Teachers Resource Force Blog

Things to have in place for back to school: distance learning style

20/7/2020

Going back to school this year after lockdown is certainly a strange experience for everyone. No one can be sure of how exactly schools are going to function while Covid-19 is still around, and every school is likely to be doing something different anyway, which makes it even more challenging to prepare for!

Things to have in place for back to school: distance learning style | TRF.one

Covid-19 has turned schools upside down and no one is sure of what back to school will look like for them:

What is likely, however, is that schools will be adopting some kind of blended learning approach with a mixture of in-school learning and distance learning. This means it can feel overwhelming to know exactly what you will need in place to prepare for back to school. How will social distancing work in school? Then there are safety fears of Covid-19 potentially spreading in schools as they are high-risk environments. How much online learning vs in school learning will there be? What exactly will that that all look like, and what kind of tech skills will you need to develop? Understandably, there are many questions and unknown variables, so it's OK to feel overwhelmed and under prepared at first. Keep reading to learn some practical things that you can do to help prepare as best as possible for back to school after lockdown.

There are things you can have in place to help prepare for blended learning:

Back to school post-pandemic doesn't have to be disorganised and unsettling for you. There are some general things that you can have in place that will help prepare you for blended or distance learning as you go back to school that will make your life so much easier. If you have these simple things in place, you will not only feel more prepared, but it will also help lift the mood and help keep a sense of normalcy, even in these unusual circumstances.

Make sure your students know what is expected of them with clear online classroom rules:

Sadly not all schools are equitable when it comes to technology access. Therefore if you feel your resources are limited yet you will still be expected to deliver blended learning, consider whether there is there anything you can do before school starts to help build your resources. For example, could you reach out to your principal or district? Set up a Donor’s Choose request or reach out for any second-hand equipment or donations? It won’t always be possible, but it never hurts to ask!

If your students do have sufficient access to technology and you are hosting online lesson calls, it is fundamental that students have clear rules and expectations for these calls. You can download thesefree Intro Slides for online calls that include rules, which are fully editable to suit your needs. There a total of 6 slides that you can customise for the start of your online calls.

Make sure your students know what is expected of them in online learning with clear rules | TRF.one

Similarly to rules, students would benefit from clear share instructions on how they are to utilise the technology you would like them to use for distance learning. For example, if you would like your students to be using Google Classroom, it makes sense to ensure that they have access to clear instructions of exactly what you would like them to do, how to access work, and how to turn in assignments. This would also be helpful for parents/carers so they can support their students through this process as well.

Use home as a support network where possible:

Parents/carers are an important part of your students’ success while they work from home, so any support they can offer would be beneficial. Therefore, you might also want to create a way to get regular parent feedback and input on how well they feel their child is doing working from home, and you can also use that feedback to improve your own practice and help students transition better. You can access these ready to go Parent Feedback Google Forms here.

Use home as a support network for distance learning | TRF.one

Free digital tools that might help make blended learning easier:

There are a number of Chrome web extensions that you could use that will help make your life a bit easier. For example, if you use Google Meet for online calls, you can download Google Meet Grid View so that you get more of a “Zoom” style layout with all your students in a grid.

Kami is another great Chrome Extension tool that integrates with Google Classroom, Schoology and Canvas. It allows you to take any document that you have shared with your students, and make it suitable for writing, drawing, annotating, typing on, etc. Kami can also be used as a digital whiteboard overlay when teaching - ideal for online lessons!

If you’re looking to prerecord your lessons in advance to share with your students, then Screencastify is the extension for you! You can record both your screen and yourself (should you choose), as well as write on the screen while recording lessons. Your videos are then automatically saved to your Google Drive where you can upload them to Google Classroom or even YouTube!

Bring the familiarity of school into your online classroom:

Finally, a fun touch to help bring those cozy classroom vibes into your online learning is the use of decor. Many teachers love decorating their classrooms and students love seeing the fun personalized touches around the room. So, why not use the dead space behind you when you're on an online call, as decor? To add that personal touch you could put inspirational quotes and posters pictures up, or add photos of your class or your own family / pets. You could also hang bunting, such as this set of cozy coffee shop bunting, to spell out a special word or phrase which is easy to change regularly to keep things fresh.

Another thing that you can do to bring the familiarity of your classroom into the digital world, is to customise your Google Classroom banner or banner of any Learning Management System that you use. You could use graphics to make it look like your own personal classroom at school, or maybe even take a photo of your classroom and add that to your online classroom. You could even just choose the same colour theme or style as you used in your classroom and transfer it digitally to your Google Classroom banner. Keeping that familiarity between your real classroom and your online space will help make blended learning more seamless for yourself and your students.

To conclude:

While it's hard to know how to best prepare for back to school post-pandemic, there are some things that you can have in place that will make your life that little bit easier in preparation for either blended learning or distance learning. Clear rules, technology tools and familiar decor can make all the difference.

