For the majority of our remote learning we're setting lessons on a weekly basis
on our virtual learning environment. The tasks usually involve something
along the lines of watching a video or reading some pages from BBC Bitesize
or from the students' revision guide, followed by some form of activity that
the students can then self-mark themselves against pre-prepared answers.
Once these activities are completed, there is then always some form of formal
assessment that the students submit for teacher feedback and this
also allows us to check for completion of the work set.
However there are some activities where I feel that the students would benefit
from some teacher explanation and this might be
topics that I know are particularly tricky and so where I feel that the
students would benefit from seeing the process modelled,
or it might be where I know that the students have specific misconceptions
that I'd like to address head-on. Now for this form of live
teaching there's lots of different options available to you. It might be
that you've got software that enables you to annotate on your
tablets or perhaps you've got a visualiser at
home or have mocked one up using your mobile phone. However the
process that I've found the best is to put together a PowerPoint show and
this is for several reasons. Firstly, it uses
software that I'm familiar with so I'm instantly more relaxed when putting
together the presentation and I'm able to focus on the teaching as
opposed to the technology. The next thing, because I don't want the
PowerPoint shows to be too long, it forces me to think about how to break
perhaps a bigger topic down into smaller bite-sized chunks that
won't overload the students. Once I've decided on the sub-topic that
I'm going to put together the show on, the next thing is
that by putting together the PowerPoint slides in advance,
it forces me to think about the sequencing of my teaching
and ensuring that there's a real clarity in the explanation.
There's no room for backtrack or for waffling.
And then the final thing that I found useful with the PowerPoint shows is that
I'm able to put simple questions into the PowerPoint
show and encourage the students to pause the video,
write down the answers, and then restart the video before checking them against
the answers provided. And if the students haven't got those
answers correct, they've always got the ability to rewind and go back and look
at the explanation again before moving on to the next section of the PowerPoint.
Practically it's very easy to put together the PowerPoint show.
Initially it's simply a matter of putting together an animated
presentation, with the animations controlled by mouse clicks.
Once you've got the learning sequence
sorted, it's worth going through and thinking about what you might say
at each stage in the explanation. However this is very much controlled by the
PowerPoint show and doesn't need to be scripted.
I also like to think at this point about where I'd like the students' attention
to be directed. Perhaps is the text animated as I
read through a key definition? Or is text that is no longer referred to
just dimmed out so it doesn't distract the students' attention?
Finally it's also worth thinking about how much information
you put on each slide. Obviously you want to avoid cognitive overload
so keep it to a minimum and also bear in mind that the students might be looking
at these presentations on relatively small mobile phone screens,
and so the text has to be quite big so that they can see it.
To record the slide show, it's simply a matter of clicking on Slideshow>
Record a slideshow and then you can choose to either record the show
slide by slide or in a whole go. Top tip: if you choose to record it
in a single go, make sure that you leave a pause between
slides to allow time for the slide transition.
Once you've recorded the animation and the narration,
the narration appears as a separate audio file on each slide,
which enables you to delete any where you've spotted any errors.
If you wish you can also turn on the webcam and have the students have a
visual view of you as you go through each of the slides in
the presentation. Once you're happy with your presentation
I usually save it as a PowerPoint show as this avoids any chance of corruption
between different versions of PowerPoint, in a similar way to saving a Word
document as a pdf. The PowerPoint shows are usually quite
large at this point so it's important to think about how you're going to share
them with your students, but there's lots of file-sharing platforms available that
can be used to do this, or simply if they can be uploaded
directly onto your virtual learning environment.
So I hope you found this short video useful. Have a look at the example that I
put together for my year 12 class on the
energetics topic, and simply have a play and give it a go.