With us all now teaching online I thought I would go through some of my top picks for creating engaging and insightful lessons fo both teachers and students. I am a high school teacher, in 2016 I started doing more and more online for my students through Google Classroom, I will admit very haphazardly. I have refined my approach since then.
Let start with platforms. Through teaching and as a student I have experienced the use of Moodle, Blackboard and Google Classroom, as a parent I am now experiencing Classdojo, not quite as interactive but it is for a different age group. Each school or department will have a prefered or paid for service. My favourite is Google Classroom. Yes this is what I have had the most experience with as a teacher but it also has extensive add-ons which can be used in conjunction with other features of google.
Classroom also allows you to create topics in order to organise materials, link youtube clips and other resources to the classwork. The ability to develop assignments which you can provide for each student to access their own is also useful, you don’t have to get each person to share with you their document or create one for each individual student, it is all down by selecting one of the options for sharing. rolls can be developed through having a daily question which can also have a mark awarded to it (though this is not necessary).
As a teacher I want to engage my students. Normally I would explain the lesson to them, a bit of teacher talk and write the tasks on the board. Just writing a list on google classroom with worksheets is not going to cut it for online learning. For this I have chosen screen casting to solve the promblem. I can make a recording of my screen, my screen and myself, or just myself with narration being an option for each. Screencast-o-matic is a free option and whilst there is paid options, the free version does suffice, especially while you are learning to use it.
Google has a great app to help you collate students work, mark it and return it. Using Google Forms, access the add-on Doctopus and link to your google classroom. So helpful for essays, reading students work and providing feedback and marks without painstakingly going through each individuals work on google classroom.
I hope this helps someone, I know its not much but if this is your starting point for an online class then at least this is something to go on. There are a world of instructional videos available but get in and explore as well.