How can educators adapt to working online if they are forced to work away from the classroom/workplace?

Given the unprecedented circumstances of COVID-19 and the enormous switch to online working, here is a list of some online resources educators can use to connect with other teachers, parents and pupils…

• 26 useful resources for pupils
• 8 ways to share videos
• 13 resources for teachers

If you believe something is of use and/or critical, please add it to the comments section for others to see and use.

Resources for pupils

1. Soaper Heroes have created bespoke lesson plans and resources, including videos and experiments, to firmly embed good hygiene habits.
2. Learning by Questions offers 60,000 questions, allowing pupils to deepen their knowledge, freeing up what limited time teachers have…
3. Me Power provides more than 100 practical tactics and tips to improve examination performance.
4. KAZ-Type is a typing software that is differentiated in order to be accessible to both mainstream students and those with special educational needs.
5. Gojimo.com has GCSE quizzes that relate to different specifications and are set up and ready to go.
6. Socrative.com allows teachers to create simple quizzes that students can take quickly.
7. Quizlet.com/live can be used to create keyword flashcards online and give out to students.
8. Another great app for creating timed quizzes is Kahoot.com for added competition for keywords or ideas.
9. Memrise.com is a useful app for all languages and uses videos to help learners.
10. Tableau Public is a great platform to connect to a spreadsheet and create interactive visuals.
11. Looking for visual thinking? Try bubbl.us, to help students better understand, remember and generate new ideas.
12. Revisionbuddies.com can provide short bursts of revision for many GCSE topics and tracks progress too. It even allows the pupils to access past papers and mark schemes.
13. Goconqr.com allows pupils or teachers to create mind maps and flashcards using key terms.
14. Wordflex.com app uses a dictionary with a focus on key terms and a content-rich curriculum.
15. Introduce creativity into your English classes – try Young Writers.
16. Exam season can be stressful for pupils and mindfulness can be a way to combat this and improve grades overall. Keltymentalhealth.ca/breathr  helps pupils focus and relax can be a useful tool for achieving top grades.
17. Poll Everywhere is a vital tool to gain feedback; ideal for voting and gathering data online.
18. Brainpop has a great set of videos, freely available for pupils.
19. Choose a video, give it your magic touch and track your students’ comprehension. Try Edupuzzle.
20. Make beautiful boards, documents, and webpages that are easy to read and fun to contribute to. Try Padlet.
21. Seneca Learning offers many online courses for pupils.
22. There are loads of online resources pupils and parents can use. Safer Internet Day is all-year-round in my opinion.
23. Young Money supports teachers to develop and deliver high-quality financial education…
24. Super Movers is an initiative from the BBC and Premier League and is designed to help primary school teachers inspire children to become more active throughout their school day.
25. Unio creates lesson plans, content and provides feedback and evaluation tools.
26. Finally, it’s been around for a while and just as good, BBC Bitesize resources and videos.

Online solutions will not be viable for vulnerable pupils who will require support. Sometimes a simple list of tasks or good worksheets and textbooks are sufficient…

Sharing videos

1. Zoom – probably the best software out there for videos, webinars and sharing resources through video.
2. Flipgrid can empower every voice in your classroom by recording and sharing short, awesome videos.
3. Screncastify is a free screen recorder extension for Chrome. It allows you to capture, edit, share screencasts, animations of presentations and give feedback to students.
4. Screencast-O-Matic is another free and easy-to-use screen recorder, you can capture any area of your screen with the option to add narration from your microphone and video from your webcam.
5. Periscope allows users to share ‘live’ videos, something I. have been doing for at least three years to connect with my audience and allow them to interact with me as I share information. I’d be lost without it and my audience on Twitter will be familiar with my Sunday evening live stream videos…
6. Speakpipe software allows people online (by voice or email) to leave you a voicemail. It saves users time, having to write an email when the same information can be left in an online voicemail between users. I’ve been using it for years and my website and it’s how most people get in touch with me…
7. Google Hangouts/Meet – is a communication platform for messaging, video chat and for audio and photo sharing to have group conversations with lots of people and free video calls. I have started to experiment using it for teacher training online. Users can synchronise to Google Calendar and if you record it automatically, it saves into your Google Drive to share later…
8. Microsoft Teams offers a wide range of resources – they offer video collaboration too.

Teachers should protect themselves at all times: Consider your personal and professional safeguarding obligations before contemplating online technology to connect with your pupils.

Resources for teachers

1. The digital 5-Minute Lesson Plan allows teachers to create lesson content and share it with others.
2. CreateSpace is a platform for individuals to self publish their books and reach millions of readers on Amazon. it’s been on my to-do list for some time…
3. Mailchimp is a great way for schools to remain in contact with all of their parents and analyse the data, without having to waste £1,000s on paper newsletters being sent home and trashed down the high street …
4. I’ve been using Grammarly for a few years, and although I do not rely on it heavily, it is an essential plug-in for checking documents.
5. WeTransfer is the perfect platform for sharing large online files to another person over the web. Perfect for videos, photographs and large folders and files, you can personalise your page and receive notifications when another person download your documents.
6. Trello! I would be lost without this piece of software, which helps me manage contracts, to-do lists and pretty much everything else. Even if you are not a freelancer, it’s a brilliant tool for teachers to use to help get organised.
7. GDrive (or GSuite) as a perfect online solution for storing files (e.g. Google Docs and Google Slides) and pretty much everything else. the beauty of it is, is that I no longer need to carry a USB around with me and that if I need to share a file, I don’t even need to download it! You can just share the hyperlink and provide the end-user with a view, comment or edit access hyperlink.
8. Evernote Scannable is a way to quickly take a photo and scan the myriad of papers that come your way during a frenetic school day. If you have an iPad or iPhone it’s a must-have tool that will save you precious minutes of time searching for that stray receipt or consent form!
9. Prolio is a great free tool for setting individual targets for students in a quick, fun and interactive way. You can customise specific targets and issue them to selected students.
10. Planbook is great for storing your grades, lesson plans, calendar, attendance lists, to-do-lists, timetable and lesson notes (along with 101 other things!) It won’t win any awards for most beautiful education app, but it is fast, responsive and very intuitive to use.
11. Remind is handy for sending messages and reminders to students and parents without all the faffing of printed forms and papers.
12. LendEd offers a search database for technology resources. It’s definitely worth a browse…
13. And finally, if you have a lot of reading to get through, Pocket is a fabulous app for saving articles to read. The tool downloads all of the data, perfect for reading ‘underground’, on a plane or when you have no signal. There is also a feature where it then reads it to you via headphones – perfect for time-poor teachers.

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