Remote Teaching Options for the COVID-19 Closures

Hi everyone!

I want to start by saying that I am not the same high quality awesome CI teacher online that I am in the classroom. That's okay.  You probably aren't either.  I am learning and growing, and if God forbid we have to do this again the fall or in the future months before we have a vaccine/treatment, I will be better.

I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy.  What a crazy roller coaster the last 5 week have been! If you are teaching in the US (and likely in many other countries, too) then I'm sure you've had to quickly adapt to teaching online.  Here are a few of my tips and recommendations:

1. Keep it simple.  

This one is for your benefit as much as it is for the students.  There is a lot of stress in just living.  There's no need for us to add more stress to our plate or our students' plates.  What do I mean by keep it simple? Cut back on how much you are providing students.  Cut back on how you are holding them accountable.  For example, I give students 3 assignments on Google Classroom per week.  They take 10-20 minutes to complete.  At this point, I know my students will not gain in their Spanish proficiency, but if I can keep them maintaining, then I'm super HAPPY!

2.  Have to give packets?

For my 5th grade students, we have been giving out packets.  This is the perfect time to recycle all of those write and discuss texts you created all year!  My recommendation is that for each day the students' are required to work on your class materials, you provide one write and discuss text and one activity to complete with that text.  Here's an example of the packet I sent home for my 5th grade students in April.

3.  Have to teach asynchronously? Can't meet with students live?

This is my situation, too.  I am posting assignments in Google Classroom for my students.  I post 3 assignments per week, and I created a routine of assignments for myself.  The first assignment is a listening one (watching a video) + comprehension questions given in a google form.  The second is a reading one (about the same topic as day 1) + comprehension questions given in a google form.  The third assignment is an extension of the first 2 days.  I am using either Textivate or Señor Wooly nuggets to extend the topic.  Here's a very simple document I used to organize my plans with videos and texts.  Feel free to use my videos if you would find them helpful!

4.  Have to teach synchronously? Meeting with students live?

So, these situations will vary greatly, but I will share my thoughts on how I would do this if I was able to.  In each live session, I would spend about 10-15 minutes giving students oral input in the target language.  I might do a picture walk, tell a visual story, or do a movie talk/clip chat using the image stills from the video (give students the video link so they can watch it uninterrupted later).  Please do your best to provide visual scaffolding to aid student comprehension.  That might be a slideshow, or maybe a "whiteboard" that you draw on online, or maybe you have a document camera that you can draw on during this time.

THEN, I would take 5-10 minutes to do a write and discuss (either under my doc cam or using google docs) about what we discussed.  Finally, I would provide a way for students to show their learning in a way that sets them up for success.  In my mind the easiest option for this is to do a 5 question quick quiz on Google Forms.  You could set the form for true/false questions and pre-set the answers (so you'll set #2, #4, and #5 as true before you start your input for the day and then make sure you give true statements for those questions when it's time to do the quiz).  AND you can set the Google Form to grade it for you, which is awesome.  You could, of course, have students do other activities on the google form at the end like a L1 or L2 retell, but I think the quick quiz is easiest for everyone!

I want to stress again to keep it simple.  Your health and the health of your students is the most important thing right now.  Above all, connect with your students and make sure they know that you care!

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