Regardless of the learning scenario, find a way to see authentic student work.
If you’re teaching remotely, you know - Zoom fatigue is so real. This is why so many of the best schools are using pencil and paper to push for deeper thinking remotely. Luckily EdLight has solved the problem of how to collect those images and give targeted feedback immediately. But there are a few key instructional moves that can make monitoring work online even more effective.
There are a lot of tools out there that allow students to use the trackpad on their laptop to draw answers, but that's incredibly unnatural for students. Instead - try having your students work out their answers on real paper. To facilitate this, ensure that students have the proper materials - a standard size notebook and pencil. Sounds simple enough, but monitoring your student’s work will be much easier if their work appears to the teacher in a consistent format. Once you’ve standardized this, teach students how you want them to set up the page - especially important in younger grades. When you want them to number the tasks, or fold their paper in half, say that! Now the work you’re seeing is uniform for monitoring. For students who don't have a worksheet in front of them, it will help them stay organized. A tool like EdLight can help in collecting images of student work in real time.
Students work and write at different paces - whether we’re in the classroom or not. It’s normal to expect that students working with distractions at home are going to work more slowly, so you have to accept that you will need to budget more time. You will have to set a hard stop time for when students must submit, regardless of their progress. Put a timer up to encourage this, the same you would in a classroom.
As students start to finish, I give feedback on their EdLight submissions with my screen shared and silently. I do this because I don’t want to distract the students working with extra noise, and the students who are finished can see the feedback I’m giving them. They immediately fix their work after they see I’ve marked it up. This also helps me start to identify trends for whole-class feedback.
I try to save about 5 minutes at the end of class to give some whole-group feedback. This gets students into the habit of going back to add to their pencil to paper work. This act of editing completed work often gets lost if you save the revisions for another class period or don’t set a time and place for them. EdLight makes this easy because you can send everyone's work back for revision at once, but it's a best practice regardless of the technology.
Master Educator @ EdLight, PBC. Deeply interested in the way feedback and data can drive learning.
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