Three Ways Teachers Can Improve Remote Learning
This is a guest post from Hali Larkins (@HaliLarkins), communications intern at The Learning Accelerator and Master’s student at Columbia Teachers’ College. Right now, many students are still trying to navigate major changes to their environments, learning formats, and wellbeing —all factors that can impact their ability to do well in remote learning. Teachers can […]
New Google Meet Tools to Help You Improve Call Quality
Google has added a new tool to Google Meet to help you answer the question, “why is Google Meet call quality so bad?” Now when you’re in a Google Meet call you can click on the little “three dot” menu in the bottom-right corner of the screen and you’ll find a “Troubleshooting and Help” menu. […]
How to Zoom and Meet Like a Pro for Teachers
How to Zoom and Meet Like a Pro for Teachers Remote meetings, teaching, and learning are part of the new normal since the 2020 COVID pandemic changed our lives. Teachers, students, parents, and employees are using Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, Skype, Google Hangouts and other video conferencing apps. These products allow us to continue interacting, […]
Five Tips for Live Online Instruction
Whether you use Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams for online class meetings there are some universal things that you can do to make the experience better for you and your students. The following five tips for live online instruction are an excerpt from my recently published 2020-21 Practical Ed Tech Handbook. Elevate your camera […]
Five Features of Microsoft Teams to Note
This year I added a section on remote teaching to the Practical Ed Tech Handbook. What follows here is an excerpt from that section. Whiteboards: To use the whiteboard in Microsoft Teams meetings simply open the screen sharing menu then choose “whiteboard.” You can turn the whiteboard on or off at any time during your […]
Seven Zoom Tutorials to Watch Before School Starts
As the new school year approaches I’ve been getting a lot questions about Zoom. I have published some tutorials on my YouTube channel that address most of those questions. Until this morning I haven’t put them all together in one place. Here are my Zoom tutorial videos. The Basics of Hosting a Zoom Meeting Zoom […]
Zoom from Teacher and Student Perspectives
As the new school year gets closer I’m getting a lot of requests for help with Zoom. I have published a few video tutorials about Zoom including this one that covers the basics of setting up a meeting with students. I’ve also published this one about how students see Zoom meetings on Android phones. But […]
7 New Google Meet Features for Teachers
In a move that clearly is an attempt to match the functionality of Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Google has announced some new features that will soon be coming to Google Meet for G Suite for Education users. All of the new features that were announced address the many concerns about Google Meet that teachers have […]
A Great Set of Microsoft Teams Tutorials
I published a bunch of videos about using Google Meet and Zoom this spring. That’s because those are the tools that I use the most and I was asked about the most. This afternoon I answered an email from a reader who was looking for help with Microsoft Teams. My recommendation was to check out […]
How to Reverse the Mirroring Effect in Zoom
In my recent article titled What’s On My Desktop I mentioned using a small physical whiteboard during live lessons delivered via Zoom or Google Meet. Since then a few people have emailed to ask how I am able to make the writing on the whiteboard not appear reversed to students. It’s actually really easy to fix […]
The Week in Review – It Was a Rough One
Good morning from Maine where the ground is once again blanketed with six inches of heavy, wet snow. We had a big storm on Thursday night that knocked out the power to more than a third of the homes, including mine, in my county. So in the midst of remote learning we had a snow […]
Webinar Recording – Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support
Yesterday afternoon I hosted a webinar titled Three Strategies for Remote Instructional Technology Support. If you missed it, the recording is now available to view here on my YouTube channel and as embedded below. The slides from the presentation can be seen here or as embedded below. Highlights of the webinar included: Improving your autoresponder. […]
Three Ways to Make Whiteboard Videos on Your Chromebook
Last week I published a video on how to make a simple video on a Chromebook without installing any extensions or apps. That video was fairly popular and it prompted some follow-up questions from readers and viewers who wanted my recommendations for making whiteboard videos on a Chromebook. Besides just recording in front of an […]
A Student View of Joining a Zoom Meeting on an Android Phone
A few days ago I got an email from a reader asking me what it looks like when a student tries to join a Zoom meeting on an Android phone. It was a good question because it is important to have an understanding of what a student experiences when he or she tries to use […]