While online teaching did not begin with the pandemic, it has definitely taken off in a whole new way since the spring of 2020. For educators who are new to distance learning, it can be challenging to know which online teaching techniques work best — or even where to start.
Echo360 enables exceptional learning experiences for in-person, hybrid, and online classrooms alike with our e3 philosophy as the top priority. Equity, evidence, and engagement are front and center with all of our user-friendly solutions. Dojo360 makes it easy to design, set up, and run online classes; Point Solutions, a flexible tool that increases student engagement; ExamView, a content-rich exam generator; and Echo360, our flagship video management system that provides you and your students with the ultimate in searchability and accessibility to video lecture capture and interactive elements. Whether you’re teaching in K12, Higher Ed, Government, or Corporate settings, we’re the provider of the tools you need for unparalleled learning in the online classroom.
What are the best strategies for online teaching?
1. Create interactive, engaging lessons for online teaching
Online teaching is not simply setting up a camera and recording yourself lecturing about the material. Echo360 offers the ability to pre-record lessons and capture lectures for future viewing from anywhere, but it also allows for streaming, editing, and interactivity. Echo360’s features start with your personal video library. You can tag, splice, and share videos with individual students, a select group, or your entire class. Echo360’s browser-based video editor lets you supercharge your videos with ease, and its compatibility with popular LMS like Google Classroom, Blackboard, and more means that embedding videos is as easy as pie.
Echo360 also turns passive video into active, accessible learning. Its Automatic Speech Recognition creates transcripts that can be turned into closed captions. These transcripts are also editable and taggable, making your content easily searchable so every student always has access to the information they need.
2. Build a strong classroom community
Classroom unity seems to happen naturally in person, but it must be cultivated purposefully in an online setting. Using a learning engagement platform like Dojo360 means you’ll create dynamic lessons that mix vibrant presentations with engaging discussions along with other interactive capabilities. When you take advantage of the technology to create lessons that your students find engaging and interesting, you increase the feeling of classroom unity.
Incorporating Point Solutions into your classes is another great way to increase classroom engagement, no matter where your students are learning. Because Point Solutions’ Anywhere Polling supports mobile devices, your students can respond to questions in real time, even if they’re on the go. Live polling and gamification encourage friendly competition between classmates and small groups, building a sense of community. Plus, with real-time responses from your students, you’ll evaluate your students’ understanding and can modify your lesson plan on the fly.
3. Continuously adapt your online classroom
As you teach throughout the year, you will find that your class has a collective personality that makes it unique from another group of students. Be open to adjusting lessons to take advantage of the class’s strengths and to build up areas for improvement. If the class seems especially motivated by competition, place a stronger focus on gamification elements to keep them engaged with the material. If the class comes alive during interactive discussions, use Dojo’s audio interactivity and breakout rooms to encourage each student to share their thoughts and discoveries about the topic at hand.
Adaptation is important when it comes to testing too. ExamView is an easy but powerful exam generator that gives you endless options when it comes to testing, study guides, worksheets, and more. Whether you choose to create your own content, embed questions from over 12,000 compatible textbooks, or pull from our 15,000+ free question bank, you’ll get the metrics you need to adapt and refine your online courses.
4. Track student performance and take action when necessary
With our suite of products, you have a variety of ways to track student participation and performance. First, you can take attendance at a glance as well as view a report detailing who has engaged with any asynchronous assignments. You can then easily send out reminders to students who have not completed assignments on time.
ExamView and Dojo360 provide reports on student performance at the individual student level, by assignment or test, and by individual question. This allows you to react quickly if there is a student who seems to be struggling with certain content. Dojo360 allows you to easily assign struggling students to additional learning modules that break down details on a topic. Point Solutions instantly helps you find out whether a large percentage of students are struggling with a certain idea or module, so you can nip it in the bud in real time and even investigate the course itself to see if it could be edited to make concepts clearer for students.
How can I implement effective online teaching strategies?
With these strategies in mind, you can build a successful online classroom fit for students of any age and ability level. Dojo360, ExamView, Point Solutions, and Echo360 have many features to help you implement successful online teaching strategies. Book a demo today to see our products in action and to learn more about how they can benefit your online classroom.
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