How to Teach a Synchronous Class

I have been teaching online students for the past fifteen years and as the leader of an online school I also am in charge of teaching our prospective teachers. To that end the video above is what I believe are the ways to engage virtual learners. Honestly it is not much different than teaching in the brick and mortar classroom, especially as more schools are going one on one. But watch the short video to see how to do that with technology tools.

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How to Make Your Own Flip & Tutorial Videos

Over the years I have made lots of video tutorial for my blog followers and flip videos for my students . Every single one of them have been made using Screencastomatic . You can purchase your own yearly subscription, but I have not only never paid, but also never even set up a free account. You don't need to since you can make the video and then just upload it onto YouTube. Watch the video above and you will be able to see how to record, add you talking (or not) to the recording and to upload it - all in less than two minutes. Go forth and make your own tutorials and teach lots of others. In a later post I'll show you how to organize your YouTube video library.

Homework Reminders

When I want to quickly contact my online students, I use Remind.com . It allows you to send a text without knowing their phone numbers. Additionally you can set a time for it to be sent. You can add a link and/or upload a document. If you choose, you can also text individual students. All of the texts are recorded and kept as long as you keep the class. Above is a video giving you a great overview and here are several videos explaining how to use different parts of it. If you use Blackboard, the video below shows you how to embed Remind texts into a Blackboard page.

Using Twitter as a Teaching Method

So I have posted on using Twitter a number of times on my US Government Teachers Blog , but it is more than appropriate to discuss it with eLearning. Sometimes the learning can't stay in the classroom and in those cases Twitter is a good substitute for a class discussion at home. Above is an example of when my students (and other teachers' students) have joined together to Tweet a debate (one tonight) and/or State of the Union. It was the brainchild of Frank Franz and has worked many many times as find that the kids have a dynamic discussion during the exercise and have far more Tweets than the required number. We pick a hashtag which our students include in every post. It can be as simple as #schoolnamegovclass. Here is what it looked like on last week's State of the Union. What about the kids who don't have Twitter! I generally use an editable Google Drive document, but one option I am using TodaysMeet which lets you set up a Twitter like screen that do

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