How To Provide Extra Resources For Your Students (while teaching remotely)

Use these tools to give extra help from afar

A school day is long, but a remote school day feels even longer. Much longer. As a teacher, you might be finding yourself running out of time to offer one-on-one help to the students who need it. In typical circumstances, there’s before and after school extra help, resource room, and the opportunity for students to lean on each other for help.

But these are not typical circumstances, and teachers like yourself, who are working overtime to maintain a positive distance learning environment for their students, are incredibly important right now.

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.

Create & Share Study Materials While Remote

Some students need extra help, it’s the reason for — well, extra help. In a remote classroom, it’s impossible to provide all the extra help by yourself, though, as there’s only 24 hours in a day (and you need to sleep for some of those hours). So unless you can bend space and time, your students will need to find their extra help somewhere else. To make things easier, we polled our Rocketbook teachers community to see the online tools they recommend for providing extra help that won’t cost you precious sleeping hours.

Khan Academy

4.6/5 Stars | Khan Academy is a site that offers free video courses in a wide variety of math and science topics. With videos that start at elementary school level and advance all the way to high school and early college subjects, this is one of the most comprehensive free learning resources out there. While some students are able to benefit from Khan Academy independently, teachers can also use the teacher dashboard feature to monitor their student’s (or entire class’) progress through hand-picked courses and practice quizzes. This way your students are watching the videos you choose and are not wasting time watching irrelevant videos or searching for the right topic. Khan academy gives you the power to offer personalized extra help while saving time to prepare for tomorrow’s lesson.

Quizlet

4.5/5 Stars | Quizlet is an interactive study tool. It allows students and teachers to create virtual flashcards and provides a variety of fun ways for students to engage with the material. One of the study options is simple memory recall, but another is a race against the clock where students must type the meaning of a term before the timer runs out. These unique games increase the likelihood that students will study and encourages them to compete against classmates to improve their skills (and thus, enhance their understanding). Quizlet has made its premium teacher plan for free through June 30, 2020, which similar to Khan Academy, affords teachers the ability to assign study assignments and monitor student’s progress, all while remote.

These are the most popular recommendations we heard from our teaching community, but there are plenty of other tools. Depending on your student’s needs these options might be a better fit for you. Here’s some other options for providing extra help without breaking the (time) bank:

• If Quizlet piqued your interest, but you’re looking for even more engaging style study games for your students to play, Sumdog teaches math and spelling with complete personalization. Sumdog has also made all their services free for teachers.
• If you’re looking for an extra help tool that’s focused on practice problems, our teacher community suggests IXL. Spanning from pre-k to twelfth grade, IXL’s practice problems test students’ knowledge and — if they answer incorrectly — offer an explanation of the concept at hand and the correct answer. This tool is especially good for students who already understand the basics of a topic or are eager to jump into answering questions. PurpleMath is a similar tool that teaches math by walking through practice problems.
• For students who are also struggling to find study time, Knowt can be a useful resource in a pinch. While it’s a shortcut, Knowt’s algorithm searches digital (i.e. typed) notes and creates quizzes to check student’s understanding. In some cases, the questions aren’t perfectly relevant, but for recall of fact-based material this can be a time-saving dream and impressively futuristic.
• If you’re looking for even more tools, CommonSense.org has an exhaustive list of learning tools, broken down by grade level and subject for you to peruse.

Give Extra Help While Remote

Sometimes an online study tool isn’t quite enough, and a little human interaction is needed to bridge the gap of understanding for a student. Have no fear, we’ve curated our teacher community’s best suggestions for giving real extra help on a time budget.

Virtual Office Hours

Many teachers offer scheduled extra help sessions where students come in to ask questions and are provided with one on one support. In a remote setting, this is still possible. Use Google Hangout or Zoom to communicate with your students and allow everyone to tune in. By answering one student’s question at a time, you’re both giving that student the attention they need to improve their understanding, but also providing the information for the rest of the class that’s in the video call. Furthermore, in order to protect your schedule, set strict times for your office hours and ask students to come with specific questions prepared.

1-on-1 Communication

Here’s the scenario: a student has a question about a topic, but your digital office hours have already ended. Here’s the solution: Use a tool that creates an open line of communication for the student to ask a question while providing yourself the freedom to respond on your own time. There’s no need to get fancy here, using email will do the trick, but Remind is another option that allows parents to communicate with you as well. The added benefit of this method is that students’ questions will be private and they won’t feel any judgement from their peers.

Classwide Communication

In school, students can form study groups, discuss problems after class, and work together to understand tough concepts. In a remote classroom, however, group learning is a much greater challenge. Group messaging tools provide a space for your class to help each other’s understanding while saving you time that can be put towards grading or sleep (you still need sleep, don’t think we’ve forgotten about that). GroupMe and WhatsApp are popular and free group messaging tools that can be used without a phone number.

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 (For Yourself)

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.

• Check out our Educator Resource Page which is full of tools and tips for mastering your virtual classroom.
• 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.

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