In early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic traveled across the world and its impact was felt strongly in the United States. One of the many areas of life thoroughly affected was that of education. At the time of writing in late August 2020, the new school year is starting up in many states.
The new school term is fraught with difficulty, fear, and challenges. Parents and studies both explain that online education is no substitute for quality, in-person teaching led by a a qualified and experienced teacher. Personally, this author agrees, and recognizes that online education is unlikely to reach the levels of engagement that can be found in the classroom. In many ways, online K-12 education is making the best of a bad situation in which returning to schools as before would bring intolerably high risk, and it’s better to admit the truth of this than pretend otherwise.
All this said, a substantial portion of the quality of an online educational experience rests in the methods used by the teachers who run it, and therefore, during this time of making safer choices as a sacrifice for the greater good, we can discuss some tips and methods for improving the virtual classroom experience.
These tips will be based on my experience of teaching three cohorts of 31 students, aged between 8 and 14, online from the period of March to May 2020. I was a full-time homeroom teacher for one group of 17 students, and a part-time specialist teacher for the other 14 students. In this particular job, teachers were granted a high level of autonomy and choice over how they conducted their virtual classroom, so I recognize that not all of these tips will work for every situation. Overall, I received highly positive and encouraging feedback from parents and my supervisor, so I’m going to explain here which techniques I used and why.
1. Use a small number of apps you know well
The aphorism ‘less is more’ can apply cleanly to virtual education. Logging in to, and keeping track of a vast number of applications is confusing for teachers and students alike. I recommend using a small number of apps, such as 2-3, that students and teachers engage with daily. When I was teaching my online class of 5th-6th and 7th-8th graders, I used only Zoom and Google Classroom as educational tools, and e-mail to communicate. I used Calendly to schedule appointments on Zoom with parents, which worked well.
One of my colleagues explained the benefits of using Seesaw, and while I agree that it seemed a great educational app, I ended up deciding not to use it because I felt that the success of my virtual teaching lay in its simplicity.
Another reason that simplicity makes sense is that, for younger children, excessive screen-time may be unhealthy. Many parents limit their children’s screen-time, and while I am not aware of any nationally recognized health standards for children’s screen-time, we can intuitively realize that, in our care for children, that it is most likely wise to have limits. My personal judgement is that 2.5 hours per day feels like enough for ages 8-10, 3 hours for ages 11-12, and 3.5 hours for 13-14. I used these guidelines to help me in setting contact class time, assignment time, and assessment time.
2. Use routines
In the past, I focused on being an adaptable teacher who was willing to pivot, experiment, and change rapidly. I used a variety of teaching tools, methods, and equipment. While this concept of adaptability certainly came in handy when the pandemic forced schools to close, I realized early on that I would have to slow the pace of change for a time.
Since communication was no-longer face-to-face, explaining the rationale for changes and experiments would have to slow down. More communication would become a scheduled event, rather than improvised conversation in the moment. With all the confusion surrounding adapting to a new educational experience, technical challenges, and lack of face-to-face time, it made sense that I wouldn’t be as experimental as I had been before.
For this reason, I was only willing to make schedule adjustments after a week had been complete, and often gave a week’s warning of major changes to the schedule, too. I explained this rationale in e-mails to parents, that they were as welcome as ever to make suggestions and schedule consultations, and that I would still give their thoughts a high level of consideration and be open to experimentation. The only main difference is that I would wait until a natural break to schedule a change and give advance warning.
I recognize that one of the main reasons my students kept logging in to their classes is because I kept things simple, predictable, and routine. It could be a foundation in a time of great uncertainty, and even if they were used to a teacher who liked to change things up regularly, that the importance of simplicity in this time would take precedence.
One more important point about routines is that, not only do students need them, parents do too. I found that what worked well from me from the start is having set times and set procedures when parents could and couldn’t contact me, and taking predetermined breaks throughout the day. For my appointment scheduler on Calendly, I made sure that no one could reserve an appointment time less than two hours in the future, even during my usually available time slots. I then made any appointment slots notify me on my phone. This way, if I wanted to go out somewhere briefly, I could be sure that I wouldn’t have a surprise appointment or miss anything unexpected.
