Google's temporary hub of information and tools to help teachers during the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.

This is a powerful resource that I encourage all of our teachers to explore.

Providing virtual instruction, you could get away with not having a class website ... but it is going to be hard to do it well without one and you are going to waste far more time and induce far more frustration for your students, their parents, and yourself. Having taught and coached many teachers to provide online courses, using a website to organize and provide clear access to the many resources and information that your students need is essential. Google Classroom is a kind of course website, but it organized in linear time, with your posts stacking up from newest to oldest in a stream (like Facebook). Google Classroom, much like your Gradebook or Scoresheet in Unified Classroom is good for organizing your assignments because they too follow linear time thinking. Organizing information so is accessible for you and your students takes a different system. (Think back to when you were a kid ... if you had gone to the library and the card catalog had just been one long drawer.)

The new Google Sites is one of the easiest instructional technology tools to master ... so much easier even than the old Google Sites. It is one the best returns on investment you can make in educational technology. It will help you organize the learning you hope to engage students with and will allow you to easily access and post materials. If you have never provided online instruction, the first thing you'll recognize is how much you take for granted the value of face-to-face time in terms of organizing and managing student learning. A website serves a variety of roles that are lost when you no longer are with your students. An additional payoff ... you will have that learning organized better when you again return to it and have students in your classroom.

See: What is Google Classroom? And how are teachers using it? Learn more about this popular platform and how to use it with students.

Unified Classroom also provides a tool for maintaining a course website (Class Pages), but unless you have already established the use of it with a class you will likely encounter access problems for your students (some don't recall how to sign in to Unified Classroom or don't know how to get to your Class Page). Quite a few parents have yet to create Unified Classroom accounts, so access is an issue. Google Sites is easier to pick up quickly and use as a Learning Management tool.

This is your primary organizational space for shared files and instructional documentation and will help organize learning artifacts. Start by cleaning up some of the existing stuff in your Drive to help as you utilize this as a core support for instruction during a school closure ... Like put everything that is not related to your needs at this time inside a folder (e.g. "Before COVID-19"). You should also consider if a Shared (Team) Drive for each of your classes is useful. If you are using Google Classroom it is probably not useful, since a Shared Drive folder is automatically created when you create a Class in Google Classroom. Creating a Class in Google Classroom helps take care of a lot the organizational stuff in Drive, but as the teacher you will still need to have a handle on how to use Drive to organize the document and file resources you want to share out to your students.

Google Hangouts Meet is pretty much like Facetime ... except it allows you do some things that would help in terms of engaging students in learning (sharing your screen, chatting, sharing documents and files ...). It will provide a way for you see your students, your students see you, and students see other students ... and these are all really important to engagement (and wellness) in online learning environments. I can't stress enough how much of a difference this type of tool makes in terms of students engagement when it comes to distance learning. Your Meet sessions can also be recorded! This can be a big time-saver. *Meet with 1-2-3 students to go over a lesson, record it, and share it as a resource for the whole class. This will also be a valuable tool for meeting with other teachers, any ed-tech that is a 1-to-1 support for your students, and could provide a unique opportunity for your students to engage with someone special (e.g. set up a Meet with someone from the Jackson Lab to talk about viruses and developing vaccines).

Please note the videos below indicate that you can use Meet with up to 25 people simultaneously, but Google has extended that to up to 250 people. You won't likely need this added capacity, but if you happen to have 26 students it's nice ;)

Important communication tool to us old dogs ... no so much for your students. It is the a tool I have found to be least useful when working with students (but it might be really important in terms of communicating with their parents). It's an organizational nightmare for sharing and keeping track of teaching and learning materials ... and communication with 50-80 students and especially when your other email communications are likely to increase during a school closing. The wasted time - you would be smart to put into learning to use Google Classroom or your Unified Classroom Class Page and messaging tool. But if it is what you know ... it's what you use. I've include a couple resources here that will help if you do.

Quicktime Player is a tool that is installed on your laptop (look in your Applications folder). Quicktime Player plays video and audio files that are saved on your laptop. But it also allows you to create Movies, Screen Recordings, and Audio Recordings. Those recordings could be uploaded to YouTube or Google Drive and shared with students via your Unified Classroom Class Pages or Google Classroom, or class Google Sites to help engage students in learning.

• If you record a video on your phone, you can transfer that to your laptop and then use Quicktime Player to edit your video.

See: YouTube Teacher (Channels)