Keep Your Remote Learners Engaged

Whether you are teaching students in person or remotely or a little of both, it’s important to make sure all learners are engaged.  Here are my favorite tips for helping remote learners stay in touch with what is happening in their classrooms.

1. Greet your learners. When we greet students at the door, they feel welcome, connected, and ready to learn. Greet each student by name as they enter your virtual classroom.  If you are teaching remote and in-person students, turn your camera around to give your remote learners a chance to greet their in-person classmates and vice versa.  Make things more fun by using special greetings like air high fives, waves, or fist bumps.
   
2. Don’t forget the power of breakout rooms, if you can use them.  I generally thought breakout rooms were only for group work, but I was so wrong!  You can send students to individual breakout rooms to work quietly or conference with them.  The bonus is you can virtually hop from room to room checking in on your students.  Imagine the power of using breakout rooms to make book recommendations to students and learn more about what they like to read.
   
3. Please, please, display picture book pages!  Okay, I have to hop on my soapbox here.  Please use an ebook or a document camera to display book pages.  Remote learners and in-person learners can not see detailed illustrations or follow along with you as you read if you just hold the book up to the camera.  Your hand is going to shake, you can’t zoom in, and it’s just not going to look good.  Take the time to learn how to use technology to make sure your learners can enjoy the books.  Students can’t enjoy books they cannot see.
   

If you need more ideas, you only need to harness the power of the web or social media to see the innovative ways teachers and librarians engage with remote learners. What great ideas will you discover?
Contributed by:
Joy Harvey, Coordinator of Library Services for the Lincoln Public Schools