How to make remote learning fun

From mood jars to scavenger hunts, here are 14 things we did to keep children engaged during our remote Design Club.

A mood jar — write down thoughts and feelings on sticky notes and pop them in a household jar

Earlier this year, I helped run a remote Design Club for 11–13 year olds at West London Free School. You can read about it in 5 insights for running a Design Club remotely using printouts and Zoom.

For obvious reasons, it’s a lot harder keeping children engaged when they’re sitting in front of a screen at home. It helped that we had a small team of mentors involved in running the club.

All 5 of us were able to join most of the sessions.

Here’s my list of everything we tried and found to be successful.

Preparation

1. Hold weekly planning meetings with all mentors.
2. Use Google sheets to share ideas for each session, allowing people to input asynchronously, when they have time.
3. Play to the strengths of your team — divide up the content and give each mentor ‘ownership’ of one or two sessions.
4. Assign roles each week to help the Zoom call run smoothly i.e. introductions & check ins, weekly lead mentor, chat monitors.
5. Try things out ahead of time, e.g. we trialled the stamp tool on Zoom, and practiced connecting our phones to the Zoom call to give a live demonstration of Marvel App.
6. If you’re new to Design Club’s resources, consider doing a dry run of the process so you feel comfortable, e.g. I ran the course through with my kids during half term :-)

Behaviour

1. Model the desired behaviour — as mentors, we always had our cameras on, and were ready to speak up when silence prevailed.
2. Throughout the session, continue to gently ask participants if they feel willing to turn their cameras on or share what they’ve done. But remember that many won’t want to — and that’s okay.
3. Assign one or two mentors to monitor the chat channel — we found this gave our quieter participants a ‘voice’ and a way to engage with us.

Warm-ups

1. Check ins: ask everyone for one word on how they are feeling at the start of each session (remember some will prefer to do so in the chat).
2. Design scavenger hunt: have the children go and find a designed object in their house that they like to use — and share it on screen.
3. Create a mood jar: ask participants to jot down their feelings and add them to a jar. Find times in the session to revisit the jar and check in with everyone’s mood.

Involving parents

1. Actively plan for how to involve parents in the process — they will be your feedback channel! (e.g. Ask the school for permission to set up a WhatsApp group, or send emails, so parents know to expect every week).
2. Invite the most engaged parents to help with safeguarding. Our participants seemed more willing to have cameras on in smaller groups, so it’s good to use breakout rooms if you can. But always ensure that at least two adults are present. (Safeguarding tips).

I hope these tips are helpful. If you run an online club, don’t forget to let us know how you get on!