Engaging students online

Introduction

Last week I delivered a session to help Cambodian teachers engage students who are studying online. This challenge of engagement is a common theme among teachers that I have received feedback from. I tried to break the session up into a listicle and deliver the session as engagingly as I could using some of the engagement techniques I have researched along the way. This blog is a way for me to reflect on the session and provide you with some useful ideas for engagement with learners. The session had approximately 700 teachers, so the challenge of engaging this number was slightly different to a class of say 30 but some of the principles remained the same. The key areas I addressed were

· Setting goals

· Creating a shared space and sense of belonging

· Getting to know learners

· Brain Breaks

· Varying your background

· Mixing up the delivery of content

Setting goals

The first thing I did in the session was lay out my aims and goals for the following hour and a half. I did this using images and asked participants to try to guess from the images what I hoped to achieve. This was done using the chat box and I fed back on answers offering clues and ideas as we went through. I tried to discuss goals as not just my goals but ‘our’ goals. With all lessons and training sessions its obviously important to think about what will be achieved from the point of the learner or participant as opposed to the teacher or trainer. When writing aims we can use stem sentences to guide us, such as; ‘Participants will leave having .....’. In my case it would read ‘Participants will leave having examined the importance of goals and the effect of short, mid and long-term goals on learner engagement’. We then did indeed look at the importance of goals on learner engagement. My thoughts here are that by setting short-term goals for the lesson, or the day, we can keep learners on task. Ideas for this kind of goal may be:

· Complete a learning journal of what has been done in class

· Write a list of new words and post this to the classroom collaboration space (More about this is a moment)

· Send a message in English to a classmate

To engage learners during the month we may have some mid-term goals. These mid-term goals can help drive work though a unit of study, provide a sense of progress and engage learners for longer. Mid-term goals could include the following:

· Record a creative video of yourself

· Watch a movie and write a review

· Complete a unit project

And to finally engage learners through a course of study and show a real sense of improvement we can add some long-term goals. These could take the form of:

· Read a reader and complete a book report

· Research a topic of interest and produce a presentation

· Pass an accredited exam

Without any clear goals, it will be difficult for students to have any intrinsic motivation and they are likely to study for the sake of it, or because parents or employees expect it. Adults, generally speaking, will likely have their own clear goals and will be able to express these. However, children and teenagers may need some support and help when formulating their goals. We also need to know what our students’ goals are in order to be able to support them. To do this, we need a safe, shared space where we can show our ideas and provide support to each other. We will look at that in the next section.

Action Point: Before reading further…What are your goals? Make a list and break them down into short, mid and long term. Make yourself accountable by sharing these with a colleague or friend.

Creating a shared space and sense of belonging

A virtual hang out area is a great tool to share our ideas, goals and act as a place to be creative. We can also use this for collaborative tasks as well as a place to submit homework.

Two online tools that I’ve used and found effective are Miro and Padlet. Let’s start with Miro.

Miro essentially a collaborative whiteboard platform that allows you to do most of the stuff you would do on a ‘real’ whiteboard and much, much more. I have created an example which you can see here. The first example is a getting to know you task.

Here I have a picture montage of interests and information about myself. I have posted it on the platform and I have asked students to write sentences underneath about me (you might notice the third person pronoun that indicates this). When they have completed the sentences, I will provide feedback using the key. Student’s will also include their own montages and post for people to comment. To manage this better, you may want to pair up students rather than complete as a whole class activity. When finished, you could create a find someone who activity using the information in the montages.

The second activity on Miro is a class vote.

Depending on the content of the lesson that week or day, students can vote. Here we see a simple activity to find out the preference between cats and dogs among our learners. The red dots are for boys and the green for girls to provide more opportunities for analysis and discussion.

You will also see acrostic poems and words lists which can be posted to share creativity and ideas. The limits of what you can add to your board are endless, and with time, will be driven more by students as they see the area as a place to share, develop ideas and get to know each other.

Another cool place to collaborate is Padlet. Padlet similarly to Miro, allows students to upload images and contribute to things that have been posted. Here is an example. You will see the same idea for introduction using the picture montage, and a homework task which will also spark debate and interest. The task is to post an image from your window and write about it. Here is mine.

In addition, I have also added a link to the Google street view of the home I lived in as a child. This is a great way to engage and introduce something of yourself to learners. Learners can then post their questions before adding their own links or images.

Padlet is also great for uploading audio and recordings of yourself. You can have students then add their own recording to check pronunciation for example.

Action point: Please have a look at collaboration spaces and make your own. Initially you will need to monitor carefully and remind students to contribute, but after a while you should see students come together and use the space effectively.

Getting to know learners

While learners need to get to know each other, it is also fundamentally important that you get to know your students. In a traditional classroom setting we would use a paper-based needs analysis similar to the examples below from Learning Teaching: A guidebook for English language teachers. Jim Scrivener, Macmillan Education.

These templates are great and can be used to identify needs and gaps in language and how students like to learn, but when learning online, there are other things to consider. For me, I would break the needs analysis up into 3 areas. Language, interests and logistics.

Language includes questions about their English ability, strengths and weaknesses and how they like to learn.

Interests are questions about what they like to do in their free time. Questions about cultural things, such as favourite bands and sports etc.

