Whether in a real or virtual classroom, every teacher wants to do the best for their students. We will keep moving forward to provide the best learning experience for our students. After the coronavirus hit and forced online classes, online exam using online examination software, some of us started scouring the internet for online education tips and tricks.
Teaching online is difficult and teaching on the screen requires a completely different skill set and mindset. In a real classroom, we encourage students to walk around the classroom and discuss in pairs. It also evaluates students based on body language and adjusts or adjusts lesson plans accordingly. When it comes to teaching via Zoom, Skype or any online teaching software the situation is completely different.
What are the best practices and expectations for online training in online classes? How can we ensure that the learning experience of students in a virtual classroom is not compromised? Do you have a strategy you can adopt? These are some difficult questions and we are here to solve some of them with you.
In this article, we share and discuss the following tips and tricks for online teaching
1. Test all technical tools beforehand.
The last thing we want is for the students to watch while they stop working and moan through the settings to fix the error. Before we even realized it, we wasted valuable time getting screen sharing to work.
Teachers can pre-test all technical tools to avoid any technical difficulties. Remind students to enter the meeting room 10 minutes early to try out annotations, PDF document uploads, and other collaboration features.
2. Record and share lectures
It is difficult for students to pay attention all the time because they want their students to focus as much as possible on their online classes. Online learning is as difficult for students as it is for teachers. Sometimes it can also be due to a terrible internet connection that makes online classes unstable and unacceptable.
To help students, teachers can record lectures and upload them to YouTube or other video hosting sites. If your online education platform is still developing video recording features here’s a trick to overcome this! All you need is a third-party application for recording lectures.
3. Encourage students to turn on their cameras.
Online lectures are difficult because you often have to speak to a screen. If you’ve listened to online lectures before, you may have realized that sometimes it’s like talking into a wall!
One tip for teachers to ensure that their virtual classroom experience is as face-to-face as possible is to encourage students to turn on their cameras. Students can mute the microphone when others are speaking.
Having students turn on cameras is a way for teachers to help measure how well students absorb content through facial expressions. Seeing your classmates focus on your lectures helps you engage and learn more.
4 Leverage online teaching resources
The advantage of online training is that you don’t always have to create training resources from scratch. Many other educators or content creators have covered the topic you want to cover and may have generously shared their videos and tutorials on the Internet.
One tip for using online resources is to sift through a list of fact-checked and approved links for distribution. In other words, while teaching online, your job is to recommend reliable sources of information.
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