As education shifts to remote platforms, you need to devise ways to enhance remote student engagement. According to Forbes, with the COVID-19 outbreak, the need to enhance how you engage your students remotely is increasing. One way schools are facilitating remote classes is through holding frequent video conferencing meetings with remote students. Because the classroom learning environment is different from a remote one, you need to develop fun ways to keep students engaged.
As a remote tutor, you might be facing challenges when it comes to offering engaging lessons remotely. One of the reasons is that you may be new to online teaching, and you don’t have strategies for engaging your students remotely.
Here are 5 fun ways you can engage your students remotely.
Create Online Breakout Rooms to Promote Collaboration Among Your Students
Video conferencing platforms like Zoom have virtual team building tools that allow you to create student project teams within the breakout rooms. Since creating breakout rooms isn’t set by default, you should activate it first. After activation, you can allocate students into breakout rooms or enable Zoom to assign your students rooms automatically. These rooms are beneficial as they help you create a collaborative environment, leading to fun and engagement among your remote students.
Additionally, you can blend your teaching approaches with breakout rooms to enhance remote student engagement. For instance, you can use turn and talk sessions as an informal approach for your remote students to exchange concepts. Here, you can pair your students and allow them to enter the breakout rooms for around 3 to 5 minutes. You can also create jigsaw sessions consisting of 3 to 4 students who can enter the breakout rooms to read and debrief. Eventually, creating virtual breakout rooms can help devise a fun way to engage your remote students.
Make Your Slides Interactive and Dynamic
In your usual one-on-one classroom environment, you might have been applying systematic and reflective teaching approaches. With remote learning, academic class content may change, but your standards and collaborative approach with an inquisitive mindset remain intact. Therefore, after shifting to remote learning, you might be wondering how to retain your classroom standards. Because of this, you might be concerned about how to devise fun ways
to keep your remote students engaged.
Fortunately, there are fun ways for you to add interactive and dynamic elements to your slides using tools like Nearpod, Google Slides, and Keynote. By including open-ended quizzes, polls, drawing exercises, and blank fill-in exercises, you can enhance student engagement during remote classes. Furthermore, these interactive and dynamic elements are in real-time. In the end, using interactive and dynamic slides can help you create fun ways to engage students remotely.
Help Your Students to Connect with Others Academically and Socially
Today, most students use different social networks to link up and exchange photos and videos. Therefore, you should help your students connect with others socially and academically to keep them engaged.
For instance, you can use free tools like Flipgrid to engage your students in their new remote learning lessons. The tool enables you to create grids depending on the academic subjects and offer a safe setting for students to showcase brief videos. Eventually, using the Flipgrid tool, you can create a platform for the diverse voices in their remote learning. In turn, this helps you create a fun way of engaging your students remotely.
Give Feedback to Your Remote Students
You should let your students know how they are doing while taking their virtual classes. Therefore, you should make it a habit to give them frequent feedback. Besides, you should encourage your remote learners to ask questions and share their opinions during the learning session. Doing so helps create an enjoyable learning environment where your students feel free to participate.
Share Your Screen
Most video learning platforms offer you the ability to share your screen with learners. You can also use in-built features like ‘raise hand’ or chat rooms to keep your students engaged when teaching remotely. Besides, sharing your screen helps students to follow your lesson closely and ask questions. Ultimately, using such fun ways, you can easily keep your students engaged.
Concluding Remarks
Following the outbreak of COVID-19, students are now learning through remote platforms. However, virtual learning comes with several challenges that you need to handle to keep your students engaged. For instance, you can create online breakout rooms to promote collaboration, make your slides interactive and dynamic, and share your screen. Additionally, you can help your students connect with others and give them feedback. Ultimately, these tips can help you create fun ways to engage your remote students.