Logistics includes questions about what kind of technology they have, and the accessthey have.

Language and interests are often covered in most sample needs analyses you can find, but the last essential area of logistics, is often overlooked. We cannot be sure that all students have stable internet access and need to make concessions for this. Do you know if all your students have access to a device that they can study online with? Do they have to share this with a sibling? Do they have a webcam? Have they got a quiet area at home where they can study? All these questions and more, need to be addressed before we can be sure we can engage and provide equal teaching quality for all our learners.

The final thing to consider when conducting needs analysis is the delivery method. Paper based is preferable with any survey due to the fact you tend to get more people participating. You can do this in class and allocate time. However, as we are teaching online, we may need to conduct surveys using online software. Survey Monkey is great for this. There are a variety of question types to choose from and surveys are easy to compile. The data received is easy to navigate and make sense of.

What area of needs analysis is most important for your learners? Have you considered the logistical difficulties students may face when learning online?

Brain Breaks

Brain breaks are essential when teaching online, not only for the students but for you as the teacher. The focus needed to teach online is more pronounced due to the lack of eye contact and body language we would normally use during a face to face class. New skills are being developed with regards new technology, teaching methodology and classroom management. All these factors ensure that you as a teacher will be deenergised and in turn, our students may also suffer from fatigue. To alleviate this lack of vitality, we can employ brain breaks. Brain breaks can be used to lift energy or to provide some form of relaxation. They can be employed after activities to provide a buffer, or at the start or end of a lesson to mentally sign on or off. Depending on the level you may want to increase or decrease the number of brain breaks throughout the session. This will be up to you and your students to decide. There are lots of ideas online to implement brain breaks, but you can formulate your own ideas quickly and easily using a dice. Think up a number of brain break ideas such as the ones below, and allocate a number to each one.

1. Jump up and down 5 times

2. Touch your toes 5 times

3. Close your eyes and take three deep breaths

4. Move your head round slowly 3 times to the left and three to the right

5. Massage your left arm for ten seconds

6. Massage your right arm for ten seconds

Roll a dice, and then tell students what they have to do. You can share this table of ideas on the collaboration space and have students add to it with their own ideas.

Come up with 3 more energetic brain breaks and 3 relaxing ones. Try them out in the next class.

Varying your background

Teachers should augment their delivery by changing up their background and environment wherever possible. First of all, you need to ensure your sound is of a high quality and that the camera is positioned at eye level. Some online learning platforms will allow you to virtually change your background with pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, outer space and so on. If this is not possible or desirable, there are other things you can do. My background happens to be my bookshelf, which is very popular for people working from home. I also have some personal items on the shelves that I encourage people to ask questions about if they want to. Try to keep your background ‘clean’ and not too ‘busy’. By this, I mean don’t have too much going on behind you that could be distracting. On the other hand, a bleak white background may be too boring for learners. Look for a nice blend here. During session, I have also changed my appearance. This is a great way to keep learners engaged and you can give points to those students who notice if you have changed or not. See below for the changes I made in a recent session. This idea would be great for revision of vocabulary such as clothing.

You may notice I am standing during this session. This enabled me to use more body language and engage better with the audience. Standing, I find, also increases my energy levels and makes me better able to deliver my message.

Action Point: Have a look around at your space and evaluate if it is too busy or too plain. Put some interesting items behind you and have students ask questions, or guess why they are significant.

Mixing up the delivery of content

Mixing up how you deliver the content of your lessons is key to engagement. Imagine if you had to sit and listen to the same voice delivering the same content from a book or PowerPoint every lesson. You would soon get bored and lack engagement. Think before you want to present something. Is there a better way to get this information to the students? Here are some examples.

• Utilize video from the coursebook or make your own videos. Video is very engaging and most up to date coursebooks will have these available. Make sure you are using them. If students also have access, they could watch them beforehand and you can then check in class.

• Provide text to explain points or to give instructions then check verbally or with a checklist. With complex instructions you can add these to the collaboration space and students can then refer to them when they want to.

• Provide audio to reading text and vice versa. Sometimes the coursebook will have this, but if it doesn’t then record your own. This allows students to follow along and hear the pronunciation of tricky words clearly. Most books will provide the tape script. Make sure you then provide this to the learners. They can then choose to read or listen depending on preference.

• When using PPT vary the animations and make them visual. There needs to be a balance here though. Don’t make them to ‘jazzy’ as this can be distracting.

• Record a podcast to summarize the lesson and use the collaboration space or chat box to provide links to further information and to give homework.

• Use polling software such as Mentimeterto garner feedback, check instructions or concept check.

• Bring in guests, either live or with recorded videos. Teachers can pair up and provide content for each other so students don’t get bored of seeing the same face and hearing the same voice. Hopefully, if it’s a teacher they already know, this can create surprise and students will be happy to see them. For an example of this you can here where you will hear John Cruft talk about the mixing up the delivery.

Action Point: Who could you invite into your classroom to provide different input? Have a think about this and offer to join someone else’s class to do the same.

I hope you have got some ideas from this on how to engage learners. Try a few out in your next online lesson. Lots of these ideas can also be used when teaching face to face. If you have moved back into the classroom, adapt the ideas and see how you get on. If you’d like to watch a recording of the session please click here.

Good luck with your teaching!