Online fatigue is real. Distracted students are real. Teacher frustration is real. So what do we do?!?!
Thankfully there are a few things we can bring to bear to try to spice it up and keep both ourselves and our students engaged.
The infographic presented here was built from a variety of resources, including the book Engaging Learners Through Zoom.
This page contains affiliate links. You can read my disclosure here.
This page contains affiliate links. You can read my disclosure here.
As we move toward a week of at-home learning for all students in Alberta at the start of January 2021, I offer this tutorial to try to help families maximize the capacity of their home internet connection without incurring additional costs to the internet service providers. There are many things that can be done for free to try to improve the Google Meet or Zoom experience.
This video will give an analogy for the internet and bandwidth and then take you through some ideas to improve your home connection. I’ve used this analogy for fifteen years to explain bandwidth to eleven year olds. It will help make sense of the issues at hand, and can be given to families “as-is” if they’re having problems.
It’s so stressful!! Teaching online is difficult enough, but every time I try to teach with Google Meet, I DON’T HAVE THE CONTROLS! I can’t record it, I can’t start breakout rooms, I can’t mute students or remove anyone for bad behaviour. It’s embarrassing, not to mention anxiety-provoking. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
YOU ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG.
1. The link that Google Classroom generates is glitchy. We have learned from our remote learning troubleshooting this fall that using the Meet link that Classroom publishes on the banner does not always ensure that the teacher is the owner of the session. IN MY SCHOOL DISTRICT, We realized these links were glitchy when we had one of our remote teachers log in to her own Meet first (ahead of all students) – 8:50 am according to the Google server log. At 8:58 her first student logged in, and that student was in control of the meet.
2. A Meet address that you have created seems to have expired. This seems to occur when the meet is given a nickname.
1. Go to meet.google.com and click on “Join or start a meeting”.
2. Do NOT give the Meet a nickname.
3. Copy the URL (web address) that Meet generates.
4. Paste the URL into Google Classroom as a material and apply a topic to it (I’d call the Topic “Google Meet Link”) and then drag that topic to the very top of your classwork tab in Google Classroom.
If at any time your Meet link begins to glitch (Michelle has used the same link since the first Covid quarantine in March of this year), repeat the above steps, but you’ll only need to edit the material in step 4.
When things have glitches, it is often “the network” we first blame for the problems. If you are physically in a CESD school, it is highly unlikely to be the network. However, what students have open on their device can present challenges.
If students have a large number of tabs open, this can place a burden on their device, causing Meet to not have access to the local resources it needs to run. This can cause a student to be “booted” out of the meet, or can cause their video to be glitchy.
If students are at home on a PC or Mac computer, other programs they have open can steal valuable processing from that computer. Things like Fortnite running in the background, or YouTube open to play music while they listen can be quite problematic in Google Meet.
Students accessing the meet on a mobile device (smartphone or tablet) not using the actual app for Google Meet may experience challenges.
Lastly, the network in the personal space (homes) of the participants can have an impact on the meeting. The CESD network is unlikely to be at fault, but home networks may be.
This page contains affiliate links. You can read my disclosure here.
Originally Kami was built as a .pdf reader for Google Drive. Over time they have added new tools and features to it making it a very powerful classroom application.
This blog post offers a short video “Crash Course in Kami” that will introduce you to the annotation tools and will offer some differentiation ideas for it as well.
If you are teaching remote learners, Kami offers a lot of assistance in accomplishing that task.
Kami typically offers a 90-day trial of all the tools in this awesome extension!
When Google rushed Meet to market in March, there were many features in the works that weren’t ready yet. The quarantine likely caught them as off-guard as it caught us. But, now, nine months later, there are many new features in Google Meet. This 18-minute video will take you through each of the new features and demonstrate how to use each.
At 16:20 I show how I created a link on March 16 and am still using the same link almost 9 months later.