Like everyone else, Kaia Preus had to turn on a dime last spring and convert her in-person classroom to an online one virtually overnight. Those months were rough, so she spent the summer reflecting on what worked and what didn’t. When school resumed this fall, the high school creative writing and English teacher had a plan.

Now, she’s made a video to share her top five tips for remote teaching with you.

Tip #1: Be organized

When Kaia started planning for this school year, she downloaded everything she could find that looked useful. But she just saved the files to her desktop and didn’t organize them. The result was an unnavigable confetti of icons. She needed a better system.

So she turned to Google Drive. Saving things on Google Drive allows her to access her files from any computer. She made separate folders for her classes and units, and color-coded them for fun.

This system works for Kaia, but you may find you need to try something else.

“The important thing is that you understand where you can find the materials you are using,” she says.

Tip #2: Radical curriculum change

Kaia recommends looking at this year as an opportunity to change up your curriculum. Remote learning makes it hard to fit in everything that a teacher might strive to accomplish during a normal school year. Something has to give.

Kaia approached the problem by forcing herself to make a choice.

“If I am on a ship and it’s sinking, and all of my curriculum books are before me, what am I going to grab?” she asked herself.

In Kaia’s case, she made the decision to choose between two books she had planned to teach: The Round House and The Great Gatsby. She chose to assign just The Round House. The downside is that she had to leave out a book she had wanted to teach. But the upside is that, in leaving out that book, she was able to take a deeper dive into the remaining.

So empower yourself to make big changes to the course material or the way you teach it. This is an opportunity, and it’s an exciting one.

Tip #3: Ask for feedback

Kaia is the kind of teacher who really enjoys getting to know her students. She learns their preferred names and tries to drum up chit chat in class. Remote teaching makes this task all the more difficult, but Kaia has gotten around that problem by asking her students for feedback.

She sends out Google forms periodically, asking for students’ opinions on the workload, the pace of study and what they would like her to know.

“Kids are real with you, and they’re going to tell you if something’s not working, probably too often,” she says.

You just have to ask.

Tip #4: Be transparent

We’re all learning as we go. Remote learning isn’t natural for students and teachers who have spent their careers in the classroom. Mistakes are bound to happen.

And when they do, Kaia recommends being honest about them. She accidentally assigned her students to read the wrong chapters. When it was brought to her attention, she thanked the student who had pointed it out and e-mailed everyone to let them know she had made a mistake, and how she was going to fix it.

“The more honest and up-front you can be, the better, because this year is going to be hard,” she says. “We’re humans. They get it.”

Tip #5: Divvy up the work

Smart instructors who teach the same subject divide and conquer to get the most out of their time. In remote learning, this strategy is even more useful.

“We already bring too much of our jobs home with us, and now our job is literally in our home. It’s too much work,” Kaia says.

So she and some of her colleagues worked together to create a unit on Oedipus Rex. Kaia made an audiobook of the play for the students. Another teacher made Edpuzzles to provide students with something interactive to do during asynchronous learning time. And a third teacher developed assessment tools and quizzes for the unit.

By splitting up the work, these three enterprising teachers were able to create a fully-featured unit that was adapted for remote learning without spending an inordinate amount of time doing it.

Summary and Key Takeaways:

Remote learning is hard and we’re all learning as we go. You can make it easier on yourself by: staying organized, freeing yourself to change up your curriculum, soliciting feedback from your students, being honest with them, and joining forces with other teachers. You’ve got this.

#teacher #remotelearning #quizlet

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