This site is intended for those educators who are trying to navigate through teaching remotely using a synchronous video platform for delivering lessons. The platform may vary, from Zoom, to Google Meets, to Microsoft Teams, etc., but the result is the same: educators in front of a screen, giving instruction to students who are connected live with video and/or audio capability.
A difficulty one soon encounters in synchronous video meetings is student apathy and disconnection (emotionally, not electronically). The aim of this website is to address this issue by suggesting ways to increase student engagement in this milieu. Of course, many of the suggestions are standard ways educators use to engage students in the classroom every day. Two questions emerge from this attempt to increase student engagement:
1. Are there ways to adapt what I do in the classroom to engage students in the synchronous video setting?
2. Are there techniques unique to the synchronous video setting that may increase student engagement?
The answers are, “Yes, and yes.”
This website was borne out of necessity in two ways: one, as a result of trying to teach remotely in the spring of 2020 due to the global shutdown of everyday life, including education; and two, the coincidental working through of my Master’s in Education degree in Technology in Education. Full disclosure, I am not a huge fan of technology in the classroom, but I see the necessity of it, especially now. Of course I use technology in the classroom, and in many ways it makes teaching and learning much better, but I only use it for very specific purposes. My larger passion is around student engagement, and this website combines the two aspects of engagement and technology. While education has begun to move back into the classroom again, there may yet be a movement towards online, remote learning in the future. With this in mind, I have tried to address engagement from both synchronous video and classroom perspectives.
A partial disclaimer – while I have been teaching high school for 22 years and I have researched everything I have posted here, conducting kindergarten to grade 12 education through synchronous video meetings has only happened on a mass scale because of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. As a result, much of what is being suggested has only been tried since education moved remotely in the spring of 2020. In the coming years, other research may emerge, and new methods may surface that add to the suggestions given here. In that vein, I look forward to adding to and editing this repository of ideas as time goes on.
Thank you for reading, and happy teaching!
Dale Sakiyama