Engaging and motivating students to learn online

As we become more accustomed to teaching online, we will seek to find more ways to engage and motivate our students to learn deeply.

Guidelines:

  • Focus on pedagogies and active learning opportunities that emphasise student effort. Design assignments and activities that require students to apply their knowledge – such as work in groups, create, prepare a project or presentation, solve a problem, and/or experience a situation. Carefully constructed activities, puzzles, problems, and questions will awaken student curiosity and inquisitiveness.

  • Finding ways for students to collaborate, discover, create and to co- construct knowledge, will encourage student motivation and engagement. Remember, with all collaboration activities, best practice is to be clear in your instructions, expectations and to outline what accountability looks like.

  • Students can interact in a variety of ways when working online. Consider purposeful groupings and choose carefully the digital tool that will best facilitate deep learning to occur.

  • Think about ways you can ensure that all students are engaged and contributing to the activity and find ways to monitor and positively reinforce student contributions.

  • Design high level ways of receiving and providing feedback to ensure engagement.

  • What opportunities have you created for students to reflect on and learn about how they are learning? Coach them to think meta-cognitively.

  • Assess and evaluate: when you design for engagement, what evidence do you have at the end of the unit to demonstrate the effect on student retention and learning? This will assist you to reflect and refine your online unit of work.

Anticipate and plan for student needs

Envision how your students will experience the online class.

  • Are your instructions directed clearly to the student? Write down the directions as if you were having a conversation with a student, so they don’t read like a textbook.

  • Have you outlined clearly instructions and expectations around group norms for group work, time limits for activities, expectations around quality in written and verbal responses, explanations of rubrics, instructions for how students can engage with exemplars and models of exceptional work?

  • What else might students need to successfully understand and engage in the learning activities?

  • How can you differentiate these instructions so all students can access the learning?

  • What adjustments can you put into place to ensure that students with specific learning needs are able to access your lesson?

  • How can you use multimodal instructions/ resources to cater for students with learning difficulties ?

  • How can you use Teams and Canvas to differentiate according to student ability?

Where you can, try to create short informal video explainers to flesh out the complex or nuanced details of a concept, task, assignment, and assessment.

Student Engagement Strategies for the online learning environment

Embrace multi-media assignments and resources

Using Canvas and being well versed in the range of multimedia assignments and activities you can design and create will help when setting and marking student work when teaching online.

  • Digital components such as audio, video, forums, message boards, blogs, polls, chat, etc. – all of which are ways to stimulate student thinking and engagement.

  • Consult the range of digital tools such as Peer Review, Assignments, Discussions, Teams Chat on offer to engage students using the VC- to access How to for each of these features click Growing with Canvas, Canvas Guide

Consider using resources that are multi-medial. See some ideas below and further resources in Helpful resources for ideas

  • Ted-Ed - Ted videos designed for children, come with lesson question prompts, research extension questions for deeper thinking and discussions for a broad range of topics.

  • Melbourne Zoo Live Stream - live stream cameras of the animals at Melbourne Zoo - bringing the zoo to you.

  • #Savewithstories - celebrities reading books to children online, linked to a charity to support literacy programs

How can I design purposeful groupings/ activities to encourage collaboration and deep learning?

Grouping:

Activities:

Digital Tools:

  • Choose your digital tools carefully- will the tool accelerate, deepen and facilitate student acquisition of deep knowledge and understanding? See Helpful Resources for a list of free educational digital tools

What is appropriate student behaviour when collaborating learning online?

Our expectations of student behaviour online is the same as our expectations of them in the physical classroom. Students are expected to demonstrate our Pymble values and adhere to the following protocols outlined on the Student Expectations and Student Guide to online communication pages of the Student Toolkit.

As per normal procedure, the classroom teacher should continue to manage student behaviour in their online classrooms as they would in their physical classroom. If you notice any patterns of behaviour, this should be sent through to the Head of Year.

Group work guidelines updated.pdf

How to - tools & software to facilitate and enhance group work and student collaborations

We often assign collaborative group activities, assignments and/ or projects to help students develop the leadership, management and interpersonal skills they will need to be successful in today’s workplaces. There is real validity in encouraging students to work together to consolidate knowledge and deepen their understanding. Below you will find many suggestions about how to encourage student collaboration.

Using MS Word to encourage student collaboration & the co- construction of knowledge


  • MS Word will allow students to collaborate in real time as a class group, small student group or as an individual. Try to design your Google doc so groups of students have responsibility for completing different aspects or features of it.

  • Using Microsoft Word to collaborate may be an interesting yet easy mechanism to encourage students/ groups of students to collaborate practice examination questions, research etc. in most subjects. This will allow students to co- author documents to co- construct knowledge in the online classroom environment.

  • You can upload a document to Teams and ask students or groups of students to collaborate and construct knowledge together. Students or groups of students can share a document they have worked and you and/ or the class can provide feedback.

For quick, simple and easy instructions, click here: Collaboration and Co- authoring documents on Word

How to use Google Doc for group collaboration

  • Google doc will allow multiple students to collaborate /edit a document simultaneously in real time as a class group, small student group or as an individual.