Download the free Intro Slides for your online lesson calls:

Reminder, if you would like to download the free Intro Slides for Online Calls that also includes completely editable digital classroom rules, you can download them below:

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How to build community and nurture relationships with students while teaching remotely

22/6/2020

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Has lockdown got you panicking that your classroom community and the relationships you have spent so long nurturing are going to deteriorate after being apart for so long? You are not alone and there are ways to help, even while teaching remotely!

How to build community and nurture relationships with students while teaching remotely | www.TRF.one

Why lockdown might affect your classroom community and relationships:

Lockdown has had a significant effect on schools. The fact that you and your students have been apart for so many months is certainly challenging for all involved. It's hard to maintain good relationships when you don't see each other, spend time together, and bond in familiar ways. There is a fear that all those months and years of hard work building relationships between students and yourselves could be undone by the time you go back to school!

This is a concern for a lot of teachers as no one has been in this situation before: these are unprecedented times. No one is quite sure how to navigate the situation and no one is sure what kind of lasting effects this will have, in particular on staff and student relationships.

You can still build a classroom community and develop relationships while teaching remotely:

Fortunately, there are ways that you can help nurture relationships and classroom community using the wonder of the internet and some exciting techniques and strategies that will enable you and your students to bond from a distance. Keep reading to learn some top tips to nurture relationships with your students while remote learning and socially distancing.

1. Understand each student’s needs and struggles during remote learning and social distancing

The first way to help build classroom community and nurture relationships with your students is to get your students journaling. Journaling will help them process their feelings as they deal with isolation and the challenges of distance or blended learning. Furthermore, they will be sharing these insights with you enabling you to understand their needs and what struggles they might be facing. This insight will enable you to support them as individuals, which in turn will strengthen your relationship as you help them through their challenges. If your students have not gone back to school yet, now would be a great opportunity to encourage them to share their experiences of lockdown, how they are feeling, what they did with their time and what fears or concerns they may be experiencing in anticipation of going back to school.

This can all be easily achieved through a journal; you can access a back to school journal for free here that is Google Slides ready, meaning you can share it with your students via Google classroom, or whatever platform you are using to communicate with your students. They can then type directly into the document and share it with you. This will give you the opportunity to read what each student has personally experienced during lockdown and what their struggles and fears are. This will enable you to differentiate support based on their particular needs, and maybe even find connections between students to help build student relationships with one another.

For example, if you know some of your students might have learnt a new skill over lockdown, then you could team them up and they can communicate their experiences with one another. This will also help build community and bonds, especially if your class are new to one another.

2. Check-in on your students’ well being:

The second idea for building community and relationships with students is doing quick well being check-ins. This can be in the form of simple questionnaires such as Google forms where you ask your students a series of quick questions each day. By offering this, you are providing your students with an opportunity to share how they are doing and raise any issues that they might be having. Knowing students feel listened to helps build rapport, and the responses they provide offer you an opportunity to act on any of their concerns.

You could also incorporate whole-class activities such as Fun Themed Daily Morning Meetings. This particular resource, as an example, focuses on a different theme every day of the week and your students can have discussions or type responses to these prompts. They are a fun way of helping your classroom community bond together even while remote learning. Your class can still have a giggle together on “Funny Fridays”, they can focus on their well-being and supporting each other on “Well being Wednesdays” and so on and so forth.

In addition, it is possible to help build classroom community by using different check-in style questionnaires such as theseGet to Know You Forms. These include “Would You Rather” questions and could even be shared publicly with a whole class, especially if the class is newly formed and doesn’t know each other yet. By sharing the form with the whole class, everyone is able to see each student’s responses and this can help students find commonalities with one another as a starting point for building friendships.

3. Encourage your class to bond through online activities:

The third way to build a classroom community during distance learning is through activities that can be played during online calls.

Activity 1 is a scavenger hunt. This is really easy to complete and is ideal for the first few minutes of a call or even at the end of a call to encourage students to stay right until the end of the lesson. All you need to do is create a list of items that are often round around the home, then reveal these items one at a time to the students. The idea is that they quickly, but sensibly, look for the item in their home and show it on their screen. You can even award points or rewards to whoever finds their items first! You can ask them to find a plant pot or some colourful socks and you will see a hilarious range of random products! Students find scavenger hunts really enjoyable and it helps them bond too.

Activity 2 is a virtual show and tell. The idea works exactly the same as a regular show and tell, whereby students will prepare something they want to share with the class, and they can talk about it in front of their peers: it's just presented online instead of in-person, but the benefits are the same. Students will be learning about one another and hopefully finding things in common as they do these show and tell activities.

