9 January 2021

Tools for Online Lessons

I've been reluctant to write a blog post about teaching online lessons because I am far from being an expert on this matter. In the first lockdown I mainly set work on Hegarty Maths. I don't believe in reinventing the wheel. With good quality videos and tasks at my disposal, I was very happy to use them. This time round my school has changed its approach in order to improve the student experience and (hopefully) maximise engagement. So now I do some live lessons (we run these as Microsoft Teams events, which are recorded for students who need to watch at different times). We will shortly be introducing asynchronous practice lessons in maths too, for which I will mainly be using Hegarty Maths.

So compared to many other teachers I'm relatively new to live lessons. Thankfully the expertise of maths teachers on Twitter is already immense. Tweets about live lessons are constant and amazing, with teachers all over the world giving each other practical advice and inspiration. I thought it might be helpful to share some of that advice here for my readers who aren't on Twitter. I'm not featuring the well-known websites here - we are very lucky that there are absolutely loads for maths (Hegarty Maths, Dr Frost, Corbett Maths, MyMaths, Mathigon, MathsWatch, MathsPad, White Rose, Times Table Rockstars, Desmos and so on). Here I'm featuring tools and websites that might be less well-known. This should give you a starting point to investigate further if you are looking for a particular solution for your online maths lessons. 

1. If you use Google Classroom...
I don't work in a Google school but if I did then I would make use of @Philmaths314's free Self Marking Google Sheets. As the name suggests, these are sheets that mark themselves. ⁦‪The site is very easy to use: choose a sheet, create your own copy and then assign to your pupils. When they input answers, they get an instant score. I featured this resource in Gems 131.

The sheets can be downloaded as spreadsheets too, so can also be used outside of Google Classroom.

The other thing that Google users might want to explore is flippity.net.



2. If you want online exercises without logins...
In the first lockdown there were times when I wanted to set my students an independent practice task at the end of a topic, but they had already done all the tasks for that topic on Hegarty Maths. One option was to set them an exercise from a website like Corbett Maths, asking them work on paper and mark their own work. Another option was the use the free interactive tasks on the CIMT website. These tasks look a bit dated but still work beautifully. I love it that examples are provided before the exercises, so support is built-in for students. No login is required so access is quick and easy. The exercises are self-marking so students get instant feedback. The other thing I like is that there are no adverts. I can't stand it when there's advertising on student-facing websites. Here are the links:



There's also interactive material for Years 3 to 5 here.


3. If you want to use mini-whiteboards...
Teachers who are heavy users of mini-whiteboards in their normal lessons might be interested in the various online mini-whiteboard tools that are now available, allowing you to see your students' work in real-time. There's been a lot of tweets about whiteboard.fi this week. Read the threads for more information:


 

The online whiteboard tool on drfrostmaths.com is also very popular.

Apparently Teams at my school has a built-in function call NearPod which has whiteboard capabilities but I haven't explored it yet. 


4. If you want to quiz students through Teams...
Each of my live lessons ends with a short online quiz to check what students have learnt. Because I work in a Teams school I use Microsoft Forms to conduct these quizzes, stealing most of my questions from diagnosticquestions.com. I schedule the quizzes in advance to pop up as an assignment near the end of the lesson. These quizzes are massively informative, guiding my planning of the next lesson and allowing me to give whole-class feedback and address misconceptions. It's like a self-marking exit ticket, which is awesome. 

In case you happen to be teaching rounding, here are four of my rounding quizzes from this week that you are welcome to borrow. I will add lots more quizzes to this document over the coming weeks. If we all start sharing our Forms quizzes, we will eventually have a big bank of them that we can all borrow and adapt, which will save a lot of time.

From Twitter I can see that many other teachers are using Forms quizzes very effectively in their Teams lessons. Here are some tweets that might be of interest.






5. If you are using PowerPoint...
My online lessons are the usual mix of explanation, modelling examples, questioning and practice tasks. They are pretty similar to my normal lessons. Apart from my quizzes, everything else I do in my lessons is in PowerPoint - and apart from a pen mouse so I can write on my slides, I don't use any special technology or online tools. The only thing I want to mention is the timers that I use in my PowerPoints. To minimise faff during my live lessons, I make use of the lovely transparent timer gifs shared by @DrStoneMaths. They're just so easy to use: I put a task up on the PowerPoint, the timer starts automatically, and the students start working. Easy! I featured these timers in Gems 134.


Just bear in mind, when you see teachers on Twitter using loads of fancy interactive tools, a simple PowerPoint containing examples and a series of tasks works really well when presented by an enthusiastic and confident teacher. Sometimes we see other people doing different stuff and assume we're not doing enough. Let me reassure you - if your students are getting clear explanations and regular opportunities to practise then you're doing a great job.

I hope that this post is helpful. I know there are dozens more tools and ideas that I haven't featured - I'm trying to avoid overwhelming people.

Feel free to add your own advice in the comments. 

