How to support your students’ learning remotely

1. Video conferencing tools

Zoom is an online video conferencing tool that allows you to run a conference with up to 100 participants. It is free to run sessions of up to 40 minutes. You can also share your screen with students, which makes this application quite useful for remote learning.

2. Collaborative online tools

Google Drive and/or Microsoft Office 365 allow you to share and edit presentations, documents, spreadsheets and more simultaneously. This is an ideal tool to set up small study groups where students can work together and collaborate in developing a project, or completing a task. You can create differentiated folders and activities that are tailored by ability, or assign a group leader responsible to support and coach the whole group.

3. Quizzes and surveys

Socrative is one of our favourite tools for learning of all times. It allows you to create and set quizzes containing multiple choice, true or false and open ended questions. You can set different quizzes to assess the progress your students are making in their self-learning efforts.

4. Online simulations

PhET has lot of really good simulations for Physics, Chemistry and Biology that students can ‘play’ with independently. On the website they also have lots of worksheets to guide students through different tasks on individual simulations. This allows them to learn as they complete a task. Or you could create your own instructions and tasks for students to complete on different simulations.

5. Online videos

There are a lot of good videos for learning online. For example, Veritasium and Physics Girl are great examples for Physics. But there are also services that have short videos tailored to exam boards in the UK. An example is A-level Physics Online which has all its Yr12 videos free to use.

These 5 tools should give a fair bit of support to your students in these unusual times.