The first response of Emergency Remote Teaching was video conferencing, be it Zoom, Collaborate, Meet, Webex, Teams, GoToMeeting or Bluejeans. They are all good communication tools, with whiteboard or without whiteboard, with gallery or without gallery, chat, reports, recording, etc. All good, but spending hours in front of a screen is what bothers us and exhausts us.
Do you miss those participatory activities, games, contests, group work that we had in the face-to-face classroom? Here are some tools that will help us motivate participation and collaboration among our students, and that will allow them to have a more active role in the development of classes.
And, best of all, they are free (or have free versions).
To work in groups and share:
Digital whiteboards are a good option for brainstorming and collaborative work. Miro, Jamboard, Openboard, Mural, ExplainEverything, and Whiteboard are all good tools to make this kind of work easier online.
To add “magic” to your content
We know that our contents must be entertaining so that the students do not “abandon” us… so we must add a little magic to them and generate the surprise effect in each session. For this, the animations are good and tools like Vyond, Powtoon, Prezi, Wordwall and Genially will be very useful to us.
Fun evaluations? is seriously?
In the online environment we can do surveys, polls, quick quizzes in the form of contests and games without the need to scare anyone.
Does anyone raise their hand?
Comments and even facilitate open discussion on hot topics within our classes. Its use is 100% recommended, believe me, the levels of participation are extraordinary and you will not miss that uncomfortable moment when we asked the students in the face-to-face class and nobody dared to answer.
Video is key
It is true that we started talking badly about videoconferences, but the truth is that we appreciate them very much. However we like asynchronous better (because it gives us freedom) and so we can recommend Loom, vidyard and flipgrid for students to submit their video work. They are going to have a lot of fun because it is a format that is very close to them, but look why TikTok and Instagram are so popular in this generation.
Team management
One of the concerns of students (and of everyone, really) in these times of isolation is how to organize for group work. There are several applications that help us manage tasks and projects: Trello is the best known, but ClickUp, Asana, and Infolio are also recommended.
Stories that captivate
The storytelling technique is increasingly present in our daily activities and education does not have to be alien to this movement. Applications like Storyboard, Twinery will help us prepare our stories and catch our students in this beautiful adventure of knowledge.
There is more? Of course there is more and every time we find something interesting we will share it in this padlet panel (by the way, another interesting tool)
