Hot tips for online teaching. Please

[WhyNotMe40]

At the moment I am doing (as instructed) everything via showmyhomework and email. But I've had a heads up that it is about to change and we will need to provide lesson videos. (Currently link to oak national academy or BBC Bitesize lessons where appropriate)

I am a bit of a technophobe although I do try, and I'm very nervous about recording lessons.

Please help me out a bit and tell me what works for you?

Ideally I want to be able to video PowerPoints playing with my voiceover and somehow scribble extra notes? I don't want them to see me, and it needs to be prerecorded as my small children will not cooperate with live lessons.

I have a pretty ancient laptop with a touchpad which has Linux not windows (blame my brother who's laptop it was originally) I do not have a visualiser. Could possibly find a mouse from somewhere.. we use office 365 at school that I can log into from home.

Can anyone help me? Thanks

This thread has grown! I don't really like the narrating over PPT thing. I mean, I'm happy to rabbit on having shared my screen in Teams, but not actually recording it.

Anyway, I just came back to say that yes Firefly is a Joss Whedon programme. But also it's a VLE. Basically you can upload files and links to it and set tasks and quizzes, but it doesn't do anything live and you have to pay for it, so if your school doesn't have it, it's irrelevant.

Anyway, I just came back to say that sharing the audio in Teams takes a bit of practice even when you find the teeny little sodding box, but I found a helpful explainer which I will post in a second.

Too many anyway s 😁

listen to how he grits his teeth when he has to admit Macs do this automatically .

none of my students will put their cameras on. Perhaps they are snacking/surfing/not properly dressed. It is a weird thing teaching into the void. However, we don't have to record (except one to ones) as they have to be in lessons unless they have a good reason, but we do have to back all the tasks up in Firefly.

Thanks, I'm going to have another play tonight once my own darlings are asleep

Something else that's worked for us is to set up a Team just with a few friendly colleagues and then set up a dummy lesson and try out various methods of teaching each other.

My very basic video technique.

1. Draw diagram on whiteboard.
2. Prop whiteboard against computer.
3. Video whiteboard on phone (I just use the camera, nothing special) while pointing out interesting (to me) features of diagram
4. I've got the phone set up to back photos and videos up in Google drive
5. Download video from Google drive (it takes a while to become available due to large file size and I'm not going much over 5 mins)
6. Upload video to YouTube (set up a channel first - it's free)
7. Send students link to the most boring YouTube channel in the world!

I am just doing this for the odd bit of a lesson where I'd normally use a whiteboard and it's for topics where I've had the students show me their diagrams on camera and they're all making the same mistake.

Does anyone use software that creates that lovely hand drawn / dual-coded look? I think Doodly is the sort of thing but it's £££

@Phineyj if you have a smartphone you can upload the videos directly to YouTube using the app. This sidesteps the google upload part and might save time. My videos are about 3mins long. Also don't forget (I did and had an odd comment!) to disable comments and make it unlisted!

Phineyj I did try to set up a team with a colleague but it wouldn't let me - i have no permissions. I'm actually wondering if I've been given student permissions or something, I genuinely cannot do anything!

Will email the IT guys tomorrow, forgot today (was too busy trying to coax one sentence of writing out of my own year 1 child )

Oh thanks for the YouTube tip, Sure! @whynot I feel your pain. Y2 DD complained to my boss today (interrupting our Zoom meeting) that her literacy was too hard. No she does not go to my school 😆 He was sympathetic though.

Mostly using Loom (not zoom) to do voice over on google slides/pc screen. It’s really easy to use. You don’t have to have your face on the screen, it creates a link you can share directly to google classroom.

And it works on my ancient laptop unlike when I try with PowerPoint voice over technology.

I am pleased to announce that I have mastered showing a film clip on Google classroom! I cannot, however, get it to appear at the same time as their little icons, so they could go away for a snack for all I know.

Teams has added some updates recently - much easier to set the whole class as attendees, and there's also a "hands-up" option which is brilliant for managing class discussion more effectively (except for the kids who leave the hands-up button clicked for the whole lesson ).

I'm quite proud of myself as I have basically taught myself Google classroom and teams since lockdown, am doing kahoots most lessons by screensharing (which they love) and Listenings on kerboodle or from sound files (am MFL teacher) as well as sharing PowerPoints and getting them to work on Google docs, so I can drop in and see what they are doing. My next thing I want to learn how to do is quizzes on Google forms. Is anyone an expert at this? I know to have the first question as what is their name. Where do all their answers go?! How do you see them all on one 'spreadsheet'? Does anyone have any tips?