3. Resolve technical problems quickly
Any of us who have used video chat for more than an hour or so know that technical challenges are a part of the experience of tele-conferencing. Zoom calls are a form of live-streaming, and one of the major challenges of livestreaming conversation is that it can’t be buffered, or stored up in advance on your computer’s memory in case the internet speed drops unexpectedly. Having consistent class times can help families plan around when the family internet line will be in higher demand.
Psychologically, there is something extremely annoying about computers being unexpectedly slow, or inhibiting your communication. It is similar to being cut off in traffic, where lack of the usual mitigating apologetic expressions and body language from people plays a huge part in calming us down. If you’re not sure what I mean, imagine two contrasting situations. In both, you’re standing in line and have been waiting to speak to a customer service employee. In both situations, a person comes and cuts in line. However, in one of the situations, the person who cuts in line looks at you and displays regret and apology.
It is likely that you will find the situation in which the person does not apologize, and instead ignores you to be quite threatening – even if the person is not inherently unstable or dangerous and means no harm at all, we humans have a biological fear response to people who violate social norms without offering an apology. The apology reassures us that the person is aware they’ve made you uncomfortable. We unconsciously need constant reassurance from those around us, and being asked to teleconference online while being cut off from reassuring body language can be surprisingly stressful, despite it being a physically harmless encounter. For this reason, I would advise that technical issues be resolved as a matter of priority.
Given that video and sound have high internet (and attention) bandwidth requirements, every extra participant in a conference call increases the chances of error exponentially. For this reason, I preferred to keep Zoom classes smaller, limiting them to around nine students at most, although I know most teachers won’t have that luxury. I broke my classes into smaller groups and kept the groups together (consistency and simplicity).
Most teachers learned early on of the importance of the mute button, both when used voluntarily by the student, and when the teacher mutes a student who isn’t using their microphone for educational reasons. I expected to have to use the mute button often on my students, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, after the first week, most of them were able to figure out when to mute themselves.
I also had a policy of keeping all background noise to the minimum, encouraging students to put their computers in a room where they could close the door, or to use a headset if they were in a larger common room. If students were not able to lower background noise, I would be watchful and selectively mute students from where noise was coming, and then inform them to raise their hand when they had a question.
As a teacher, you have a reasonable amount of control over a virtual classroom, arguably more than you have over a physical one. I found that the best use of this extra control was to limit distractions, the majority of which were unintentional.
I also found that sending weekly emails asking parents if they were having any technical problems logging in, and offering to resolve them set their minds greatly at ease. Knowing that you have a person willing to help you out makes annoying situations less stressful.
4. Encourage students to use the text chat, within reason
I found that textual communication, to my surprise, had great power in the virtual classroom. Two of my students who experienced learning disabilities in the classroom found themselves engaging more, asking more questions, and completing more written assignments than they had done in a physical classroom.
In Zoom, the function to allow students to message either the teacher, another student, or the whole classroom, can allow a student to contribute or ask a question without raising their hand and breaking the flow of the lesson. The ability to selectively choose the recipients of the message improved privacy, allowing the teacher to check on individual students without the whole class having to know, and the ability of students to write messages to me in real-time allowed me to adjust my teaching on the fly without breaking focus.
I know that some students had troubled classes by spammed text chats with non-educational material, but I found that this wasn’t happening in my virtual classrooms much at all. Being able to mute, turn off video, or even temporarily send a student to the waiting room seemed to be an incredibly effective tool in preventing misuse of the online teaching environment. A single period of 30 seconds of being in the waiting room seemed sufficient to encourage all of my students to choose not to disrupt the virtual learning room. This was only necessary to do twice over the two-month period that I taught these 31 students. I think what makes it so effective is that there can be no protest or argument against the disciplinary measure, which makes it prompt, proportional to the offense, and doesn’t get wrapped up in an emotional discussion that disrupts the lesson.
As before, I am in no way suggesting that online education should replace in-person learning. However, we should make maximum use of the tools that online education does provide to us while we are in this quarantine situation.
