Engaging Secondary Students in Synchronous Remote Learning

Goal

By completing this module, teachers will gain the background knowledge and resources necessary to ensure their synchronous remote lessons are active, engaging learning experiences for students.

Content

Before

Think back to those moments in your classroom when everything went right. Students were engaged and actively involved with the content. They interacted with you and with one another. They met or exceeded your goals for the lesson.

Jot down a few of those experiences and take a minute to reflect on what contributed to those successes. Consider these questions:

Whose voice was heard most throughout the lesson...yours or that of your students?

Were students engaged in actively making meaning of the content - whether text, video, discussion, etc.?

Did all students “have a seat at the table”...giving everyone a chance to find success?

Were there opportunities for students to interact with one another throughout the lesson?

During

All of the factors you consider when planning engaging lessons in the face-to-face classroom are still important in a remote, synchronous situation...you just might need a few new tools to bring them to life. The resources listed below will help you to take those strategies that work in the classroom and bring them to life in your Zoom sessions in order to maximize student learning.

Choose one or more of the following resources to explore for ideas and information about making the most of your synchronous remote time with your students.

Read an article...

3 Ways to Use Video Conferencing with Students Learning Remotely - from Dr. Catlin Tucker

Engaging Students in an Online Lesson - from Teaching Between the Lines

Watch a video...

Tech Tools for Interactive Remote Teaching

Zoom - Make Your Lessons More Student-Centered

Listen to a podcast...

How to Teach When Everyone is ScatteredSome students are in the room with you. Some are home. Everyone is spread far apart. How do you teach this way? How do you build community? Here are some ideas.

This podcast focuses on classrooms where some students are face-to-face while others are "Zooming" in from home. While we're not in that situation, there are still some great takeaways for engaging students in synchronous remote settings.

How to Engage Students in Zoom and Teach Effectively at a DistanceAaron Johnson Shares His Way to Engage Students Even at a Distance Many of us are learning to traverse between online and in-person learning environments. Our guest Aaron Johnson, author of Online Teaching with Zoom, shares with us how to better engage students through Zoom, so we can all teach effectively at a distance. Sponsor: […]

Start this one at 1:36 to avoid the promotional material at the beginning.

Interaction/Try-out/Sandbox

After

Go back to the notes you jotted in the “Before” section. Now that you’ve read, watched, or listened to some new ideas about remote learning, how can you apply this new knowledge to create engaging synchronous learning experiences for your students?

Additional Resources to Explore

80 Tips for Remote Learning from Seasoned Educators

25 Remote Teaching Tips Engage Students in Distance Learning

3 Ways to Make Remote Learning More Engaging

Tools for Creating Interactive Synchronous Activities

Jamboard - You and your students can collaborate on a “whiteboard” in real-time. Learn more here.

Whiteboard.fi and/or Whiteboard.chat - These new whiteboard services have a variety of features that might meet your needs, including individual whiteboards for each student and libraries of manipulatives, etc. Learn more about both here.

Padlet - Use this versatile site to have students respond to prompts, share their learning, comment on one another’s work, etc. Learn more here.

Kahoot - Engage students in live quizzes to activate learning or review content. Show students how to manage Zoom and Kahoot on the same device.

Google Forms - Gather input from students and see the results in real-time. Start at 9:49 in this video to learn about Google Forms in remote sessions.

Mentimeter - Ask poll questions, gather input as a word cloud, and more. Teaching Strategies for the Remote Classroom.

Nearpod - Conduct live, synchronous lessons via Zoom. Use the Nearpod Live Participation + Zoom Integration.

Take some time to review an upcoming remote lesson plan. How could you apply one of these new tools or strategies to increase student voice, participation, interaction, or opportunity?

Evidence

On your Individual Professional Learning Plan 2.0, please share at least two things you will do to increase student engagement in your remote synchronous lessons.

Special thanks to Anne Reardon for creating this module.

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