Every Friday my mentor teacher, Mrs. Collins, would sit down with me to plan the next week before leaving to enjoy the weekend.  She told me “don’t ever leave your classroom for the weekend without planning your next week”.   This was the single most important skill she taught me during my student teaching; she told me it would increase my efficacy as an educator and reduce my stress during the weekend.  This ritual did help me be prepared as an educator, but it also helped me enjoy my time when I was away from my classroom.

Today, there is no physical classroom.  Home is the constant.  The workday is ubiquitous and seeps into every nook and cranny of my day.  I don’t get to plan my week and leave it at work and I’m struggling to find separation and definition to my routine.  In addition, my needs have changed and so have the needs of the students and teachers I serve.

Weekly planning is different with stay-at-home orders.  It means thinking beyond work needs and exploring personal and relational needs as well.  Here is how I’m keeping myself structured.

 

#1 Friday Reflection and Weekly Planning

What is most important is different now.  Take some time to reflect on your needs and your students needs.  What has been missing in your daily routine since stay-at-home orders have been issued?  What has been missing in your student’s routine?  Can you find a way to meet those needs in your current environment?  Have classroom and personal priorities shifted?  Take a moment to reflect on your current situation.  Get on the balcony.

Ask yourself two questions and write the answers down

• What are the most important things I will do for my students this week?
• What are the most important things I do for myself this week?

(The answers to this question may be very different than they were pre-quarantine)

#1.1 If these items are not on your list, consider them.

• Defined time to respond to emails
• Check-ins with students (give students the opportunity to express themselves and their feelings at least once a week)
• Time to connect with your colleagues (think digital happy hour)
• Time to connect with your support network – professional & personal
• Daily Mindfulness practice: meditation, yoga, expressing gratitude, journal writing, reading.
• Daily Exercise

#2 Use Outlook to Define Your Time

Every Friday, see if you can schedule those most important items week in your Outlook Calendar.  Protect that time. Get time scheduled to meet with others as well, using Microsoft Teams Meetings.  These items will then be in others calendars as well.

• For items that just involve just you, create a “new appointment” and schedule it in your calendar
• For items that involve others, create a “new Meeting”, add those involved, and the click “Teams Meeting” to add a remote meeting link.

#3 Structure your Digital Environment

• Turn off all notifications when teaching or focusing on a task.  It can take nearly 30 minutes to refocus after a distraction.
• Set auto response for your email.  Use that response to manage expectations to  senders of when they can expect to receive a response from you.
• Manage your status in Teams to communicate your availability
• When accomplishing tasks, use count down timers to keep you on point

Create Hallway Moments, Lunch Moments & After School Moments

My favorite part of being an educator are the times students seek me out to chat in the hallway, at lunch, or after school.  Students love getting to know their teachers and building authentic relationships.  Students who feel connected with their school, peers, and educators are better learners in the classroom.  Effective teachers often leverage time outside of class to build those relationships: before school, after school, clubs, sports, in the hallways, lunch. With schools closed, those serendipitous moments where students connect with their educators seem almost impossible to replicate.  There is no hallway or lunchroom.  There is no finding a teacher “after school”.  Here are some ways to replicate those moments.

 

Let students know you miss them

Since serendipity is difficult to replicate, take some time to let students know that you are feeling disconnected and that you miss seeing them outside of class.  Its likely they also miss a lot of the casual encounters with adults as well.   Let them know that you are going to make yourself available during certain times and where in Microsoft Teams they can find you.  Here are some ways

Use “meet now” to make yourself available

Find a channel that your students are a part of and begin a “Meet Now” meeting with your name as the title.  You can do this in your class team … or if your school has an all school team, work with your administrators to create a channel that acts like a hallway where faculty and students can hang out and meet; your IT can set permissions so that only adults can start meetings. Just hang-out and wait for students to join.  Even if no students join you at first, they will see that you are available to them.  Be as consistent as possible.

Use Bookings to let student schedule one-on-ones

For more scheduled and formal one-on-ones use Microsoft Bookings. Microsoft Bookings is a program that connects with your calendar and allows others to make appointments with you during times you are available.   Bookings can create Microsoft Teams Meeting scheduled with the student.

Do individual check-ins with calls

Microsoft Teams gives you the ability to call students privately to chat.  Be proactive and check in with students.  You can do this even if your are running a class – like calling a student out of class for a private one-on-one.  If students are in another session they can still answer a private call and have a quick one-on-one.

