Make Your Virtual Classroom Sessions Engaging With These 7 Insider Tips

“If you continue training the same way you’ve always trained, don’t expect to get better results.” — Jim Crapko

Generally, in every classroom you will see there are students who always raise their hands to participate, and those who are tentative to engage. Additionally, connecting via webcam isn’t always easy and it takes a lot of creativity to keep students’ brains encouraged! Quite obviously, teaching online/virtually needs certain different skillsets completely compared to those used to teach in-person!

The online learning industry is growing by 15% annually.

We all know that online learning is more flexible, more comprehensive, and more effective in many ways. But, studying from a screen made several students feel secluded, left behind, unmotivated, and detached from the classroom setting. This has led numerous teachers to search for how to make online learning more engaging for learners.

Helpful Guidelines for a More Engaging Virtual/Online Classroom Experience

The following proven guidelines help you build an engaging online learning experience ---

• Take the Advantages of Technology

First of all, ensure that you know how to use various virtual tools. Try to take time to explain them to students, so they feel confident with using them as well. Whether you use whiteboards, pointers, virtual games, text editors, drawing tools, file editors, breakout rooms, or screen-sharing tools, try to add variety to your lessons and keep learners on their toes.

• Make It Interactive

Planning interactive classroom activities that keep your students actively clicking, typing or talking throughout the lesson is the way to go. You can easily do this by asking lots of questions, including games as well as making sure learners have to physically do things like use drawing tools or type in the dialogue boxes, etc.

• Break Down the Lesson

While teaching online, you might see you need to break up your online lessons in a different way than you would with face-to-face ones. Well, it’s a smart idea to keep a fast leap and break down information into small, simply digestible portions. You will see there are plenty of free resources out there to get you started.

• Flip Your Classroom

Flip your classroom to kindle deeper discussion. Research shows a blend of asynchronous and synchronous teaching worked well to excite student discussion during remote learning. Flipping classroom will let you spend less class time in direct instruction.

• Set Goals

Try to set goals and remind them of their development. Introduce short-term goals into your online classroom. Try to give positive feedback, badges, points, playing games or doing other fun learning activities your learners would like. It will also aid make a pleasant working environment where all students will feel acknowledged and safe.

• Plan Your Sessions

Certainly, this is nothing new to teachers. Pre-planning avoids disruptions in the flow of your lesson. Planning lets you share plans ahead of time and have the learners formulate for the upcoming lesson. Planning is also essential to empower numerous other strategies as well.

• Make Separate Learning Plans

Try to make the student feel seen. Individual learning strategies show the learners that your course is custom-made for them. It makes them feel reinforced, it gives them their money’s worth, and, most significantly, it rises their success rate.

Takeaways

Streamline communication to boost enthusiasm. Masters of Arts in Education with Teaching Technology program enables teaching professionals to teach online/virtually. Be patient with your students. It’s crucial to give them a break now and then and be patient with them.