Distance Learning Tips and Tricks for Teachers

The physical distance between a teacher and a student keeps increasing each year. First, the pandemic made half of the world stick to remote learning. Currently, the global situation remains quite unstable, contributing to the integration of distance learning into our lives.

As the actual distance increases, so can the communication gap. The set of techniques the teachers used to apply during the offline lessons appears less effective in online learning.

Are there any ways to reduce this distance and make remote learning as effective as offline? New times call for new challenges, so the European Training Foundation (ETF) has developed the 10 Commandments for distance learning for teachers that may be extremely useful for online education.

Also, you may want to check the below tips and tricks to help you establish appropriate communication during remote learning and choose the proper teaching techniques, no matter the subject. These recommendations will be helpful for online math classes, language courses, arts, and science.

Increase your online presence

The online environment does not facilitate strong communication connections with the students. However, nothing is impossible with the right skills, professional techniques, and desire to retain schoolers’ attention. Planning lesson plans ahead with an app like Notion for Teachers can certainly help give you more time to focus on how to get your students engaged more.

Get into the habit of greeting each student when they log on to the online class. Addressing each kid will help you demonstrate your readiness for communication with every individual present. Distance learning gives you more opportunities to apply creative tools during the lesson.

Using the slide templates, you can share a welcome message and briefly present the material you will deal with. 

Introduce norms and rules that should be followed

Since we are facing a new online learning reality, students should know the rules applied during the lesson. Provide brief guidelines regarding the behavior expectations and principles of jumping into the discussions, voicing their question, or asking for help.

The control over the observance of these rules in the online mode should be tighter, as it is crucial for better communication and interaction between teachers and students. 

Apply interactive methods

Remote learning is more complex in communication but more accessible using various interactive, visual, and audio tools. When teaching online math for kids, you are free to integrate games and other enjoyable activities into your routine.

Elementary school kids will enjoy matching, ordering, and counting games to practice math basics. Middle schoolers can try various fun activities to practice decimals and equivalent fractions, mental math, graphing coordination, and adding and subtracting positive and negative integers.

Feel free to use free math worksheets suitable for any grade and any concept to practice. Help your kids succeed in online math quickly and engagingly.

Use virtual manipulatives

Virtual manipulatives are irreplaceable when modeling abstract concepts to reach deeper comprehension. They are the interactive online representation of dynamic objects to obtain math knowledge.

A variety of them could be easily found on the Internet: measuring spoons, geoboards, geometry builder sets, base ten counters, etc. They help schoolers practice counting, measurement, addition, subtraction, time, and other basic math operations.

Wrap up techniques

Appropriate finalizing of online lessons is as important as their start. This is the stage when you can ask every student for their feedback. Engage kids to share what they have learned during the class and what difficulties have faced.

Explanation of the reasoning will keep the students involved in the online routine and lead your online interaction to the logical end. Providing feedback by answering a simple question may become an exit ticket to a student, meaning they can now leave the online classroom. Do not forget to respond to each schooler – secure your presence at the lesson until it ends.