How To Train Teachers for a Virtual Classroom
The coronavirus pandemic has prompted educators around the world to step up their commitment to students, seeking new ways to provide online instruction and support. From universities to yoga studios, educational institutions are increasingly turning to free virtual classrooms for online teaching and learning. This move to remote learning requires remarkable agility from administrators and leaders, who in many cases are scrambling to train a large group of teachers very quickly for the transition.
Classroom Management for Teaching Online
So your classroom is moving online. For many instructors, this shift poses technological and pedagogical challenges, but for K-12 instructors, it also poses behavioral challenges. As a former middle school teacher, I’d imagine that upper elementary, middle, and high school teachers are having visions of Zoom bombing, inappropriate camera usage, private chat gone awry, and annotation tools used like spray paint. Even though it’s already springtime, starting online school may feel like going back to September: students will need to learn a whole new set of routines and norms.
Ten Ways to Get Your Students Talking in an Online Class
If you’ve recently started teaching online, you may have discovered that, like so many activities in the time of coronavirus, it can be a lonely experience. Virtual classrooms have the potential to foster strong interpersonal connections, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re looking at a sea of black screens generated by off-camera, off-mic participants logged in as “iPhone 2.” In the past few weeks, I’ve interacted with instructors of all varieties who are looking for the “secret sauce” of student engagement in the online classroom.