hey everybody it's sam carrick from the new ed tech classroom if you're new to my channel i make videos that bring together high impact instructional strategies and powerful technology tools to transform your teaching in this video i'll be giving you five tips for how to address the challenge of concurrent hybrid teaching where you teach in-person students and virtual learners at the same exact time [Music] first of all i just want to acknowledge the challenges of concurrent hybrid teaching it's an unconventional teaching method that requires unconventional instructional strategies so let me give you five tips that will hopefully help you out here's my first tip rather than attempting to bring your physical classroom to your virtual learners move your entire class online although clearly well-intentioned trying to deliver the physical classroom to students via live streaming or mounting multiple cameras around the room so they can see you lecture and teach at the whiteboard is always going to pale in comparison to the real thing it's sort of like virtual field trips they aren't bad but wouldn't you always rather be on an actual field trip focusing on bringing the entire class online will also help you shift away from emphasizing student observation to emphasizing student participation live streaming a classroom puts a priority on students being able to see what's happening in class but doesn't inherently encourage them to engage with the learning activities in that class bringing your entire class online will also mean focusing on optimizing your digital classroom space rather than focusing on optimizing your physical classroom space for example focus time and energy on setting up a well-organized digital hub where students and families can find all the information they need through your learning management system better yet get your entire school to come together and decide on a uniform system for organizing everyone's learning management system to create a more predictable experience for students and families so instead of bringing the physical classroom to your remote learners level the playing field leverage technology to your advantage and move your entire class online my second tip is to keep using all the asynchronous teaching techniques you've learned remote teaching forced millions of teachers to build skills in how to provide instruction to students even if they aren't in front of you learning all at once all at the same time teachers learn how to create asynchronous video tutorials with screencastify loom or screencast-o-matic teachers have learned how to assign student-paced lessons in pear deck and earpod and how to design hyperdocs and choice boards to create rigorous lesson sequences that students can complete entirely on their own if you have all students moving through a lesson in sequential order at the same pace any number of disruptions can derail your lesson if a virtual student logs in late and misses your direct instruction it's going to be difficult for them to jump into the middle of a lesson if a couple of virtual students are having difficulty with logging into class you'll be faced with a choice to stop and troubleshoot while everyone else waits or move on without them and risk leaving them behind a hybrid classroom calls for hybrid instruction trying to run a hybrid class as an entirely synchronous class is extremely difficult to pull off although you'll still likely need to do some synchronous instruction you should also continue to provide a large majority of instruction asynchronously that brings me to my third tip which is to set up your hybrid classroom in stations stations are inherently asynchronous because you can't be at every station at once having the large majority of your students working on independent self-paced activities will open up your time and space to work with students in smaller groups that's going to reduce the impact of the unique challenges of teaching in person and virtual learners at the same time although the learning that takes place in stations needs to be connected the key idea is that the order through which students move through stations doesn't matter breaking your lessons into non-sequential pieces is called horizontal planning and if you want to learn all about how it works i suggest you check out one of catelyn tucker's books on blended learning when you use stations i'd still recommend starting class all together to calibrate on what you're learning for example if you are teaching a lesson about fractions you might start with a whole group activity where students solve fraction problems in padlet then students would move into their stations in one station students might be working on a personalized learning platform like ixl or st math in another they could be learning about fractions through a self-paced nearpod lesson in another playing a math game like prodigy and then in the final station they could be getting direct instruction from you on a skill i say move and scare quotes because students don't have to physically move in order for you to implement stations if students can't be in small groups because of social distancing you can split up the room into quadrants number each part of the room and have students rotate to the next activity after a given period of time once students move through all the stations over the course of a day or maybe even a week you could have them start to work on an independent project where they're applying learning by doing something like creating a digital book by the way if you like the tips i'm sharing in this video be sure to hit the like button and be sure to let me know in the comments below how you're currently addressing the challenge of concurrent hybrid teaching my fourth tip is to leverage the power of digital workspace programs in your hybrid classroom digital workspace programs allow you to teach via a multimedia enhanced digital whiteboard and allow students to work in their own digital workspace and most importantly they allow you to see what all students are working on in real time let you jump into a student's workspace to give them feedback and allow for peer collaboration in the workspace one of the best digital workspace programs is classkick similar to a program like nearpod classkick allows you to build dynamic interactive lessons for your students as well as see their responses in real time with classkick however you're able to see all students working on their assignments in a single grid view and in the actual workspace students can choose from a wide variety of ways to interact with the work you've assigned for example they can choose to draw record audio type drag and drop take pictures etc it's not just students who can use all these tools as the teacher you can also choose from any of the response tools as a way to give students feedback and there's also a comment bank with pre-created comments and customizable ones so you can start automating the process of giving immediate feedback without losing that feeling of personalization if a student needs help while they are working they can raise a digital hand to get assistance and help isn't limited to conversations between the student and teacher if you choose to enable the function students can respond to a request for help as well you might also want to check out programs like formative seesaw whiteboard phi or whiteboard chat which will also function like a digital workspace my fifth tip is to think ahead if you choose to spend money on your hybrid classroom to be clear i'm not saying that any teacher out there should spend personal money on their own classroom but i know a ton of you do anyway so if you or your school are thinking of investing in upgrades or adjustments to make your classroom more hybrid learning friendly use that money to buy access to high quality instructional technology programs instead of spending it on equipment the only exception is that if students don't have one-to-one computers you should spend money on getting them all devices first avoid spending money on camera equipment lapel mics or any other piece of equipment that you wouldn't use in any other situation than concurrent hybrid teaching those types of investments won't do much to facilitate students learning and are focused on student observation rather than student participation although there are lots of great 100 free programs such as whiteboard chat canva for education flipgrid google jamboard adobe spark post and loom for educators many other powerful programs such as nearpod paradec actively learn padlet newsella classkick gimkit and breakout edu cost money to access the premium versions and i think that's okay they're making a high quality product and need to make a living using any of those programs will immediately increase active participation in class and are all tools you can and should continue to use regardless of your exact teaching situation another option would be to invest in an online course about teaching with technology or in pd on hybrid teaching techniques you likely aren't going to be teaching in a concurrent hybrid model forever so if you're going to make a financial investment make sure you're investing in becoming a more adept user of instructional technology and build skills or get access to programs that will benefit you and your students in the long run if you want more tips and tricks about implementing hybrid or blended learning be sure to check out that playlist above and if you want to learn all about how to build a technology integrated classroom click on the link in the video description to get the latest enrollment updates for my online course the 21st century classroom thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video