Provide opportunities for students to interact

Continue your school’s SEL programs using Teams

In this remote learning environment, students need adults to create safe, virtual ways for them to interact with their peers, meet new friends, and remain connected with their school.  If you’re a school leader and your school has a House System, Advisory, or Homeroom, don’t cancel those; use these groups as ways to bring students together and tend to their social-emotional needs. Schedule times for these supports and make a Team for homerooms, mentor groups, or advisories.   Intentionally scheduling virtual meetings for these groups with the purpose of students mingling is an SEL support you can offer your students.

Throw a class party in Teams

Find something to celebrate or just have a class party!  You can celebrate a birthday or your seniors or anything!  Create a party channel open up a meeting space for students, create a flipgrid for students to celebrate a student, tell their stories, respond to a fun question, or anything. Show a movie through sharing system audio. Do something fun. Together.

Bringing it all together

Relationships are the foundation of strong communities.  Social distancing certainly creates some challenges for building those relationships that are the foundation of healthy school communities.  Microsoft Teams provides many avenues to overcome these challenges in distance learning and connect with your community.  There are no more hallways or meeting in the teacher’s classroom after school, but if school leaders and educators are intentional, they can provide opportunities to connect, celebrate, and enjoy time with others.

 

 

 

 

Use technology for fast-paced learning

There is so much out of an educator’s control during remote learning sessions, especially the level of distraction permitted into the learner’s environment.  Remote learning works best when the learning is fast-paced.  Fast-paced learning limits downtime, reducing the the amount of time students can distract themselves.  Use the power of technology to keep synchronous time fast paced and learning diverse.  Diversify student activities and learning assessment with available technology

• Use Microsoft Forms to rapidly collect data
• Use Flipgrid to get responses to prompts or engage discussions
• Use OneNote for worksheets, labs, concept maps
• Use Office lens to collect paper and pen or tangible assessments
• Use Assignments to create multiple submissions per session in a singular assignment
• Use Microsoft Sway to create newsletters, student portfolios, and websites
• Use Teams Channels and Meet Now sessions to get students to discuss topics or collaborate on projects

Communicate structured timelines for each session

Effective remote learning demands clear and structured timelines.  In brick and mortar class giving students until midnight or beginning of next class to turn in assessments was common; however, in remote learning this strategy leaves students alone to organize and manage their time.  Organize you synchronous class time to the minute and collect evidence of engagement at set intervals.

• Break your project down to steps and create minute by minute deadlines
• When possible collect a submission for each learning task at a set time
• Use an online timer to keep students attention on timelines
• Keep downtime to a minimum

Include “screen down” activities

Screen time can be exhausting.  Find ways to incorporate screen down activities into your course work. Students can easily convert these items into digital assets for submission using Office Lens or digital cameras.

• Concept Mapping
• Collages
• Written Math
• Popsicle Stick Activities
• Baking/Cooking projects
• Video creation

Bringing it all together

Keeping students engaged remotely is a challenge due to the uncontrolled physical learning environment.  Teachers can mitigate this by creating highly structured remote learning sessions.  Students thrive when they have clear expectations, deadlines, and diverse learning activities.

In schools, community is everything!  With so many states issuing stay at home orders and cancelling schools, school leaders are trying to figure out how to continue with school programming and community events remotely.  Microsoft Teams Live Events may be the answer! Here are some events Teams Live Events could host for your community.

Professional Development & Conferences

Microsoft Teams Live events are a perfect solution for bringing experts to your community to deliver quality professional development sessions.  Microsoft Teams live events will record each session, track attendee engagement, and produce an easy to access link for all attendees to join.  During the session attendees can ask questions and engage the producers and presenters of the event through a live Q & A dialogue.

Live Announcements & Student Broadcasts

You can have up to 10 people collaborate on a live event!  What a great way to get students to continue to connect with the community and produce live announcements or broadcasts!  This can be like a virtual PA system for your institution or an internal broadcasting network.  What a great way to stay connected!

Daily Workouts or Wellness Seminars

Don’t cancel that Wellness Week or Daily Workout!  Use live events to keep your community’s mind an body sound.  Host a daily work out for all to attend or bring together programming for wellness week.

Family Information Nights

With all of these changes, it is important to continue to communicate with your school community.  Use Teams Live Events to host your college information nights, incoming student orientations, emergency planning processes, principal announcement, etc.

Guest Speakers & All School Assemblies

Bring in guest speakers for the community.  Since Teams Live events can host up to 10,000 viewers, it is a great platform to continue to bring in guest speakers, honor student achievements, and continue to connect at a community.

How a Teams Live Event Works

From the    calendar icon  in Microsoft Teams, choose “Live Event” from the new meeting button.

