Ensuring a Productive Learning Experience for Your Pupils
A virtual classroom setup has two sides:
- organizational
- technical
More than ever before you will need to demonstrate your planning and managing talent and your familiarity with computer technology. We will guide you through the basic steps.
Organizational Setup
With an organizational setup, we mean everything that can be more or less decoupled from any computer technology.
Curriculum
Indeed, any learning process needs a plan. Online learning may need a curriculum that is different from the usual one. For instance, for subjects that require physical experiments with special equipment, you will have to replace some learning hours with video demonstrations or other learning materials.
The good thing is, if you decide against live sessions and offer video recordings instead, you do not need to think about matching your and your pupils’ schedules as a part of the curriculum preparation.
Virtual Classroom Rules and Expectations
Your pupils may be very comfortable with virtual technologies but not particularly aware of the netiquette. For instance, you expect them to stay silent while you are talking in a physical classroom. The same rule applies to a virtual classroom, with a difference that you need to let your pupils know explicitly that they should mute themselves during live sessions.
Punctuality may seem less mandatory for some kids since in a virtual classroom they are less visible for the teacher. You will need to remind them not to be late and avoid multitasking while they are in the class.
Your Dedicated Working Space in Your Home Office
You know how difficult it may be to make pupils stay focused. That’s why nothing in your surroundings must disturb either you or your viewers.
Make sure that you have a place in your household where nobody can simply crush in or where no noises can easily reach you and leak into your virtual classroom.
A whiteboard behind your back may help to create a proper learning atmosphere for those who watch you online.
Technical Setup
As you may guess, the core technology of a virtual classroom is video communication. Apart from hardware, you have two major options for your virtual classroom solutions:
- a unified virtual classroom software or platform
- using different tools
Depending on the situation, the decision may need to be met by you or your principal or other administrative manager.
Hardware and Internet Connection
However, you won’t avoid getting a webcam and a microphone. Make sure that both of them are good, especially the micro. In a virtual classroom, pupils may have difficulties asking you to repeat something that they missed due to a bad sound quality.
Even the best equipment won’t rescue you during live sessions if your Internet connection fails to transmit the video. You will need at least 1 Mbps for moderate quality calls and 6 Mbps for broadcasting HD video (for which you also need an HD camera, of course).
Virtual Classroom Platform
This kind of solution means that the entire learning process is going to happen within one unified platform. There, you will also be storing your learning materials.
Virtual classroom software is often offered as a SaaS solution. You and your pupils will need to log in to an account using your browser.
At first glance, this seems optimal. With the level of computer literacy among modern kids, it may be even ideal. But depending on the solution, some features may be confusing for particularly small or special kids or even teachers. Besides, such platforms definitely want your school to pay some fee.
A Free Virtual Classroom
With just a small effort, though, you can set up your online classroom for free.
All you need is a proper hub for your learning materials and video lessons. Your pupils will also need an email account (which they surely already have). Another necessary addon is a video conferencing tool, but the basic idea of a free classroom is that you switch to asynchronous communication as much as possible, enabling your kids to learn in their own style.
With dadan, you can record, store, share your video lectures and pupils’ feedback, distribute other materials, such as files and links, and conduct tests to check their knowledge.
How would it work?
Video Messages for Greater Learning Impact
Video lessons solve the problem of slow Internet connection, busy schedules, and sessions missed due to any reason.
Creative Presentation Ideas With Dadan
With dadan, you can capture your webcam and your screen simultaneously. It allows you to turn your PC into a whiteboard and document your explanations to allow your pupils to replay later what they did not quite understand.
Your webcam capture will appear in a corner without hiding any big portion of your screen but helping the pupils to feel your presence.
You can draw on your screen while you are talking and recording to point the viewer’s attention to any important details.
dadan as Your Knowledge Hub
After the recording is ready, you can edit it and add even more interactive features, for instance, you can insert notes that will be displayed like on a presentation slide. Pupils will need to click on it to acknowledge that they’ve seen it: a good trick to hold their attention!
Lessons can be broken into chapters. Pupils can click on a chapter, and the video starts playing from where the chapter begins automatically.
Every dadan video is stored in your online account in a secure cloud. Every video has its own page where you can upload any files, and add links to external resources.
You can schedule videos to go live and produce them in bulks when you have time and inspiration.
A Video Can Be a Two-Way Communication
We all know that school kids need just a bit of supervision and control to move forward.
With dadan, you can place interactive quizzes and open-ended questions right into your video lecture. Pupils will need to answer them to continue watching. In this way, you can ensure that they not only watched your videos but also comprehended and memorized the information.
When all your pupils have a dadan account, you can check exactly who watched the video and who did not.
Moreover, dadan is so simple that even kids can use it. Your pupils can record their own videos to ask you questions or share any other feedback.
Conclusion
Online learning may be a challenge for school teachers and their pupils. But the right technology helps to make it efficient and offers experiential modalities for achieving a better outcome.
Try Dadan for free to create and manage your virtual classroom