  • Try to design your Google doc so groups of students have responsibility for completing different aspects or features of it. All students get to share and keep the document as a resource.

  • You could create a Google Doc through Google and signing in with your Pymble account.

  • If you need help with how to share a Google doc with your class, please click here

How to create private channels in Teams for group work

Why create private channels?

  • You can create channels in the class team to allow groups of students to collaborate and communicate via chat, voice or video calls.

  • You can use the Channels function in Teams to construct purposeful groupings and assign students accordingly. Or, you can simply allocate students to groups verbally via microphone while you are online.

  • Only members of the group in each private channel can see the channel appear in the Team. When students are working in a private channel, messages will only be viewed by other members of the group.

  • You can join any of the groups set up to listen to the student discussion.

  • Please note, only you as the teacher can set this up.

To learn more about Private channels and how they can be used for group work- click on MS Teams-Private Channels

How to use Whiteboard to encourage group collaboration

You can read more about how to start a Whiteboard in Teams meetings here to encourage group collaboration. For further information see video tutorial further down on this page.

How to use Group Spaces in Canvas for collaborations

Group Spaces in Canvas allow students to create their own discussions, collaborations and share files. Collaborations can be created using tools such as Google and Office 365. A simple idea would be to collaborate on a presentation that can be delivered in a virtual classroom using Big Blue Button. See how by clicking any of the following: Group Spaces , Growing with Canvas, Canvas Guide

Hypothesis.is

Use Hypothesis.is as a way to engage students in a text. Students can collaborate to annotate, break down, analyse or evaluate within the text using this tool. A great way to focus students's engagement with a text from any subject. It can also be used as a tool for peers to evaluate each other's work.

Flipgrid- to engage and empower student voice

Flipgrid is an easy tool to use and integrate into the online classroom for any subject. If you are looking for ways to engage students in conversation around any topic. Teachers and students can record short videos based on specific topics as a way to discuss, share, reflect, showcase and create mini presentations to demonstrate learning. You can even invite families to join and share their ideas on a topic- a great way to involve parents in the learning.

Flipgrid have provided easy to use 'Get Started' instructions here: Setting up a Flipgrid topic

There are a number of pre- prepared and ready to go ubject-specific topic discussions in Maths, Science, Social Science, Language Arts and Physical Education. Click here: Resources , sign up and access the resources.

Stile for Science

Stile is an engaging Science resource that is a workbook, video resource bank with simulations, and assessments combined into an interactive teaching and learning experience. Make your lessons more engaging by Integrating professionally crafted science content with your existing lesson materials. Why not divide students into groups to work through these carefully crafted resources and feedback to the class on their observations and findings?

Screencasting

A quick guide to recording and sharing screencasts with your students and colleagues through Microsoft Stream.

Voice Thread for collaboration and student interaction

Useful for any subject area- students can upload, present, share and discuss their documents, presentations, images, audio files and videos. Students can use Voice thread to comment on their own slides or their peers' voice thread. This tool when used purposefully in the online classroom helps to develop collaboration, creativity skills, critical thinking and communication. To learn more about Voice Thread, click here: About Voice Thread.

How to create a Voice Thread

Quick Guide

Using Peer Review & Discussions (Canvas) to facilitate meaningful group work or graded formative assignments

Discussions in Canvas is a wonderful tool to facilitate group work and student collaborations. Discussions is an ideal tool for group work solving real-world or multi-stage problems. It can be used for students to present videos of themselves and receive feedback. You can organise the groups according to skill level, ability etc. If you're using Discussions asynchronously- always consider the clarity of your instructions and expectations .Additional clarification of the task can be given by recording audio, video instructions, or including a rubric through the rich content editor. You can set an individual or group Discussion as an assignment for grading. To learn all about how to use and set up this tool, click here: Discussions, Growing with Canvas, Canvas Guide

How to use Peer Review for student collaboration

How to create a group discussion in Canvas


How to add a rubric to a graded discussion

Rubrics will help to frame and guide the student discussion. it is a create way to establish parameters, ensure students are engaging deeply with the subject matter and remain focused on the topic at hand.

I have set a Discussion as an assignment.

How to grade it.

Graded discussions are a wonderful alternative to a class assignment or assessment task. Providing a rubric helps to formalise and frame graded discussions. Students understand the parameters and expectations around the quality of the discussion expected.

Using Teams to facilitate group collaborations and discussions

How to innovate and stimulate class discussions

Engaging your students using Teams: Learn how to use chat, polling and whiteboard functions to enhance student engagement and interactivity by clicking on the following Using chat, polling and whiteboard functions in Teams.



How to share your screen/ ask students to share their screen

File Sharing

Organise, share and comment on documents via teams. Student can collaborate on documents, or you can add them to the 'class materials' folder for teacher only editing.

Tip: Add a new tab with the document/ website/ video that you are wanting to focus on. This provides quick access for your students.

Collaborative Whiteboard

You can always share your screen and use a drawing app like oneNote to create a virtual whiteboard. But, what if you wanted to have your class add to that whiteboard? Here is a video showing you how to start a collaborative whiteboard session.