Happy … Tuesday? Is that right? Are your days running together? Have you lost track of how many weeks you’ve been quarantined? I have! Please tell me I’m not alone! I feel like the time we are spending, working together to flatten the curve of COVID-19 is DRAGGING, but at the same time, I’m baffled when I look at my calendar and I see that we’re already almost a third of the way through the month. WHAAAT?! I’m currently in my third week of teaching remotely – my dual credit classes have moved online and I’m beginning to share enrichment lesson opportunities with my American Government classes. Throughout these last few weeks of teaching online, I’ve used Google Meet to deliver instruction, hold office hours, and answer questions about assignments and everything else going on in the world right now! While I miss many aspects of my face-to-face classroom, one of the things I miss the most is engaging with my students during class. When I ask a question or gauge student understanding of content during class, I’m met with nodding heads, questions, or confused expressions — signs of life! I really miss that in our online environment! I’ve found a great extension to help with the lack of student feedback – check out Nod!
Nod is a great extension that offers participants the ability to give emoji-like feedback to the presenter as well as raising their hand! The presenter is notified of the reactions in the bottom left corner of their Meet screen and can close out of the reactions/raised hands at any time. I shared the link to this extension with my students on Classroom stream the in the morning before our scheduled Meet so they could download the extension. We found that students needed to add the extension and relaunch their browser OR if students were already in the Meet when they added the extension, they needed to exit the Meet and then rejoin for the extension to work.
It’s been AWESOME! My students automatically mute themselves when our live class begins, so Nod has been an awesome extension that allows me to check the understanding barometer, if you will, as we progress through the lesson. Like I shared on Instagram today … I’m so thankful for the technology that we have available so I can see and talk with my students. Though I’d obviously much rather be in our classroom, tech like Meet and Nod make my teacher’s heart smile during these uneasy times <3
Stay well, and thanks for reading 🙂
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