Remote Teaching and Learning

The purpose of this 1.5-hour workshop is to organize your teaching load into discrete groups that you can access so contact is continuous. I will guide you through the process of creating virtual classrooms using a program called Google Classroom*. This program allows you to build a classroom for each of your courses so your students can find their assignments, turn in homework, get feedback on their work, and receive their grades. Although the interaction will not necessarily be simultaneous, students will be able to communicate with each other and with you through the platform. Google Classroom a free, well-vetted program that is useful whether your classes are in-person or remote. This platform is not a live video meeting; therefore, it does not require a high-speed internet connection or a to synchronized meeting time. Google Classroom can be accessed using a computer, tablet, or cell phone so students with limited access to the internet can participate on any device using whatever time is available.

*Note:  We will discuss alternate Learning Management Systems (LMS) programs such as Schoology, Moodle, One Note, Seesaw, Teams, and Canvas in case you find those programs to be more appealing, more intuitive, or chosen as the preferred platform for your school. We will discuss the similarities in function of these programs as a teacher and student communication platform.

*Note:  We will discuss alternate Learning Management Systems (LMS) programs such as Schoology, Moodle, One Note, Seesaw, Teams, and Canvas in case you find those programs to be more appealing, more intuitive, or chosen as the preferred platform for your school. We will discuss the similarities in function of these programs as a teacher and student communication platform.

In this 1.5-hour workshop, we will compare several online video meeting platforms that you may find useful for holding synchronous classes. We will go over the pros and cons of several popular programs (Zoom, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, and Webex) discussing why you may choose one over another. This is not an IT workshop where we work out technical difficulties, the focus of this workshop will be on the quality of the platform as it serves teachers who are simulating an interactive classroom experience. We will consider the ease of set-up, quality of connectivity, privacy settings, and compare a variety of features such as screen-sharing, student presentation abilities, the flow of discussions, continuous sidebar chat, student participation, quizzing the group, recording and replay of the class period. We will practice using the common features of these programs and go over ways you might interact to optimize collaboration and communication. The objective of this workshop is to help you choose a medium that works best for your classes and your style of instruction.

Online learning does not have to be devoid of depth, there are plenty of ways to hone your teaching skills and challenge your students within the confines of teaching remotely. During this 1.5-hour workshop, you will take part in several assignments that foster higher-order thinking in an asynchronous learning environment. You will play the role of the student as we try out activities that work well in online classrooms so you can experience the effort and critical thinking required. We will reflect on the methods that optimize participation, communication, collaboration, and depth of learning. We will make a list of some “Do’s” and “Don’t’s” that pertain to distance learning and brainstorm the alignment of content and skills with the tools you have available.

This 1.5-hour workshop will address teaching techniques that can be used while conducting a class via live video streaming where all students would meet at the same time (aka synchronous teaching) using a platform such as Google Meets, Zoom, Teams, Webex, etc. During this 1.5-hour workshop, you will take part in several assignments that foster higher-order thinking in a synchronous learning environment. You will play the role of the student as we try out activities that work well in video meetings so you can experience the effort, engagement, and critical thinking required. We will reflect on the methods that optimize participation, communication, collaboration, and depth of learning. We will make a list of some “Do’s” and “Don’t’s” that pertain to distance learning and brainstorm the alignment of content and skills with the tools you have available.

Many of us have the basics to teaching online down, but there are still delays, hiccups, and a suite of things that may go wrong each time we start a video meeting. Little things we learned to do without thought in our first few years to teaching once again plague us, such as handing out materials, knowing if every person is present (when their audio and video are both off), getting full participation, and helping recalcitrant students interact. How do we regain the mastery of teaching so we can again convey content and see our student apply knowledge? In this 1.5-hour workshop you will learn about and practice using a number of techniques that will help make your remote classroom run more smoothly. Some tips and tricks will take the bumps out of basic procedures, while others will give you access to a deeper level of connection to your students.

In order to promote intellectual curiosity and advance the collective, individual participants must trust one another so they can take risks, offer ideas, disagree respectfully, and collaborate freely. Starting the year with new students who are not meeting in person as a group will present some unique challenges. Even within a group familiar with one another, this interdependence can be difficult. So, how will you build a collaborative culture in your online classroom? Participants in this workshop will play the role of the students meeting for the first time as a class. You will be led through a number of activities that you can reproduce in your own classes to foster connection, ease, and familiarity. Interwoven in the activities will be skills required for learning in a synchronous and asynchronous classroom so as you build a sense of community, you are simultaneously practicing and testing your ability to perform the skills required for future assignments.

In this free 1-hour workshop, Kristen Dotti from Catalyst Learning Curricula will show teachers three easy ways to integrate graphing and data analysis skills into their lesson plans with the user-friendly features of DataClassroom. Whether you just want a solid graphing interface, or you are drawn to the hypothesis testing and descriptive statistics that are available with a few clicks, this program has a clean presentation that makes telling a story with numbers a breeze. There are pre-loaded data sets and postable activities with claim-based reflection questions to lead students through a thought-provoking experience, or students can load data they have collected to create a graph that expresses their results and supports their conclusions. Kristen will demonstrate several ways to use DataClassroom so you can optimize the materials in this program regardless of what you have prepared already for the coming weeks.

Although DataClassroom is a paid subscription service that is available for teachers and districts, the resource is so valuable as a teaching tool for data analysis, graphing, and statistics that I wanted to dedicate a free workshop to make teachers aware of the utility of this program. Their free version and the 90-day trial of the licensed version will allow you time to determine if this resource is a must-have for your classroom. As an AP and IB teacher, I find the manipulation of all aspects of a data set and the presentation of data in graphic form–particularly the choice of error bars–to be something my students need. I want to let other AP and IB teachers know about this resource, and would love to see students using it at a younger age so they could be better prepared as they progress through the vertical science curriculum.