Give your event a name, date and time, and invite your presenters and producers.  If they are outside users, you will have to invite them as guests.  Click “next”:

Decide on your audience.  Is it for a group or class, for your organization, or for the public to view and engage in.  If you make recording available to attendees, attendees can view the event even after it is over.

Share the attendee link with your audience.  Once you schedule your event, you can click on the event in your calendar to get the attendee link.  Copy that to your clipboard to share with your audience.

As producer, join a few minutes before the event to get prepared with your presenters to produce and begin the event.

Produce and begin the event.  Queue up the content and presenter screens you want to share with your audience.  When ready, click “send live” and “start”.  This will begin the live event.  Don’t hit “stop” until the live event is over.  Producers can Queue up content and presneter screen and hit “send live” when it is time to send to the live feed.

 

 

After the event, the producer can download engagement files and recordings of the event from the Live Event calendar in the event resources.

 

Bringing it all together

Don’t let social distancing cancel important community events and professional development.  Use Microsoft Teams Live Events to bring your community together, offer professional development, engage the student body, and keep your school community healthy!

An effective student support program is collaborative; it involves staff at all levels – school counselors, special educators, teachers, students, families, administrators, and other school staff.  In  emergency remote learning environments it is important that students, teachers, and families receive coordinated support from the school’s administration and student services.  Schools can use technology such as Microsoft Teams to continue to promote and enhance student academics, professional development, and social/emotional supports.

Invite Support Staff to Team Meetings

One way is providing real-time support in synchronous remote class sessions. Teachers can invite support staff into their classes on Microsoft Teams.  Inviting staff into a channel meeting is easy.   Add support staff to a scheduled meeting by adding them as an attendee.

Or during a meeting you can invite support staff real-time by inviting them into the meeting. You can find this at the top of the participant dialogue in the meeting.

Just type the individual’s name and it will call their Teams account.  When they answer they will be in your class.

What can your support team do? Here are some ideas.

• Pin student screens and observe them in the meeting
• Have private chat to coach and provide support to individual students
• They can even call and have quick private conversations with students for support or interventions
• Administrators can conduct class observations, understand provide recommendations for improvement.
• Dean of Students can be quickly called for any discipline issues

Develop proactive student outreach

It’s often students who need the most support that aren’t receiving it.   This can be even more true during remote learning.  Microsoft Teams offers many approaches for support staff to reach out.

Schedule a Teams meeting with parent/guardians, students, teachers, administrators.

If you can email them, you can invite them to a teams meeting.  Find the Teams Meeting icon in your Outlook Calendar, once you click it the Teams Meeting link will be added to the calendar invite.  Even if the parent does not have a computer, there is a dial-in option to the meetings.

Proactively call students using Microsoft Teams

Support staff can make “the first move” by calling students and being proactive.  Support staff can actively reach out to students and provide real-time support.  They can reach students through the application on a computer or a cellphone.

Provide Technical Support

School Technology support teams can use Microsoft Teams to gain remote control of student devices during a Teams meeting.  Technology staff can ask students to share their screen during a meeting.  Once shared, technology staff can click the “request control” button.  Students will get a prompt to allow the staff member to control their computer and address the issues they are experiencing.

Bringing it all together

Microsoft Teams is a platform that can help schools serve students and faculty well, even in a remote environment.  So invite administrators to your class, ask counselors, para-educators, and interventionists to join the remote session!  Administrators, continue to provide support and feedback through remote classroom observations.  Deans – you can still address behavior problems in the remote classroom.  Special educators – hold your interventions and connect with your students.  Microsoft Teams connects the whole school to the child – use the tools!

 

 

 

 

 

Great teachers know how to set a tone and mood for their classroom. They do this a bunch of different ways – organizing and decorating their classroom, setting up student desks in particular configurations, greeting the students at the door, class routines, letting students see how excited they are to work with them.

In remote learning, many of the ways teachers set the tone are unavailable. So I wanted to share some thoughts on how teachers can set the tone and mood for their class.

 Use your camera!

If you are the type of teacher that loved having agendas on the board or changing the physical mood of your classroom – use your physical background! Hang your posters, get a whiteboard, change it to fit the mood of each class. This will give students things to look at while you teach, something fun to look forward to, and also act as physical resources you can use during each session. It’s OK to get out of your chair, move around, and use your physical space to teach remotely.

Use some icebreakers!

Remote sessions can feel distant and cold – as if everyone on the call is meeting for the first time and just learning what their role and place is socially. Students may not know what’s expected of them and may feel self-conscious and unwilling to join in. Icebreakers may help in getting students to buy-in to the learning and be more productive. Ask students to say their name and answer a quick and fun question or reveal a little known fact about themselves.

