Productivity is the key to teaching online. Here are the remote teaching hacks you need!

Remote teaching is a new professional reality for many educators worldwide. While learning from home can be difficult for students, teachers face even bigger challenges. Teaching from their living rooms can affect their productivity and negatively impact classes. Multi-tasking is daunting. Getting through the day teaching and running the home can be exhausting. Here are a few clever remote teaching hacks that can help you improve your productivity.

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Remote teaching hacks for your productivity

Get rid of distractions

Just as students get distracted during online classes, so do teachers. They can get a roving eye when it comes to remote teaching. Focusing can be challenging, and once your students witness your distractive and easy-going nature, they might take this as a pass to take a back seat, so to speak. 

Hours and hours of remote teaching might make you pull your hair out at the end of the day. The best way to deal with distractions is to think of them as rewards. This means after one lesson is finished, watch your favorite YouTube video, then grade papers, then read a blog post, and so on. Doing so will ensure you get the work done.

On-screen clutter

During remote teaching, close all the other documents and browse tabs on your desktop. It will increase your productivity levels because you will be more organized. A de-cluttered screen won’t leave you confused and rushed every time you have to move from one file to another in the middle of a lesson. It will save you time and effort as well.

Also, organizing your classes in advance will minimize the stress of having to find things while live. Not to mention, closing apps and everything that you are not using during class helps your computer perform better. 

Re-plan your content

Do the research and generate a lot of information related to your student’s subjects. Instead of making different files for each subject, create presentation templates that can be reused regularly. 

Most of the remote teaching is done via video calls. You would be able to refer to your presentation templates whenever you need it. Design a large amount of content consisting of interactive quizzes, words, and phrases to help your students learn. Not everything has to be made from scratch. All you need to do is plan and reuse what you already have to ease your workload.

Break out groups

Regular classes have many students, but it can be tough to manage so many people in virtual classrooms. So, you will naturally have to split them into smaller groups. Smaller groups work well because they inspire interaction with the teacher as well as with each other. It increases student participation and drives motivation. 

Like Webex Meetings and Zoom, most video conference platforms offer “break out rooms” in which you can assign different students to your class. For example, Zoom has up to fifty “break out rooms” you can utilize during your lessons. You can assign a group one task, move on to another room, assign them another task, and so on. 

Once your students have had the chance to complete their tasks, they can come back to the main session to have a class discussion. It may take a bit of getting used to, but it is beneficial for teachers and students alike.

Explore free online tools

Ever since remote teaching has become the new norm, many app developers and tech companies have launched different online tools to help teachers conduct their lessons without any issues. Most of them are free of charge and highly engaging. They make online classes exciting for the students, which gives them the motivation to do well and progress.

There are various tools you can use, such as Animoto allows students to create video clips of the knowledge they gained during their lessons. Canva is another tool you can utilize to make your classes visually attractive. 

ManyCam is a fantastic tool for online teachers because it makes your life easy to bring all your assets together in the virtual classroom. On ManyCam, you can add YouTube videos, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and much more, then quickly switch between them. Plus, you can add your webcam in a picture-in-picture layer to keep your classes more engaging. 

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Give students ownership and control

Allow your students to feel a sense of ownership by asking them questions about the lessons. Don’t wait until the end of the class to ask whether they enjoyed it or not. They will say anything you want to hear so they could leave as soon as possible.

Interact with your students during the lessons and ask them to give you candid responses about any adjustments they would like you to make. This will make the students feel heard and won’t feel like they have no control over their learning experience.

Final Thoughts

Embracing the technological changes regarding remote teaching and learning can be stressful and might feel like double the work at times. When you focus on improving your productivity and delivering engaging classes, online education becomes less daunting. The remote teaching hacks above are just a few of the many ways you can do that.  

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