To join us for this workshop, place an event ticket into your shopping cart and check out (at $0 charge). You will receive a workshop meeting link at the email address submitted, so be sure to use the email address you intend to use during the workshop. If you would like to register members of your department, you can place more than one ticket in your shopping cart as needed.

Competitions are assignments that guide students through a preliminary exploration, data collection, analysis, reflection, and revision in a repeating cycle. This process leans on the scientific method and helps students practice character skills such as persistence, curiosity, critical thinking, and self-direction. For my own purposes, I will differentiate team challenges from competitions in that competitions are assessed with quantitative measurements that allow clear winners to emerge in an objective manner. Participants in this 1.5 hr. workshop, will be asked to achieve a particular goal, the outcome of which can be documented and shown to the rest of the class. Teachers in this workshop will be taken through the steps of a competition as if they were the students with intermediate goals and checkpoints along the way. As a final step, we will return to our roles as teachers and help one another think through ways that this teaching structure can be used in our own classes.

Combat attrition with engaging assignments that can be sculpted to the student’s abilities and interest. Stop-animation videos are a short movies made with a series of photos taken from the same position and a handful of items that can be moved about to create story. In this1.5 hr. workshop, you will create your own stop-animation video of processes or phenomena, to cover main ideas or convey detailed information. Through this experience, you will see how this teaching technique can be used to deepen understanding, reinforce the use of terms, and work out the sequence of events for a content topic. We will use online teaching methods to build your repertoire for synchronous instruction, and you will experience how the use of shared materials and peer editing can be used to enhance remote learning.

Whether for STEM, foreign language, arts, or humanities, applying information is one of the most effective ways for a student to increase their level of understanding and for a teacher to assess mastery of knowledge and skills. Team challenges include any activity that asks a cooperative group to use what they have learned to accomplish a goal. For my own purposes, I will differentiate challenges from competitions by defining a challenge as an outcome that is assessed with a mixture of subjective qualitative and quantitative measurements. Team challenges result in a wide range of solutions rather than predictable and comparable outcomes. Participants in this 1.5 hr. workshop, will break into groups to work on a challenge that requires knowledge and aid from each member of the group. Solutions will be presented to an audience of workshop peers (our “class”). Outcomes will be judged using a rubric that is created by the class, so personal knowledge of the difficulties facing those presenting their solutions will be inherent in the final assessments. As a final step we will return to our roles as teachers and help each other think through ways that this teaching structure can be used in our own classes.

One of the gifts of teaching in a distance learning environment is the documentation that occurs as students complete and submit work. Each step of the thinking process is recorded digitally, and if a teacher is clever about how they pose their assignments, the maturation of an idea can easily be captured. In this 1.5-hour workshop, participants will learn techniques to document the development and refinement of student work. We will consider how an assignment can be modified to encourage students to reveal their thought processes and reflect on what triggers modifications or changes in thinking. Each participant will tailor the techniques to their own subject area skills to fit the learning objectives of their course.

An exciting way to engage your students in their online class is to use a topic that sparks discussion, research, and the desire to sleuth out additional information. In this 1.5 hr. workshop, teachers will participate in a debate in an asynchronous platform (such as Google Classroom) and in a synchronous video meeting (such as Zoom). We will use a topic that allows teachers of any subject area to join in making claims supported with evidence and reasoning. Have fun interacting with other teachers as you learn a new technique to use in your remote classroom.

Fallacies are errors in reasoning that undermine the logic of an argument. However, fallacies do not necessarily weaken the impact of the argument—on the contrary, fallacies are employed as persuasive devices that lead an audience to false conclusions. In this 1.5 hr. workshop, participants will learn to identify some common fallacies and use them to search auditory and written information. Using a repeatable structure that can be taught in any subject area, teachers will determine how logical fallacies are executed in materials relevant to their class so they can help students identify when a claim is not truly supported by evidence or reasoning.

In this 1.5 hr. workshop, teachers will work individually and then as a team to identify a pattern in puzzle pieces that are tell the story of a theorem, function, or process. Once the pattern is defined, participants will use the pattern to predict what comes before or what comes next in the series. Testing their hypothesis against additional information will allow them to revise their explanation of the rules that govern the pattern. Using a technique that can be repeated with different content, phenomena, or skills, we will look for topics that lend themselves to this method of learning-while-doing to provide an engaging critical thinking activity for online or in-person classes.

Information is available from an unlimited number of sources and accessible to anyone. And, anyone who desires can make information available to the masses regardless of its factual or fictitious nature. How are we able to determine what information is reliable and what is suspect? In this 1.5 hr. workshop, we will use a series of activities to create a list checklist of attributes that we are using when we decide what is substantiated and what is not. The activities can be repeated for use in any subject area as a method for discovering how we know what we know in specific fields of study—math, history, art, science, or languages—or modified for use with different grade levels.

Systems models are diagrams or infographics that contain multiple lines of evidence and data within a single visual presentation. Increasingly used across all subject areas, these graphics can be challenging for students to interpret. In this workshop, teachers will act as the students as they shift through each layer of a complex systems model to harvest the information embedded in the diagram. In a second activity, teachers will work in teams to produce a systems model that conveys a large amount of data in a succinct manner. We will discuss the repeatable method used and share sources for systems models that are applicable to their courses.