Teachers' Top Tips for Teaching Students Remotely

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by distance teaching, you are certainly not alone. We asked educators on our Facebook page to share tips and tricks on how they’re continuing to foster student learning at home.

Try making a Google hyperdoc and put links in for videos/worksheets and articles to read. This will ensure the lesson has guided work and independent practice.
Amina Ahmed
5th-6th Grade
Irvine, CA

Record yourself using QuickTime, your phone, or something similar so that the students can see your face as you are giving instructions or even teaching the lesson. You can create your own YouTube channel where you upload the videos with the date and the topic.
Christy Bursby
10th Grade (Honors English)
Mentor, OH

Use fun things like YouTube—they have many awesome educational videos. Take advice about schedules from a homeschool group.
Summer Barrios
5th-6th Grade (Home School)
Seneca, SC

Start a Google site where you can post the kids’ artwork photos they send you.
Rebecca (Becky) Broyles
7th-12th Grade (Digital/Studio Art)
Battle Ground, WA

Figure out the goal of the lesson, and then determine what would demonstrate to you that your students learned it. After that, open it up to students to do whatever they need to do to demonstrate that they learned it. Offering suggestions is a good idea.... This is where rubrics matter.
Katrina Rudolph-Wise
High School (Spanish)
Baker City, OR

When I homeschooled my daughter, I gave her something to do each day, in each subject, at the beginning of the week. I wrote down everything that needed to be accomplished and some weeks she did all the math on one day, English on one day, etc. Some weeks she did a little in each subject, each day. It was up to her as long as she accomplished what she needed to do.
Petrina Milligan LeBlanc
Elementary (Substitute)
McLean, VA

Be careful with requiring specific mediums for projects—parents don’t need to be going out and buying supplies.
Rebecca (Becky) Broyles
7th-12th Grade (Digital/Studio Art)
Battle Ground, WA

Remember that parents are not used to common core math. Most were not taught that way!
Summer Barrios
5th-6th Grade (Home School)
Seneca, SC

Please remember the accommodations for IEP kids. My daughter uses talk to text and a similar program that reads text to her. She keeps getting PDFs that do not work for her.
Cara Kowal
K-12th Grade (Agricultural Science)
Indianapolis, IN

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