Online Teaching Resources
Simple ways to host content
Google Classroom
This is still one of the easiest ways to share, especially if you already use Classroom
If you want to know more about Google Classroom, click here.
Google Sites
(You are looking at a published Google Site right now)
I like Sites for putting together a variety of different sources of information all in one place
You can use a table of contents like the one at the top of this page to direct students to content on the page
You can also insert buttons to direct students to different pages or to other websites or resources
onto a home page to lead students in many different directions based on what order they wafrom one page, or just to break up and sequence content.
Sites are easy to make straight from your Google Drive
Click the + button in Drive and from the pull down menu, click "More," selecting Google Sites from the menu
If you want to know more about Google Sites, click here.
Google Docs and Slides
I use both Docs and Slides for a lot of reasons in class but don't find them as versatile for hosting content.
Both are good, serviceable tools and very accessible if you aren't as familiar with Classroom and/or Sites
Other Website Builders
The Best Website Builders for Teachers
This blog post discusses pros and cons of Weebly, Wix, and other builders that teachers use to host content. It was updated in 2019, so some of the costs noted may not be accurate; COVID-19 closures have led to a number of companies that provide services to educators offering some or all of their premium features for free, so I would encourage anyone interested to go to the actual websites for those companies to see if they are offering more for free right now.
Ideas for Office Hours
Consider NOT doing it all via email
My own email was already an unmanageable beast, so I've spent the last few days exploring other options. Here are some reasons email may not be the best option, especially for those of us teaching hundreds of students
Lines between when you are available immediately (office hours) and when you are not available are blurry when you use the same communication tool
Incoming email from non-students can distract you during office hours
You may find yourself responding to the same question via email over and over
Students can't interact with each other and you at the same time, which is when the best learning happens
How I Communicated with Students
Posted on Classroom
You have my permission to steal and revise the text of this to make it fit your needs--I copied it below the screenshot so it would be easy to copy/paste.
You'll notice in my screenshot that I added a little note that was very personal to reach out and reassure my kids that I'm also just still here in their lives. If that's your style, I'd encourage you to remind them how much you miss them--authenticity goes a long way, especially in the virtual world.
This is the text that I posted as an Announcement in the Stream in Google Classroom:
For the foreseeable future, we won't be able to meet in person, but I will still be here virtually, trying to keep the learning happening. We have been asked to try to have 4 hours of office hours each day between the hours of 7:30am and 3:30 pm, starting March 30th.
To start out, this is the schedule I'm going to follow:
Available continuously via Google Hangouts Chat from 9:00-11:00am and from 12:30-2:30pm Monday through Friday. I am setting up a Hangout Chat room for Human A&P students and a separate room for CP Biology students. You should get an email invitation from me to join; after you join you can leave me a message on Chat at any time.
Available via Zoom video chat meeting one hour per day 10-11am M/W/F or 12:30-1:30pm T/Th. Below are links to get into those meetings for the week of March 30 - April 3. First link is the M/W/F meeting, second link is T/Th.
You also have the ability to comment directly on any post I make here in the Stream or Classwork. I'll get a notification right away
I feel pretty good about how the text chat will go but I realize video chat at set times like this may not be the most convenient thing, so I am open to revising the video chat schedule if we need to do that. If you need to screen share with me or need me to screen share to draw or explain something so that you can get the help you need, just send me a message (preferably through Chat because email is insane right now) and we can probably set up a video chat on the spot or set an appointment for a little later.
Office Hour Tools I am Using
Google Chat
Google Chat is a Google app that can be found in the upper right corner of Gmail, Classroom, Drive, or any new tab on a Chrome browser (at least as long as you are logged in to the browser) in the Google apps menu, symbolized by 9 gray dots arranged in a square shape. The Chat app is a green text bubble with an @ sign in it.
This will be my primary way to check in with students. It has a feature called "Rooms" that I like because it allows me to set up a separate chat space for each subject that I teach.
The video below shows how to find the app and how to create a room. So far, I can't figure out a quick and easy way to bulk invite students to the room, so I did have to add them one by one from my roster.
Before sending the invites, I made a quick "reconnection" post just to get them going when they accepted the invite.
How to set up Google Hangouts Chat with Rooms.movZoom Video Chat
Zoom is a way to video chat. Video chat may be a useful tool to explain something that is complex or needs some illustration. If you teach a class where getting students together at the same time is a necessity, video chat will probably be a very valuable tool.
I signed up for Zoom on the Zoom website and chose to sign in with my school Google account. Zoom is offering some premium features to teachers for free during the COVID outbreak, so signing in with my school account made it easy to verify that I was a teacher. The premium features were automatically added to my free account.
When I tested Zoom out, I was struck by how easy it was to schedule and host a meeting. My husband initially hosted our test meeting and made a whiteboard we could both annotate on. Later, I wanted to try to annotate over a Google Doc but couldn't do it because I wasn't the host. He was able to make me the host temporarily and I shared my Doc on screen and annotated over it. Afterwards, he took hosting rights back from me and I couldn't share with everyone anymore.
Some other ways to manage your video chat
Mute all participants - host can turn off sound from participants which is nice if everyone has joined but someone is in the living room with a dog barking and vacuum running in the background
Restrict participants video - host can also turn off video from participants which would allow participants to be able to see you but not everyone else in the video chat's video feed
Raise hand - especially nice if you mute everyone; this is a tool participants can use to let you know they want to talk. Then you can unmute them and they can ask their question
There are probably lots of other features that I will figure out when I try this with students
Test Runs of Products
When I was trying to figure out what would work and what I preferred to use, my husband was doing to same thing, so we sat in different rooms in our house and tested Chat, Zoom, Hangouts, and some other services with each other. I would highly recommend giving these tools a test run with a family member, friend, or colleague to see what you like.
Other methods to try
Google Classroom Comments
I went into the Settings gear ⚙️in the upper right of Classroom for all of my classes and chose to allow student commenting in the Stream. In my communication post (see above) I mentioned that as an option to reach me.
Google Hangouts Meet
If you are interested in doing video chat via Google Hangouts, this would be the way to go. This post in the Google Help Center explains how to use Meet for distance learning.
I did try this out but just didn't like it as much as Zoom. I have an iPad and stylus and found it easier to annotate on my screen and share it with Zoom, so I decided to go in that direction. I think it is possible to do that with Meet, but didn't explore much further.
Another reason I chose not to do Hangouts Meet was actually just that Google has so many different versions of things called Hangouts (chat and hangouts in email, plus three apps called Chat, Meet, and Hangouts) that I was actually confusing myself trying to figure out where to go to get each feature to work and I thought it might end up being confusing to students as well.