My husband works in a hospital so when I'm not in school looking after keyworker children, I'm home alone trying to homeschool my six year old and nine year old whilst simultaneously teaching lessons, responding to hundreds of messages and attending dozens of online meetings. Stressful is an understatement! Many teachers are struggling at the moment, so it's more important than ever that we support our colleagues during this difficult time.

Well done on surviving a killer first week. It will get easier!



24 comments:

  1. Thank you-these are great! Those CIMT activities look fantastic.
    I would also add
    - Transum interactive activities eg
    https://www.transum.org/software/SW/Starter_of_the_day/Students/Factorising.asp
    Or teacher.desmos.com activities

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  2. Thanks for this, it reinforces that we are doing ok, and the best we can! I am in the process of making lots of forms. Nit sure how to share them!

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    1. Hi. When you're in the form, click on 'share' then where it says 'share as a template', copy that link. Then you can send that link to a colleague - when they click on the link, it lets them duplicate your form. So they can edit and use their own version, without changing your original form.

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  3. I'm a massive fan of whiteboard.fi - I've been using it ever since lockdown 1 and have found it by far the easiest whiteboard site for me and my students to use.

    Thanks for reminding me of the CIMT resources - I'll definitely be looking through those to see how they align with the lessons I'll be teaching over the next month.

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    1. Thanks for your comment - good to hear that whiteboard.fi has been tried and tested in the first lockdown.

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  4. I’ve used teachermade.com this week. You can upload pdfs to create online worksheets, which are self marking. It allows you to then give feedback and reopen so students can have another go.

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    1. Interesting! Thank you. I’ve not heard of that.

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    2. I have just explored techermade for the first time and it looks like it could be amazing!

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  5. My school uses teams and we are exploring using classnotes with our classes. We snip the lesson slides from ppt then put them in a classnote. You can distribute to your whole class and other classes as well. The students can type on the classnote and can use a pen tool. It saves automatically and as a teacher you can review the work. You can write on the work or leave voice recorded messages. Our students seem to be engaging with this.

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    1. Interesting, thank you. I've not heard of this approach. I'm a bit cautious of committing to checking students' written work because it's so time consuming to do online, though I agree that giving students personal feedback is great for engagement.

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  6. Thanks for these tips. Jo, I’m interested that you say you use a pen mouse to write on the slides. I’d read they were as inaccurate as using a mouse. Have you found one that allows you to be accurate and legible?

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    1. I’ve not found that at all. It’s not perfect writing, but definitely legible, and way better than when I try to do it with a mouse. And it improves with practice. For me, writing on slides is so important - typed, animated solutions are so time consuming to create and don’t have quite the same impact as live modelling. I bought the mouse pen in the first lockdown - it was around £40 - a worthwhile investment!

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  7. Thank you Jo - you may just have saved me - this is really helpful support.

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  8. Thanks Jo, some really useful tips. I bought a graphics tablet and for me it was a game changer! To be able to write straight onto powerpoint etc was great. You don't need the most expensive wireless ones if your planning on being tied to your computer.

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    1. Agree - I feel that writing by hand is so important in maths - probably more so than other subjects.

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  9. These are all awesome. One of the things I found amazing to add to PowerPoints was the Pear Deck add on - it also works with Google slides. Students could just work through slides at their own pace after been taught the theory, I was able to see all of their responses and I was able to give feedback that they could respond to.

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  10. Ben Gordon has shared a video on how to use Whiteboard.fi:

    https://www.loom.com/share/c0e48cb76ef54140988810b0b6692f94

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  11. https://learn.desmos.com/create

    It is a game changer for me how quick it is to create bespoke tasks on Desmos and the options you have when doing this and then how useful these are to provide students a way of contributing answers and then offering a mechanism to monitor these response whilst student work on their response during live lessons was an improvement on my attempts to do this simply using Microsoft Forms.

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  12. You can use a egg timer for math quizzes. One option is to use textbook exercises to teach vital math skills etc and devise weekly fun quizzes based on them for each student. Another good way is to make up entire math worksheets using either paper or on a Microsoft Word document in advance then print them out to hand out in class. A series of puzzles is a really good idea too. Other ideas include math games etc. For lesser able students, pictures may help in addition for starters.

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  13. Hi Jo
    Thanks for the article. I created a form for Angles and Trigonometry which I taught would share for anyone that wants to duplicate. Answers are included.

    https://forms.office.com/Pages/ShareFormPage.aspx?id=24d0Rvyl2EioI9IjnqyITnxfGqgNxiNArzzQaf-LTUpUMFkwWTdSQkkwVkNRMjlJVzE5TjJWUFRQTC4u&sharetoken=O1KWmUrgAQ3mGoHTxSDi

    Tahir

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  14. I would also recommend Mote which is an add on for google/Chrome. You can use it within google classroom to give 30 second voice messages on student work, no need to record the audio and then save and then upload, it functions almost instantly within classroom. When I check written work that does not need a mark I simply leave a 30 second bit of feedback for the kids to listen to. It also tracks which feedback has been listened to which is really helpful.

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