The start of every school year is filled with exciting beginnings and opportunities to try new activities & lessons. This year is different.
Anxiety levels have reached unprecedented levels as we try to make plans that will quickly change depending on the spread of COVID in their communities. Many districts have chosen to start the school year fully remote while others believe they have sufficient safeguards in place to begin the school with some form of a hybrid schedule in which half of the students are learning form home while the other half are with teachers in the classroom on any given day.
Below are some tips that can help you plan lessons for the unique hybrid format.
Same Lesson for In-Person & Remote Students
Approach | Description | Examples/Tools |
Ongoing Project | Students work on a long-term project individually or small groups. In-person students get feedback from teachers & peers. Remote students do research using library databases or other websites to connect current events to issues studied in class | |
In-person & Virtual Presentations | In-person students present live, remote students record videos of content, post to LMS and use discussion feature to comment and learn from each other | |
Build Community | Periodically use portion of virtual days for community building which would normally occur naturally in traditional in-person formats. | |
Common Google Slide Deck | In-person & remote students work on one set of Google Slides to make it easier for you to give feedback and for students to learn from one another. | |
Synchronous Formative Tools | Use formative assessment tools to provide feedback in real-time. Can be coupled with video conferencing. | |
Videoconference | **Not preferred because of possible medical & technology issues** Livestream the class you are teaching in-person at school for remote students. Assign roles to 1-2 students at school to monitor chatbox, hand raised, etc to see if remote students have questions or issues. Project video grid on screen for synchronous discussion. Using the chat function to ask opinion questions can be great discussion starters. |
Different Lessons for In-Person and Remote Students
Approach | Description | Examples |
Station Rotation | Works best for series of lessons that do not have to be completed sequentially. Different “stations” for different formats (at home, individually in school, with teacher or peers in school). | |
Discussion & Reflection posts | Use the same pre-discussion & post-discussion reflection prompts. Pre-writing (e.g. Monday’s lesson) can help students prepare for in-person discussion (e.g. Tuesday’s lessons). Alternatively, students can discuss in-person on Monday and comment on students’ discussion posts as a post reflection on Tuesday. Similar strategies can be used for generating questions. | Higher Order Discussion Questions |
Hyperdocs | Create different options for in-person or remote students but in the same Google Doc to make collecting & distributing work more efficient. |
Special thanks to Chris W., Erin, Marty, Sofia, and Whitney for suggesting tools!
2 Comments
Thank you for these resources. I’m not able to open the hyperdocs.
Thanks for catching that, I’ve updated the post with the link below which includes various examples of hyperdocs: https://sites.google.com/view/drivingdigitallearning/hyperdoc-templates