Formative Assessment in an Online Classroom
Checking students’ understanding throughout a lesson or unit, often called “formative assessment,” is an essential part of a teacher’s work. Without these checks, a lesson risks being too easy or too difficult, and thus a waste of time. As teachers, we want to deliver the right level of challenge to each of our students, and this requires that we both diagnose their starting points and assess their levels of understanding throughout the lesson. It’s easy to lose people if we make assumptions about our students’ level of understanding.
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.