot, and adapt. This approach can be tough for schools. I have said many times that I believe schools should be among the most innovative places on earth. That is true now, more than ever. We must do our edgework.

And finally, I believe that we, as schools, must fully own this. This is OUR responsibility. We cannot fail our students, our families, and our teachers.

With my deepest appreciation to numerous educators around the world and Seattle, here is a list of ideas, suggestions, and lessons learned. There is no particular order. No presumed priority. Things are moving too fast and there is simply no time for that. Just dig in.

Nail down communications:

Determine who is communicating information about remote learning at a high level and who is managing the details. What is the rhythm of the week in terms of school wide, division level, and teacher level messaging?

Establish clear landing pages and documents that organize assignments, directions, instructions for logging in, necessary resources, and FAQs. Parents and students cannot manage a barrage of emails. Keep it simple.

Consider English Language Learners and potential barriers and challenges.

Establish clear student expectations:

Treat this like the first few weeks of a new school year.

Create a Remote User Responsible Agreement (even if other tech agreements are already in place from start of year).

Anticipate that issues that will arise with logging in, managing new systems and structures, and accessing hardware.

Be clear on the tasks and assignments students are expected to complete. What is core? What is enrichment or extra? What are the deadlines? How is work submitted?

Decide how students are expected to present themselves for group classes and conversations. Are they expected to dress as they would for school? Would it be acceptable to attend a remote class in their pajamas?

Determine what is appropriate in terms of a learning environment. Are you okay with students having background noise or distracting backgrounds? Help them learn to use tools such as online chat, mute, etc. Are they allowed to be in bed? On the couch?

Be clear about online behavior. Can they take screen shots? Use the chat feature? How will you manage inappropriate or distracting behaviors?

Set up students for success:

The first week is about setting up routines, expectations, and processes for communicating. Think of this as the first week of the new school year.

Make sure assignments and tasks include the necessary resources in easily accessible and consistent locations.

Provide an approximate time for each task or assignment. Teachers tend to over-estimate the time students need to complete a task (especially in the early grades) because the nuances of instruction (extension, questions, guiding) are not present like they are in the classroom. The thirty-minute lesson is completed in ten minutes.

At the same time, teachers may underestimate time to complete tasks, especially with students who normally receive accommodations in the classroom. Suddenly, these students don't have the teacher making on-the-spot accommodations and redirections. The fifteen-minute assignment takes an hour or ends in tears.

Provide extensions for core assignments (students work at different paces).

Find a balance of synchronous and asynchronous assignments and classes. It may seem logical to teach a day's worth of courses live, but it doesn't work that way. Online teaching cannot replicate the classroom experience. Teachers need different tools and modes of engaging students.

Consider a flipped classroom model, where students are completing certain work, readings, and reflection and then coming to "class" for deeper discussions and project work.

Ensure students receive feedback - frequent, personal, and detailed. This type of feedback happens constantly and naturally in the classroom but requires an intentional and different approach when online.

Keep students accountable - no one gets to drift away. Follow up on any missed classes or assignments.

Advance the curriculum:

Begin the first week (maybe two) with lessons and assignments that review previously covered skills and concepts.

Especially with longer term closures, the curriculum must advance - this cannot only be about maintenance or reinforcement of previously taught skills and concepts. Get on with it and dive into new material.

This is not a drill - the program must be delivered in the best way possible. Implement and adapt.

Develop units and lessons that adapt standards and outcomes to the new reality (and constraints) of online learning. A tried and true unit may need to be reworked - you can still meet the standards, but in new ways.

Seek to understand the parent experience:

Help parents provide at-home routines, schedules, and physical learning spaces to support success.

Recognize that parents may want or need to have their children learn quite independently. When parents express concern about how much time they are spending "home-schooling," pay attention. They need help.

At the same time, help parents understand the bigger picture. Remote learning will not fully replicate the classroom experience. How can schools help parents provide an appropriate level of guidance and support for their children without this becoming their full-time job? How can parents best support teachers?

Understand that the parent-child relationship can be challenging in the best of times and can become even more strained when parents are more deeply engaged in the learning process. How can schools help parents navigate these two roles? What role can the school play with expectations (and consequences)?

Parents are going to have a lot of emotions, frustrations, and perspectives, especially in the first few weeks. They may have had other ideas and hopes for remote learning. Perhaps they thought their roles would be minimal. Seek feedback and accept suggestions and criticisms, make incremental improvements quickly, and be nimble. The feedback may be harsh. Get over it. Take it as an opportunity. Be a startup - fail, adjust, and implement.

Provide structure for students with learning needs:

This is a huge challenge. Students with learning and emotional needs normally have their teacher, and perhaps a learning specialist or counselor, to scaffold their learning and provide accommodations throughout the day. Suddenly, the student who struggles with attention, executive processing skills, or organization is being asked to work independently or rely heavily on their parents. How can learning specialists connect and provide remote support? How can counselors check in and provide guidance?

For ELL students, consider use of subtitles or online translators.

Consider non-screen alternatives:

Especially for younger children, provide guided lessons and resources to help parents set up art centers, cooking activities, and a maker space.

Weave specialists into the play deck or list of activities throughout the week. What activities can the art teacher develop? What can the PE teachers offer to encourage movement and physical breaks? And the music teachers - consider remote lessons, sing-alongs, or music appreciation.

Books, books, books. There are so many wonderful audio books. Famous authors reading their novels. Adaptive reading programs.

Attend to social-emotional needs:

Relationships still matter! Find ways to connect perhaps through a shared social hour with middle schoolers, a read aloud for first graders, or a group snack in preschool. How could advisory classes take place remotely?

Provide social emotional support for students and parents. Counselors and teachers need to check in with families. Simply ask, "How is this going for you?"

Pay attention to who, over time, begins to disappear or disengage. Are there any students who start to miss classes or meetings? Why? Is it an emotional or social challenge? Perhaps a tech issue?

Students may become more insular over time - they begin to lose their social structures. Look for ways to build those in and provide students with examples of ways to connect outside of school, especially if they are "sheltering in place" and cannot meet in person.

Pay attention to the emotional toll on parents who are at home, where activity is restricted, and everyone is anxious. Ask how you can help.

Keep in mind that schools serve as emotional and social anchors, and when children are not at school this stability is lost. What school routines can be replication online? Morning meetings? Greetings from the principal or Head of School?

Pay attention to the teacher experience:

Teachers are feeling incredibly vulnerable. Parents will have unprecedented insights into their lessons. At the same time, parents are not able to see the usual in-class magic. So, the math lesson now only has the basic bones, without the teachers' craft, nuances, and scaffolding that bring it alive. It can be hard for teachers to send out activities and homework that does not represent their usual approach to teaching.

Teachers will feel judged and criticized, especially if they are bombarded with feedback and criticism. It won't feel fair, but put on the entrepreneur's hat - take in the feedback, adapt when needed and appropriate, and keep moving. It gets better.

Teachers need structure and time to meet remotely in grade level, subject, and inter-disciplinary teams - time to plan and to learn from each other.

Remember, not all programs can be delivered remotely. Units must be adapted.

Teachers will adapt quickly - give them tools and training, empower them, and give them permission to be vulnerable (mistakes will happen; good ideas will flop).

Leaders need to create entrepreneurial mindset and embrace new school cultures of learning and risk-taking. Support cultures that embrace a cycle of growth and flexible mindsets.

Celebrate new successes!

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Lessons from Around the World: Remote Learning in the Era of Coronavirus