Set up your digital learning space

Organize your digital learning space like it is your classroom. Take the time to be thoughtful of how students will navigate resources and transition activities. If you are doing group work, create dedicated group space for students to work in such as private channels in Microsoft Teams. Learn the nuances of the digital space and take time to prepare it for the learning task at hand. Just as students silently appreciate and learn better in organized and prepared classrooms, they will learn better in digital spaces that are thoughtfully prepared.

Check in with student emotions

The brain of your student is not just processing mechanism, but a complicated system that works better when the student feels safe and cared for. Take time checking in with your students’ emotions. It’s time well spent as it will make students feel more seen and more aware of what they are feeling.

 

Every year I organize a technology conference at O’Dea High School for local educators. This year, due to the COVID 19 epidemic, I faced a challenge that many event organizers are facing; how to move forward with an important event while maintaining social distancing. I had worked for months bringing together experts, collaborating with faculty, advertising to local schools, and working to gain approval for clock hours and didn’t want all that work to go to waste. School leaders were counting on this event as a Professional Development option for their educators and educator were counting on this event for training.

I faced a challenge that many event organizers are facing; how to move forward with an important event while maintaining social distancing.

In some respects, I was lucky. Microsoft Teams was one of the main technologies highlighted at the conference and it was also the perfect platform to use to deliver a remote conference. With effective communication and some slight adjustments, conference team was able to pivot the conference from a brick and mortar event to an on-line event in less than a week using Microsoft Teams, despite having many novices of the software presenting and attending the conference. The conference went off very smoothly and an added bonus was that we were able to record all of the sessions for attendees and those who were not able to make it.

 I was truly impressed with the ease of using Microsoft Teams to deliver an excellent Professional Development experience, and happy to say that in the three days before the conference our audience expanded from 90 local educators to 250 worldwide educators – adding new perspectives and energy to the conference.

I wanted to share my learning of this process as I have had many requests to help others move their PD events on-line. This article lays out the process step by step and offers some resources to help you on your way.

Advertise and Register Attendees

I used Adobe Spark for the Conference Web Page and Jotform for the form collection. I have a Gold Subscription with JotForm that permits me to collect fees through a payment integration. For those in Office 365 who don’t need to collect fees, you can easily get registration using Microsoft Sway as your website and Microsoft Forms for collecting registration data. Be sure to collect an email from every participant as you will need it to add them to your Team.

Prepare a Microsoft Team for the conference

1. Create a Microsoft Team
2. Apply as open permissions as possible to allow all guests and members to contribute, but limiting their ability to delete or add channels.
3. Create channels for Keynotes and Sessions and if you want them in order use numbers as the first thing in the channel name, Microsoft Teams orders channels Alpha Numerically.
4. Use the general channel for announcements and conference materials. It will always be at the top.
5. Add all presenters to the Team as owners
6. Add internal attendees. You can add attendees in bulk using internal distribution groups.
7. Add external attendees using their email addresses. This process must be done one by one; however I was able to add over 200 attendees rather quickly by cutting and pasting from an excel file.

Prepare Keynote

The Keynote is best run through a Microsoft Teams Live Event. You will need a producer and at least one presenter. Attendees can interact through a Q & A chat bar, but this method suits a more “Stand and Deliver” form of presentation and allows far more attendees to view than a regular Teams Meeting. Check out Mark Sparvell’s Keynote for O’Dea’s Conference.

Prepare Sessions

For sessions you will want to schedule “Meet Now” meetings in the session channels set up in Teams. When scheduling these sessions, attendees added to the team will receive a calendar invite to the session with a link. These sessions allow more interaction between attendees. A good example of this interaction is seen in Mike Tholfsen’s session from the conference.

During the Event

1. Organizer can send reminders to entire group through Microsoft Teams or Email. Microsoft Teams makes a group email for the Team.
2. Organizers can start recordings for all sessions, which will automatically be uploaded to Microsoft Stream.
3. Create a few “meet now” unsessions for attendees to be social, engage in side conversations, and network.

After the event

1. Use an on-line form to collect feedback. I used jotform and was able to create automatic emails that send CEUs to attendees who met the requirements after submission of feedback.
2. Download session videos from Microsoft Stream and upload to and open platform such as YouTube or Vimeo to share.
3. Continue to use the Conference Team to collaborate with attendees and build community. You could use the same Team to deliver next year’s conference or sessions.

Want to collaborate on transforming your conference to an On-Line event using Microsoft Teams? Contact me through LinkedIn