Teaching from home - How can I do drawing support - Take 2

Yesterday, I wrote about some experiments I have been doing regarding trying to teach drawing from home (beyond recording my drawings, but doing it live, in a 'class") Blog post here.

After chats in the comment section, today's experiment was having one chat open and me being in it on the laptop so I can record the meet and in the iPad so I can show my iPad screen using Miro. I did it this way as I couldn't work out how to record the meet from my iPad.

As you can see from this video, it was terrible. Because I was logged into two devices on the same meet and they were close together, the feedback was huge and I had to mute both mics. This is no good if I am trying to explain something as I am doing it. The lag on the Miro board was just the same as yesterday when I was logged into the same Miro board twice instead of the same meet twice.

Teaching from home - How can I do drawing support?

We have been learning / teaching from home for a while now. Up to now, the Y11, 12 and 13 students have been doing the elements of the project work that can be done on Google docs / drawings / presentations etc. I have got all of this set up on the class website and Hapara workspaces (example here).
It is getting to a point though, that I need to start thinking about how to do drawings with the students so they can work on some design work at home. In the class, my method is to do the work alongside the students. I have examples ready before hand, I show them what to do in front of them and then continue with my demo pieces as they work so they can see the progress. How can i do this at home.

My first thought was along the same lines as when I made my own drawing board to connect to the class projector - blog post here. Unfortunately, I forgot to pick this up from my classroom on the last day I was in there. I have tried to make one at home using a webcam, a gorilla tripod and a science retort stand. This worked ok.




Recently, I have been using Miro (the free version) with one of my Y12 boys. We have been using it to collaborate on work to do with his design era project. (link to this board here). I was talking today with Ms David, one of our Mathematics teachers, and she said that she was using Miro too as a whiteboard for teaching maths. She got me thinking about how I could use it to do drawing via the Google Meets with my students.

Today's experiment was this.
The Miro board was up on my laptop and I had the app downloaded onto my iPad. I was logged into the same board on both devices.
I had a Google Meet running where I was presenting the tab where the Miro board was on the laptop. I was drawing on my iPad.


This seemed to work well. This is definitely an option to use if we are still on lockdown when the students get to doing some drawn design work.

Teacher Only Day - Teaching Strategies

Today was teacher only day for the whole country to help prepare for going into Lockdown Level 3 teaching tomorrow.
As part of the day, we had a department meeting session where we looked at the various teaching strategies that we have used during teaching online so far. We filled in a Google slide presentation where we all put our information to share. We then talked to it and received feedback from the rest of the department.

Here is a copy of that with just my slide in place and everyone else's removed (privacy)

Trying to plan for limited contact

During our teaching and learning from home experience during the COVID 19 lockdown, I did not really know how much contact I would get with my intermediate classes. I have two Year 7 classes from two different schools, so I wanted to plan for something they could do without me if necessary and if I got to see them, then that would be a bonus.

With my usual classes, I can put work onto the class Workspaces but I can't do this with the Intermediate classes. We tried it with them last year and to be honest, it was a bit of a pain in the bum.

I have set up a page on my usual class site for this purpose and I have made step by step presentations and screencast videos to take them through the tasks. It is all based on learning and using Tinkercad skills for 3D design.

Link to the page on the class site.
The baby Yoda theme and Star Wars style lettering is just a given with me.

It turned out that today I got to see quite a lot of them. Their lovely class teacher set up a meet and I got to talk them through this and help them for an hour this morning. We had fun.

Week 1 - Term 2 - Lockdown teaching is the new norm

We started back to term two on Wednesday this week, after having Monday and Tuesday off for being part of Easter weekend.
We start this new term with a new norm. Lock down teaching from home.

The basic method for this teaching is having all the details of the lessons on Goggle calendars, with the events containing all the links to workspaces, class sites and Google Meets where we can talk face to face.
These calendars are embedded on the front page of my class site and on the individual year group pages, but the main communication is through inviting them to the event so it pops up in their email.
Link to class site

Highlights from this week include -

• Having one student in my Year 11 class on Thursday and I had to hold my cat up to the camera so she could sing to her.
• My lovely Year 7 group n Friday morning coping so well with a coding session. They were putting their coding together using mBlock and then downloading the code to send to me. I was uploading it onto my mBot and testing it for them. We had a lot of fun.
• Talking to a screen full of icons during my Y13 class and I was accusing them of nicking off for a sandwich and I wouldn't know they had gone. That was funny.
• Year 10 assembly on Friday morning. So good to see so many of them joining in.
• Morning tea Meet with lots of other staff members.

Here is a couple of short parts of my intermediate class this morning.
It shows a bit of teaching / question / answer and then a bit of me crawling around on the floor setting the mBot away with one of the student's code. (we were using the force to make the mBot move backwards - link to work on the class site)

Checking my Site for Online Teaching

We did a site check today to make sure it is all ok.
I put the link to my class site into a Chrome incognito window and did a walk through of where the students will have to go while they are at home.
It was a good exercise as I found two things that were not viewable - one was a document that was not public and the other was an embedded workspace where i had taken the wrong url when I embedded it.

It has all been sorted now.
Please excuse the slightly grumpy face. I was on my couch, concentrating.

Link to class site

Online Teaching Support - Changing the Sharing Settings on your Calendar

I have had a few people contact me about making their Google Calendars public.
Here is a quick how to video explaining how to do this.
Here is the link to more Google Calendar help too.

Online Teaching - Workflow prep for students

I sent this to all my NCEA students today so they know what the workflow will be when we. get back to term 2 on the 15th April

Online Teaching Support - Adding Links to Calendar Events