Speaker 1: Survive and thrive with digital learning. This is a five-minute PLD video designed to help educators in lockdown, isolation, and the classroom. Today, we're looking at monitoring student engagement. Monitoring student engagement is really important because it is what helps us identify those students who might be struggling, who don't know what they're doing for whatever reason, and help them re-engage. A student who stays disengaged for a long time will become increasingly disengaged as they get more behind and start often feeling more overwhelmed. So catching them is real important. When we're in the classroom, many of us have developed a bit of a sixth sense about it. You know, you read the body language, you know that the angle of the screen and that particular type of laugh probably indicates the student is not on task. So when we are teaching online, while these strategies are useful in the day-to-day classroom regardless, an online space requires us to use some different tools because we're not able to read the body language. So we have to think a little bit like detectives and use a few tools to help us track whether students are engaged. Like I said, these tools are useful when you're actually physically teaching in a classroom, but particularly so when you're teaching remotely. Two of my favorite tools, Google Classroom and Edmodo, they do a similar job. Both of them are really great at giving you a really quick overview about whether students are turning in work, are getting behind and turning in work. So for example, this is one of my classrooms. I can see that student C has not turned in two of their assessments, but I can also see that student E has not only turned in all their assessments, they have redone the quiz to get a higher grade, and I've got some of their work that I need to mark. So just at a glance, I can get all of that information without me having to make a whole lot of effort in terms of checking whether they've done a document or not done it. So it's a good way to signal to me, yep, check my work. Another great tool I like to use is Google Forms. You can use it through Google Classroom's quiz function, but you can also use an add-on called Flubaru. Flubaru will mark things like multi-choice questions for you, but it will also indicate for you, and this is all automated of course, where there are particular gaps in the student understanding because it flags questions that lots of students have gotten wrong. Because it outputs all of this in a spreadsheet then, you can very easily organize it into groups, and it means you can do particular teaching related to what students are struggling with, which concepts, which is a really handy tool to have. Next up, quizzes. Quizzes works a lot like Kahoot, except it works very well for doing things asynchronously. So it means I can set a quiz. Students can access it through the Google Classroom as an assignment, where when they finish the quiz, it will automatically record their score in Google Classroom in my gradebook. However, quizzes can be done so students are still competing. However, they can do the quiz at different times. So I can do mine today at lunch, you can do yours tomorrow, and we can see where we're placing in the rankings overall, and we can also see who the top three people are. Useful as well because it uses the student's actual name, so you know which score belongs to which player. PlayPosit is another handy tool that I like to use. You can embed questions in a video, so you can see whether students A are watching the video, and you can also see whether they're understanding the ideas in the video. With each of these tools, why I've chosen to show them to you today is because they minimize the effort on your behalf, but they maximize the impact because you can see really quickly and at a glance where the students are engaging with the material, where are they struggling, where are the concepts that they are struggling with. There are lots of other great ideas out there too. I particularly like the idea of Easter eggs, so little tiny clues or collectibles that students will only have seen if they've actually engaged with the material. Do read up more about Easter eggs, it's definitely the time of the year for those. Thanks again to everyone who helped make this episode. This is really a contribution from lots of people. If you're interested in more videos, you can subscribe at mistytheteacher.blogspot.com. You can also take the New Zealand Teacher Lockdown Response Survey, which all of these videos are designed in response to. Good luck with your online teaching and planning. Have a great day.