Engaging Online Learners - An update

I started writing this post before Christmas.  Now, as we begin lockdown 3, what follows seems even more important.  

I have been lucky enough this term to teach most of my lessons standing in front of my class with a few of my learners online.  I have always managed to include all my students in all parts of the lesson and you can read about how I did this in this post Engaging your online learners  

The tool to help you deliver lessons during lockdown

In the last couple of months I have become aware of a new tool, Spiral  that my students have enjoyed using and from which I have been able to see at a glance how learning has progressed.  It is equally useful and impressive whether you plan an activity in advance or launch an activity in the moment in a lesson.   The set up is easy and the tasks that can be carried out are varied and provide different opportunities and thus different information as regards the learning that is happening (or not, as the case may be).

Here's a little video giving a short overview of the tool. 

In a planned activity, you have a range of tasks to choose from:

1. open
2. closed
3. poll multiple choice 
4. canvas - where students can draw their answer
5. annotation - where students can annotate a picture or diagram
6. audio - where students can record their answers

You might think that annotation is only for the Sciences or Maths, but this is not the case.  As you can see here, I have asked my students to correct a sentence that I have previously inserted as an image:

At this point, I have only used two features; the Quickfire feature which allows you to set up and plan the questions prior to a lesson above and the Quickfire Lite feature which is launched during the lesson and allows you to pose questions orally and receive written responses (or audio).  I have used this to ascertain understanding in the middle of a lesson.  As my lessons were online,  I was able to gain some rich formative data and some useful insights on my students' progress. 

Data can be gathered by student, by question or by grades table.

The information I receive immediately highlights any misconceptions that my students might have and means that I can address them in the lesson or focus on these areas for my next lesson.  

It is worth adding that a Quickfire Lesson can be launched in class and be led by the teacher or you can set the Lesson as an assignment with students then working at their own pace which might work well for a retrieval type task at the start of the lesson.  

For me, this is going to be a 'go-to' tool  for this next lockdown period.  Indeed,  I used it last term for lessons where I had some students in front of me and some at home learning remotely.  Some of these students were international students in far away countries and I was able to see all students work live during the lesson.  It is a powerful tool and definitely worth a look.