Lit and Tech

If you use Zoom with your students keep reading. If you use, or want to use breakout rooms with your students in Zoom, this post is for you. This works best if your students login to Zoom using their school accounts. It can also work if they created personal Zoom accounts. For safety, your best bet is requiring students to login to Zoom with their school accounts. The second best option is to require them to create Zoom accounts using a personal email and then you use a form to collect those email addresses. Either way you should know the email address of anyone you are expecting to join your class Zoom session. (See #1 in the screen shot.)The Fun Part: Breakout RoomsZomming with 36 students is nice for direct instruction, but for actual conversation and collaboration, break out rooms are essential. In my classroom, I almost never group students randomly, but the prospect of having to click 36 different check boxes to assign students to groups intentionally was daunting and time consu…

Gear for Virtual Teaching And A Virtual Classroom Background

A back in March I posted a picture of my classroom on Twitter and suggested teachers take pictures of their own classrooms to use as a virtual background on Zoom. That tweet has turned out to be very popular, so here is a little more info.

To add a virtual background on Zoom you will need to go into your settings in the zoom app. I find it easiest to do this if I launch a meeting and click the arrow next to the camera icon. One of the options is to add a virtual background. It remembers the backgrounds you add, and you can have more than one. There are much more specific directions from Zoom here.

Note that the full image, and what shows up on Zoom are slightly different. Zoom trims all the edges.

The Gear: (Updated in August 2020 because I found some things I like better.)
Virtual backgrounds work much better if you have a green screen. I happened to have one already and I was glad I had thought to bring it home from my classroom. I have one like this. (Affiliate link) It works great…

Get More Internet: Bandwidth for Virtual Teaching and Learning

We are about to go back to school and most of us are about to do that in virtual teaching modules. (It's the 5th month of pandemic 'quarantine' for those keeping track.) Unlike the spring, my district, and state are pushing for a much larger number of live teaching minutes. For most of us, teachers and students, this means many more hours a day in virtual meetings, mostly via Zoom or Google Meet.
Everyone is operating with the assumption that this technology is just going to work, that all kids and teachers will be able to get and stay online in video calls for several hours a day. We are even starting to see rules posted that students “must be on camera” during class. We are assuming that we can use these calls as proxies for attendance. I even heard a principal say to mark a student tardy if they leave the call early. It’s not that easy.
I’m not talking about the social and emotional challenges of being online. There are other excellent posts about that. See "Camera…

How do I grade when the work is digital? 5 Tips to get moving

One of our biggest responsibilities as teachers, one of the most time consuming ones anyway, is giving feedback to our students. As a writing teacher, I spend a lot of time giving direct feedback in class, and also digitally on my students' Google Docs. If you are just getting started with devices for your students, you may be worried about giving feedback digitally when you are used to being able to write directly on student papers. At first this digital transition will make it more time consuming for you to give students feedback, and then it will get faster, as you get the hang of it.

I like metaphors, so try this one. When a baby is an expert crawler he/she can move pretty fast. When he/she makes the transition to walking the movement is less efficient and the child moves slower, often even dropping to the floor to crawl when walking feels too slow. But over a few months the baby learns to walk well and then run. This is what digital feedback feels like for teachers, slower a…

How do I organize my Google Classroom?

The question I get the most about Google Classroom is, "How do you organize it?" When I am helping teachers in my district, I often ask them to add me as a co-teacher to their Google Classroom. Then I poke around, and make them a screencast with my feedback. Much of that feedback is about organization.
I know every teacher out there is doing the absolute best they can in a very new situation. Most of them have no experience with GC and they are making normal, rookie, mistakes. I want to help.
I'd love to just write one post about this, but I have a feeling it's going to be an ongoing series. So, today I'll just focus on one thing, assignment efficiency.
Assignment efficiency means giving assignments in a way that makes the most sense to students, and also creates the most practical work flow for teacher evaluation. I think when teachers ask me about organization they are really asking how to assign things efficiently. I'll show you a wrong way to give ass…