Quick Prep for Remote Classes

The following is based on an email I sent to my school’s Academic Dean as we prepare to offer all our classes remotely.

I set up an entire week’s worth of lessons tonight using what I learned from the Global Online Academy (GOA) course. It took about 3 hours. The parts of the GOA course I most leaned on were wayfinding, relationships, and assessments.

First, watch my ~5min walkthrough of the lesson. The actual page/lesson is still under construction and behind my school’s Canvas login. Happy to share with anyone who asks. Here are screenshots, as well:

Here’s how I thought about planning for remote class delivery:

• How much time? Face-to-face seat time at my school is about 4 hours per week, so that.
• I figured my work would go fastest if planning backwards from an assessment. So the assessment I chose is a lab, something that already existed in my lesson inventory. Physics teachers, it’s the Waves Intro using Sean Cordry’s submitted lab called Writing an Equation for the Wave.
• To get the students ready for the assessment, I knew I’d need to teach vocabulary and introduce them to the key content. I chose videos and readings. The videos were filmed tonight (included in my 3 hour estimate) and readings come from a great online resource.
• I knew I needed some synchronous time, so decided on a Zoom call. A good chunk of the time in the call will be devoted to students presenting something to each other. Physics teachers, since I’m introducing wave vocab this week, I made up a fun activity about estimating the measures of a wave from a video clip of their choosing.

 

The tech I needed to feel comfortable with includes:

• Canvas Pages to present the class stream for the entire week. This is not hard to do but maybe is hard to make look nice. In an effort not to overwhelm, go ahead and tell our colleagues they can get icons from flaticon.com, photos from unsplash.com. I can share the page I created to the Commons then my colleagues can use and adapt – a huge timesaver.
• Canvas Quizzes for submitting the homework for completion (kinda a hack of the way graded quizzes are supposed to work, a Google Form would have worked just as well here)
• Zoom web conferencing
• Canvas Assignments for submitting the finished lab report

I want to stress that this is just one way to run remote learning. It most closely mirrors what I’d have done in the classroom AND the pedagogy is fairly traditional. I think therefore it presents a course quite familiar to my colleagues.