5. Use an open-book style of assessment
This suggestion applies to my teaching style more readily anyway, but online, it is far more difficult to ensure test-taking integrity and prevent copying, collaboration, or use of written crib notes. Since the students aren’t taking the test in front of an invigilator, one cannot set as much store by the results of a traditional pen-and-paper assessment commuted to an online platform.
However, that means that the teacher can adapt and try a different style of assessment. Careful use of time-limits, allowing notes, and disallowing copy-paste methods of answering questions are some techniques that I used.
Google Classroom has a ‘Set Quiz’ function in Google Forms, wherein some questions can be automatically graded and others manually graded. I learned early on that one of the questions must ask for the student’s name, otherwise Google Forms won’t collect this data and you won’t know who to assign the results to.
Informing students in advance of a test, setting a time limit of how long they have to answer the questions, and changing the style of question asked are ways to make online test-taking fair and equitable. I focused on setting questions where copying and pasting the answer wouldn’t get you very far anyway, and where the key to getting the grade lay in analysis and discussion rather than in memory and recall.
Now that looking information up and researching through search engines, especially Google, has become a standard part of life, it makes sense to change education to be less about what students can recall when prompted to, and more about how students can analyze and work with information they are given. For this reason, in my online assessments, I encourage students to use Google as they type their answers, and sometimes even suggest extra research for a particular question. This gives them an incentive to do research, to analyze what they’re given, and to work within time limits. Our information is no longer limited like it used to be. Instead, what is now limited is our attentions spans. So now, setting a deadline for an assessment to be completed is the hard line, rather than limiting which materials the student may bring to the assessment (such as crib notes, books, and internet-enabled devices).
6. Imagine the ideal
In the first point, I emphasized the importance of keeping the virtual classroom consistent and simple. This came from a deeper belief in what I should like to see in my ideal web application for learning. When I used the apps that I’ve mentioned above, I tried to match my use cases that I shall describe below with the best practices that already existed in the apps I used. In other words, I used my ‘ideal’ wishes as a guide and worked backwards from there. The thought of something better out there one day existing helped stand as a bulwark against the inevitable frustration I would otherwise have experienced while using existing apps.
While there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all educational app, I came up with a list of features I’d like to see in a web-based or device-based software program that students, teachers, parents, and school administrators could use to keep virtual learning as simple and painless as possible. If you’re a web developer, this section is for you. I don’t have any significant web development skills of my own, but if I had them, this is what I would design in a package. You may not have any desire to be a web developer either, but your experience of using existing applications can be a very helpful guide to other people who can then design new applications to suit the needs and use cases of their clientele.
Of critical importance for this would-be application is a single sign-in per user. This means that the user only has one single password and login procedure for every educational application contained within, much like a single Google or Facebook login allows a variety of applications to be used.
Next, the web application should integrate with Renweb, Gradelink, G Suite for Education, Zoom, Calendly, See-saw, Blend, and all major educational applications already in use. It should be as easy to import and export data between all of these as permissions allow, because that will ease the process of using a whole new app.
The app should allow each type of user, including student, parent, administrator, teacher, and coach to make a social networking profile. The profiles themselves should be fairly minimalist, but engaging and make it easy for users to send each other messages and control who contacts them and who has access to their information. Social networking allows children on the virtual educational platform to contact their friends, and I believe friendship and social learning is an important function of schooling that should not be ignored or passed over.
Video calling, messaging, and calendars should all be integrated into this app. It should be very easy for any user to access their calendar, see their scheduled classes, appointments, and free time, and at the assigned time, a notification can come on screen that a teacher is calling them for class.
The application should be colorful, engaging but not distracting, and have features that make it accessible to persons with disabilities, including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, visual contrast adjustment, and selective text enlargement, among others.
The application should build in gamified education, allowing both parents and teachers to track and place limits on the amount of gaming done. For example, ABCMouse has a feature that makes students complete a certain number of lessons before engaging in free play.
The application should have an integrated payment system, where parents can pay fees to the school administrator and pay teachers and coaches for extra, private lessons.
Conclusion
If you like this topic and find it interesting, here is an article from another teacher, who discusses a greater number of virtual education tips.
Do you have any tips you’d like to add, or any extra suggestions for web applications? Let us know by commenting or by private message!