Last Updated: 09:15 KL Time (31st March 2020)
With the prevalence of COVID 19 and so many schools having to close. Here is a summary of the resources that you can use to enable the learning to continue.
There are a large number of resources and many companies have kindly provided free access for schools suffering closures.
School Plans
A large number of schools have shared their plans to help you plan for an emergency.
Stick to what you know
If you are a Google School then the basics are already there for you. Use Google Classroom as your main area and Google Meet to help your students with live conferencing. A very good set of support videos for GSuite is available at flipped classroom tutorials. Google also have collected together a series of articles to help you teach online. They now have a Teach From Home centre.
If you are an Office 365 school, then you can use Microsoft Teams and One Note to help run your school. Microsoft have setup a global support forum for teams.
If you don’t have any video conferencing facilities then the one being recommended by most schools is zoom.us it has a time limit of 40 minutes for the free package, but enables you to manage rooms and handle many students. (YouTube tutorial) For smaller classes streamyard.com is excellent, but limited to 6 people on screen at any onetime. Peardeck can also make your slides more interactive and they have included an extensive guide to teaching remotely.
For Apple users with iPads. Apple have an excellent guide for preparing devices for remote learning. and a very good video series.
The International School of Beijing has an excellent selection of resources highlighted.
Freebies for affected schools
Companies are being very generous to help schools affected by the virus. Here are some helpful resources. There is a very good Wakelet with reources, an excellent spreadsheet and a Free Tools Doc.
See the full sheet.
Formative Assessment
My gotos for formative assessment are:
- Google Forms (Microsoft has their own version.)
- Quizlet
- Quizizz
- EdPuzzle / TED ED Lessons
Everyone has their favourites and if you have tools already, then use them! Many VLEs such as Moodle have their own quizzing functions. If none of what you know fit the bill then here is a list of 75 formative assessment tools.
See a friendly Face
A number of videos have been made by the team of Google Innovators in Asia to help everyone involved. They are a bit on the long side, but there’s plenty of hints and tips in them.
Guides from teachers teaching online
- Jess Periam series of Tweets on how she teaches online for the OU
- Online Teaching in the Time of Coronavirus by EdTech Emma, step by step guide to teaching online. I like the detail of this article.
- Letter To Teachers – Reminding us that it is also the human contact that we provide that is important.
- TES: Coronavirus: 8 tips from closed international schools
- Best Practices for Digital Teaching & Learning– Especially in a Hurry!
Let the Computer Science Continue
- repl.it enables team coding and is free for public accounts and non-profit schools. (Youtube tutorials here). They’ve extended their offer to cover more schools.
- code.org is fully online. They also have many hour of code tutorials.
- CodeHS has offered its extensive package for free until the end of June.
- MIT Scratch is also fully online
- Python Challenges is also free
- github enables you to upload gists for students. It NOW also has an autograding system!
- Sololearn is great consolidation
- Thunkable are now offering free teaching materials to go with their app design kit.
- edx offer some excellent online courses including MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science.
- A great selection of lesson plans at Teach Computing
- Free iGCSE Paper 2 iBook. (Apple Only)
- Unity are offering their premium courses for free for 3 months.
- Real Python are offering some advanced courses. Very useful for our highly able students.
- Great guide to Koji. Perfect for Middle Years. (Javascript based game system)
- Code for Life – Nice set of introductory lessons. (Age 7-13)