While we can’t change the world overnight, there are some things that we can do to help make this time a little bit easier for our students. It is important to create a virtual or real classroom where students feel safe, have predictability, rituals and routines, and that remains a place of consistency. Here are some specific suggestions:
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Grading class conversations can be a nightmare. I usually just avoid grading it, but I always have trouble getting everyone to participate and honor the community of classrooms. So here are a few ideas that I have come across to help alleviate these discussion grading dilemmas.
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One of the biggest challenges we have had to face when teaching remotely is how to assess our students’ independent reading. During a normal school year, we provide twenty minutes at the start of class each day for students to silently read. During that time we walk around and confer with each of our students independently. During our conferences, we discuss our students’ reading lives. We assess their reading habits and discuss reading strategies to help our students grow as readers. We also take that time to recommend new books (admittedly our favorite part).
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Remote, or distance learning has become our new normal here in Northern California. As we begin to navigate what this may look like for us going forward, we thought we would share some tips and tricks we have learned in the past few weeks to keep our students engaged and connected to the class, even from home.
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Whether we are teaching remotely or in the classroom, it is important to invite our students to create products like videos, podcasts, infographics, and other interactive media that showcase their writing in engaging ways and that can be shared with others. Empower your students to build visual literacy and engage your students in rich and authentic learning experiences that will help them in the real world. Here are some website ideas that help students to write for multiple purposes and audiences.
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Whether we are teaching remotely or in the classroom, it is important to invite students to document their writing process and to stay focused while they do so. Here are some websites that will help students to improve their writing:
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Whether we are teaching remotely or in the classroom, it is important to invite students to use writing-to-learn strategies with visible thinking tools. Here are some ideas that will help students to visually showcase their thinking and keep learning interesting, new, and different especially during remote learning:
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In this follow up post, we are going to share some more engaging ways to check in with your students each day, and we will share some awesome resources and strategies to help you build your class community.
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There are many things that you can do starting the very first week of school to build a classroom environment that is responsive in nature and supports all students within your virtual classroom.
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Whether we are teaching remotely or in the classroom, it is important to invite our students to annotate digital readings and transform print readings into digital products.
Here are some website ideas that help students connect to their reading and writing instruction:
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One challenge that has kept us up at night is how to build a strong classroom community while teaching remotely. We start building our student relationships and classroom communities on day one. This year will be no different, even if we are connecting through a computer screen.
We have resigned ourselves to the fact that our lessons that we would like to teach may take a bit longer when taught remotely, and we have also decided that our main focus will be to spend more time getting to know more about our students each and every day.
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