Instructional Strategies

Ideas for sending activities to a class, collecting their responses, and providing feedback.

On our other pages we provide ideas for tasks to provide your students. On this page we hope to give you some ideas on how to send those tasks, gather responses, and provide feedback.

We'd love to hear what teachers are doing! If you have an idea to share, please fill out this short form. Use this form to send us a teaching idea, or even just to tell us about a math task, problem, or routine that worked well for you.

Safety

Teams (Office 365)

Creating a Class Team

Conversations (Posts)

Getting Started with Classroom Activities

Finding an Activity

Assigning an Activity

Using the Teacher Dashboard

Things to Consider During Remote Teaching & Learning

Safety

Safer Schools Together has released this guide for increasing safety in a remote learning world. It includes a handy reference guide for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Classroom.

Teams (Office 365)

As every SurreySchools teacher has access to this tool, we thought it would be good to explore ideas on how to utilize it for providing continuity of learning.

Creating a Class Team

If you have not done so already, you can create a Team for your class. The ideas below show why it may be worth doing.

Check out this series of videos to get tips on creating and managing a team.

When you create a team, be sure to select Class as the team type.

This will load your team with tools that are helpful for a class, such as a Notebook and Assignments.

Conversations (Posts)

In Posts you can have classroom discourse through messages. In Teams you can also exchange posts to individuals or groups.

You can post files (see also the Files tab), add a YouTube video, and so on.

If you press the video icon, you can do video conferencing. This can be done in the moment, or at a scheduled time. You can video conference with the whole class, or one or more individuals.

During a video conference you can have text chats as well as share your screen.

Notebook

The OneNote Class Notebook is a digital notebook for the whole class to store text, images, handwritten notes, attachments, links, voice, video, and more.

Each notebook is organized into three parts:

Collaboration Space — A space where everyone in your class can share, organize, and collaborate.
Content Library — A read-only space where teachers can share handouts with students.
Student Notebooks — A private space shared between the teacher and each individual student. Teachers can access every student notebook, while students can only see their own.

Assignments

Assignments are a key way to send tasks to students, get their responses back, and provide feedback.

The video on the right shows an example of turning one of the tasks from this website into an Assignment. You may wish to expand the video to view it better.

To find out more about Assignments, see these videos (Day 50 to 55).

TeamsAssignment.mp4

Add a Tab

There are many other tools you can add to your class Team. For example, many teachers use Flipgrid as a way to gather evidence from students.

Flipgrid

Many teachers have had success using FlipGrid for students to share their thinking through video or using the whiteboard. They can also provide feedback. Check out this series of videos from #365in30seconds.

Desmos

Desmos started as an online graphing calculator before branching out into building free engaging digital activities for the mathematics classroom. These activities position students as creators rather than simply consumers of mathematical ideas. They enable students to share their ideas with each other, and with you!

Watch this very short video to the right for a quick introduction to teacher.desmos.com.

Getting Started with Classroom Activities

At learn.desmos.com, there's a wealth of resources to support you in learning how to facilitate these activities. If you're new to Desmos activities, please read these helpful Getting Started tips. Also, be sure to create an account if you haven't already done so. Each step in the planning and orchestration of an activity is briefly explained before a video (below) walks you through these processes.

Finding an Activity
Assigning an Activity
Using the Teacher Dashboard
Things to Consider During Remote Teaching & Learning

Finding an Activity

To find an activity, you could:
- Search by topic or keyword.
- Browse Featured Collections.
- Look through the collections created by the Numeracy Team.
  - These collections contain activities that have already been checked for alignment with grade level learning standards in BC.
  - K-2; 3-5; 6-7; Secondary
- Search the MathTwitterBlogoSphere (#MTBoS) Desmos bank.
Click Student Preview and experience an activity as your students would.
- Assess whether this activity will support your students' learning.
- If you'd like to customize an activity, click Copy and Edit.

Assigning an Activity

Once you've found an activity, click the Create Class Code button.
To share this activity with your students:
1. Have students go to student.desmos.com and type in the class code to join.
2. Or, send them the link.
As students enter the activity, you'll see them in your dashboard.
It's a good idea to have students create accounts. While this isn't necessary in order for students to complete an activity, it will enable them to return to prior work if need be or to receive feedback from you. Plus, you'll know who's who!

Using the Teacher Dashboard

After you create the class code, you can access the teacher dashboard.
The Summary view (right, top) will show whether students have logged in and where they are in the activity.
The Teacher view (right, bottom) will show how students responded within a given slide.
- select Overlay to see common answers (or outliers) when students were asked to draw or graph a response.
- Here, you can also click on a response of one student's and navigate through the activity to see all of their responses.
Use Snapshots to capture student thinking that you'd like to share and discuss with the class.
The Student view, like the Student Preview above, allows you to see and experience from the perspective of a student.

Things to Consider During Remote Teaching & Learning

In the classroom, your students would be logged in at the same time. You'd be able to pay close attention to student thinking and react in the moment in order to facilitate discussion. However, we are under the assumption that learning is asynchronous at this moment which presents some challenges.
You may decide to use the Pacing feature to restrict students to some rather than all of the slides. For example, you may wish to:
- Give all students time to write what they notice & wonder or make an initial estimate before students begin implementing a strategy.
- Get a sense of students' intuitive approaches before they can see slides where more formal methods are introduced.
- Reveal an answer only after every student has had an opportunity to come up with a solution.
Consider the goal of the activity and how this fits with where your students are at in their learning. Is your intention to:
- Introduce a new concept?
- Develop new mathematical understanding?
- Practice--and deepen or strengthen--knowledge or skills?
- Apply this learning to solve a novel problem?

Note: The Written Feedback feature was created to support remote teaching due to COVID-19. Play with this beta feature!

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse