Don’t Let Being Remote Interrupt Your Teaching Flow written by the Rocketbook Launchpad

Use these tools to stay on track.

Creating an effective remote classroom is no easy task. Let’s be blunt, it’s freaking hard. Teachers, like yourself, who are working overtime to maintain a positive distance learning environment for their students are incredibly important right now.

As a remote teacher, you’re likely looking for ways to easily communicate lessons with your students not only to maintain their educational progress, but also to help them feel comfortable and safe during these unique circumstances. Our goal is to make your job easier, and so we’re providing tools and tips from our Rocketbook teachers community, a group of teachers we’ve built from around the country, to help you overcome the challenges associated with remote teaching.

Livestream Your Lessons While Remote

As a teacher, you need to present new learning material to students. If you were a secret agent, that would be considered your primary mission. This task is difficult enough when your students are in the room with you, but even more challenging when you’re all apart. One teacher we spoke to explained that it’s “difficult to video conference with 20 students at a time and have a quality discussion.” To help make things easier, we polled our Rocketbook teachers community to see the tools they recommend for presenting lessons live via the internet. Think of these as your secret agent gadgets, but instead of an exploding pen you’ve got video conference software.

Google Meet

4.4/5 Stars|Google Meet is a free video chat service from Google that allows up to 100 participants at a time. This tool allows two-way visual communication between you and your students which helps you recognize when students are following along or are confused and might need something repeated. Additionally, Google Meet has a “share your screen” feature so that if you have a presentation your speaking from, your students can following along with you which helps prevent distractions. Lastly, there is also a chat feature in Google Meet so that your students can type questions that can be answered by you. This prevents them from interrupting your lesson and allows them to focus on what you’re saying rather than trying not to forget what they want to ask.

Zoom

4.6/5 Stars | Similar to Google Meet, Zoom is a video chat service that has recently made some paid features completely free for educators (e.g. they removed the 40-minute time limit for Basic accounts). In terms of its capabilities, Zoom is similar to Google Meet, but it also gives teachers the ability to “draw” on their screens to make annotations or bring attention to important visuals.

Edpuzzle

While Edpuzzle is not a free service, it does offer some capabilities not provided by Google Meet or Zoom. First, Edpuzzle can be integrated with Google Classroom, PowerSchool, and Blackboard. Additionally, it allows teachers to track the progress of students with interactive videos and problems. This tool goes beyond a simple lesson sharing service which may not be what your looking for right now, but it’s a great tool to have in your arsenal.

These are the most popular recommendations we heard from our teaching community, but there are plenty of other tools. In a world of secret agents, everyone has their methods. Here’s some other options for live remote teaching:

• Pear Deck: allows students to interact with the presentation as you teach
• Canvas: 4.4/5 Stars | a virtual classroom with calendar, quizzes, and discussion features.
• Schoology: 4.4/5 Stars | a virtual classroom tool made by PowerSchool.

Make Your Lessons Accessible To All While Remote

In some circumstances, your students won’t be able to watch the lessons live. Have no fear, there are ways to share your lesson even after you’ve taught the information.

Google Slides

Google Slides is a free presentation tool offered by Google. Similar to PowerPoint or Keynote, this program allows you to create a lesson with text, images, video, and links. If a student misses your live lesson, you can easily share the Google Slides presentation with them via a web link so they can see all the material that was covered. This tool also offers some interactivity with speaker notes and comments. As a teacher, you can add speaker notes to each slide so that students can read the key commentary for each slide even after the fact. As a student, comments can be used to ask questions or provide opportunities for discussion on certain topics. This promotes active learning for students going through old lessons, which studies have shown to improve comprehension.

Video Record Lessons

This is more of a tip than a tool, but it’s important and useful nonetheless. Use a camera or QuickTime (to film yourself giving a lesson to your students. This enables you to share the full visual and audial version of your lessons with students who aren’t able to attend them live. In terms of secret agents, this would be considered on par with saving the world.

Our Rocketbook teachers community all struggle with providing remote resources for students who lack access to technology. Many schools are not 1 to 1 and some students don’t have the laptops, Chromebooks, phones, or internet access necessary for many remote teaching tools. This can be incredibly frustrating for you and your students. Our free Rocketbook PDFs help bridge that gap by providing a way for students to communicate, submit assignments, and present their work without a laptop. Learn more about our free PDF pages template.

Get Extra Help

Right now there’s lots of resources for helping teachers being shared, but maybe you’ve still got some unanswered questions. If you’d like additional help, suggestions, tips, or tools for providing a great remote classroom environment for your students, we’ve got your covered.

• Email our educational advisor, Maggie Robbins, at maggie.robbins@getrocketbook.com. Maggie taught middle and high school for 25+ years, primarily in Math and Engineering, at Westside Middle School Academy in Danbury, CT.
• Email Rocketbook at hello@getrocketbook.com for any questions on how we can help you.
• Help other teachers by sharing your tips online with the hashtag #BetterTogether.

In the meantime, thank you for working hard to help make this a seamless transition for your students despite it being anything but for you.

Our hope is to help every teacher make the transition to a remote classroom as easy as possible, even if you’ve never heard of Rocketbook before. In the case you do know about Rocketbook (we’re flattered, by the way), we wanted to provide some bonus tips on how to use the Rocketbook products you already own to enhance your remote classroom.