Quizzing remotely

Hi. I’m Kristy Turner and I’m going to talk you through how I teach remotely using a semi-live lesson.

A semi-live lesson is one that isn’t livestreamed into students’ homes through one of the apps like Skype or Zoom. There are lots of reasons why you might not want to livestream your lessons.

It might be to do with broadband issues for you or your students, or some other issues with technology. It might also be because you want the lesson to be a bit more accessible and for students to go at their own pace rather than trying to keep up with you talking.

So in these semi-livestreamed lessons I always begin by sending the students an email, which contains all the instructions for the whole lesson. This gives them the cue that whatever work they were doing before they should put away and it’s time to start their chemistry lesson.

The first part of the lesson is the introduction.

Introduction

In this part students are introduced to the lesson content. This might be new content or it might be something they’ve learned before. I quite often do this using a short video that I’ve pre-prepared using either an app like Explain Everything or just a piece of paper and a mobile phone camera.

I think it’s really useful for students to hear their teacher’s voice, it helps maintain the class connection and gives them some reassurance. You can use resources that are already there on the internet, but I do think that students really value hearing from their own teacher.

At this point in the lesson I ask students to take notes from the video. I will often send them some links to textbook pages for their reference as well.

The second part of the lesson is independent work.

Indepdendent work

In this section I’ll email students some questions to work on and some lesson exercises. I expect them to do them in their exercise book for the 25 to 35 minutes in the middle of the lesson.

This gives me a break in the middle of the lesson and that means I can get a vital cup of tea. I can also catch up with planning and with marking. I can also catch up on my CPD reading.

Towards the end of the lesson we move into the review phase.

Review phase

In this phase I really want to know how well have students got on with what I have set in that lesson. I do this using a live quizzing app like Socrative; I set the quiz to start 10 minutes before the end of the lesson. Students log on and I see their answers come in live. This allows me to take the lesson attendance and tick off who has been present and who’s been engaged, and then I can let heads of year know if there are students who are maybe not engaging. It also allows me to see how well they’ve understood and I can use that in my planning later on.