In this blog, I am going to give you 3 tips on how you can teach more effectively online. If you are using Zoom or some kind of online mode during lock down, then I am going to give you 3 ways to teach more effectively.
1.Use more discussion and less explicit teaching
2.Get your students to teach the lesson
3.Take lots of breaks
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I know with Covid so many of you teachers have been in lock down. You are having to teach kids over zoom or some other online platform. I know that can be really difficult. I do a lot of teaching by zoom as well. The advantage I have is, that I teach adults. Because adults are expected to self regulate and own their learning, I have less pressure teaching via zoom than perhaps you do with kids or even teenagers.
Kids or teenagers often get distracted, get off task and become very disengaged, especially when they aren’t in the classroom where a teacher can keep them on task. So I want to give you some tips that I’ve learnt about teaching online that may help you as well.
1.Use more discussion and less explicit teaching
What do I mean by this? Do not use Zoom or online platforms to just talk to your students. It is very hard for students to stay engaged if you are talking to them. The whole concept of talking to students in a classroom is that you can go around and check if they are engaging but it’s much harder to do that online. You can not check if they are writing on their work sheet or participating in the lesson online, so it is much easier for students just to check out instead of being actively involved in learning. So you need to use more classroom discussion. Find ways to engage them through questioning rather than telling.
If you have got a concept you want to teach them, I will tell you a simple trick I use. It is the 3, 2, 1 strategy. 3 people have to tell me something they know about this topic, 2 people tell me something that has blown your mind about this topic and 1 person asks a question. What this will do is, get them engaged and talking. This will also help you see where they are at with their learning. It helps you to target the areas they are more interested in rather than just doing a verbal dump of all the information you want them to learn. So, use more discussion and less explicit teaching.
2.Get your students to teach the Lesson
The second way to teach your students more effectively online is to get them to teach the lesson. Break up your lesson into small topics and then set a topic for each student to prepare a presentation on. They get to present their power point or teach their little component of the lesson. You can split it up into 25 to 30 mini topics, if you have that many kids in your class. Get each child to teach a little component. This will engage them more and give you the ability to observe the kids. While one of the kids is teaching, you are observing everybody else. You are able to manage behaviour and see which kids are engaging and which ones are not, so get your kids to teach the lessons.
3.Take lots of breaks
Attention span is a really difficult thing to measure. A really good rule of thumb is their age plus 3 minutes. So if you’re teaching a class of ten year olds, you can probably be sure that their attention span is around 13 minutes. To regain their attention, you may need to change the topic, activity or mode of learning.
If you are working with kids who have some kind of learning difficulty or maybe an attention deficit, it’s normally their age minus 3 minutes. So you might be teaching a bunch of 10 year olds but you’ll only keep their attention for about 7 minutes.
So you have really got to think about how you plan out your lesson and how you pace your lesson. You need to take into account the attention span of your students. Make sure you’re not asking them to focus for longer than is realistic. Give them a break and then re-engage them.
So those are the 3 tips I suggest that will help you to teach more effectively online. Weather its zoom, google meet or some other online platform, make sure you use more discussion and less explicit teaching. Get your students to teach the lesson. Break up your lesson into small topics and let them teach the lesson so that they are engaging. Lastly, make sure you manage attention spans by taking a lot of breaks. I know we are in a unique time for teaching so I hope those tips were really helpful.
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