Activity 3 is a virtual contest. You could arrange for students to prepare for a talent show, for example, everyone has to perform a special talent of theirs, that could be music, art or even their favourite TikTok dances! By sharing their special talents, each student feels valued and listened to and gets to share a side of themselves to help their peers get to know them better and find things in common: all contributing to a sense of belonging and a strong classroom community.

In conclusion:

As you can see, even though your class might be physically apart it is still possible to build a community whether with existing students or even a new group of students; you can help them get to know each other and bond, even while distance learning through these various activities.

Download the Free Back To School After Lockdown Journal

If you would like to use the back to school after lockdown journal to help your students process their experiences and share with you their fears and concerns, you can download it for free below:

Back to school after lockdown journal | Teachers Resource Force

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Paperless Digital Colouring Decks for Distance Learning: Using Technology to Support Student Well Being

12/5/2020

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The benefits of quote colouring pages has been long documented on TeachersResourceForce.com! I first created them back in 2014 and students all around the world have been using these pages to help their well-being and practice mindfulness, ever since! If they are new to you, you can read all about the benefits of quote colouring pages here.

So after 6 years, and now with the new arena of distance learning teachers are finding themselves in, I figured it was about time that these quote colouring pages developed into the digital world! Keep reading to learn how these new digital colouring pages work and how you can get your hands on them for your students:

Paperless Digital Coloring Decks for Distance Learning: Using Technology to Support Student Well Being | TeachersResourceForce.com

SO HOW DO DIGITAL COLOURING PAGES ACTUALLY WORK?

Digital colouring pages work exactly as you would imagine they would! Your students can simply colour exactly as they would on paper - they can scribble using their finger, mouse or digital pen and they work on any digital device with absolutely no software required. Watch the video below to see them in action:

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL COLOURING PAGES?

These are not currently seen in the education world and I am proud to be the first to bring them to our schools and young people! Here are some of the benefits of digital colouring pages:

No more photocopying or printing required for teachers! What a relief, right?
Students have a complete library of colouring pages to choose from
They can colour in with any colour on the planet - no more restrictions with pen or pencil sets
No more pencil sharpeners - hoorah!
Students can colour in whenever and wherever they like - a great alterative to social media
These work on any device: phone, tablet, computer, laptop, chrome book... you name it!
No software is required and there is no learning curve involved
Ideal for early finishers or extension activities
Easy to assign as home work or for distance learning
An easy and effective resource to support student well-being

EASY WAYS TO USE DIGITAL COLOURING PAGES WITH YOUR STUDENTS:

Here are some ideas for using these digital colouring pages with your students:

1) Set them as distance learning activities:
At this current time, we're not sure how long distance learning will go on for, but even after it's over most teachers will likely to still be setting home learning tasks. Assignments such as digital colouring pages are so easy to set for your students, or they could be offered as optional tasks to support well being, relaxation and mindfulness at home or at school.

2) Ideal for parents to share with their children:
These are not just for teachers! They also make great activities to share with your own children at home. There is no need to print a thing and at least your children will be doing something healthy for their well-being while on their digital devices!

3) Set as activities for early finishers:
Many teachers who reach out to me about how they have used quote colouring pages said they love to use them as work for early finishers! Why not save on the printing and have these digital versions in your arsenal too! Because they work so well on any device, your students could even use their own phones if so permitted in your school.

4) Practicing mouse control:
Do you have children who need to practice mouse control? These digital colouring pages are a fantastic tool to help them with this! They can use the mouse to colour in intricate details of varying complexities depending on their skills, and be inspired by powerful quotes in the process!

6) Design their own desktop backgrounds and posters:
Once they have completed their pages, the benefit of these digital colouring pages is that they can easily save a digital copy of their work. That means they can set their designs as their computer desktop or phone screensaver if they wish, to help keep them inspired all day long. As an extra bonus, these pages are printable too, should you want to display these up on your classroom walls afterwards!

7) Send to others via email or messenger:
Another bonus of having these saved as a digital file, is that they can easily send them to their friends and family via email or messenger. During these challenging times of social distancing, it's even more important than ever to keep connected, and what a more personal and special way than a specially coloured inspirational quote poster just for them!

HOW TO GET HOLD OF THE DIGITAL QUOTE COLOURING PAGES:

If you would like to get your hands on these digital colouring pages, you can access them in 2 different ways. You can purchase them individually via TpT or shop.TRF.one whereby you will be given a link and password for each deck.

Alternatively, if you would like an easier way to access them, you can sign up for a year long membership whereby you and your students will have access to every single deck (and so much more!) without the need for multiple passwords!

You can find out more about the membership by checking out web-decks.com below:

I hope you will join me in being the first to bring these digital quote colouring pages into our classrooms and homes. Let's help inspire our young people, encourage them to take a break from the pressures of social media and instead use technology to help their mental well-being.

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