This fall, my county will start school completely virtual. So for me, a first year teacher, this means I’ve spent the past 10 days living in different Google Meet. This was completely new to me after just graduating from a school that was fully obsessed with Zoom. My experience so far with Meet has been fantastic. It’s user friendly and pretty approachable. However, it's one thing to sit in on a staff meeting but to run a full class session with 20+ students is a whole other challenge. So to help make classes more manageable I’ve been building a list of Meet essentials. The following are tools for classroom management, engagement, and feedback. I’ve also attached a downloadable copy of my Online Expectations below. Happy virtual teaching!
(Click each title to access the extension link)
Grid view is an essential extension for me. This allows you to see all of your students in the Meet instead of a select few. For small groups, every face is usually seen when the layout is set to “tiled”. However, with my typically class size I would lose sight of a good portion of my students without this. There are currently multiple versions of this extension, make sure to add the “Fix” version linked above for the best option.
Tab Resize is my go-to for presenting in a Meet. I’ve found this to be the easiest way to split my screen so that I can present and keep an eye on my class or whoever I'm meeting with. Alternatively, I have also used an additional monitor instead of splitting my screen. With two monitors I join the Meet on both and use one to present and one to observe. This also makes it easy to monitor the chat and stay on top of conversations.
This extension automatically takes attendance for your Meets! It copies student names and creates a Google Sheet document with the attendance. This makes it easy to track who is present at your meetings and allows you to focus on greeting students as they join instead of logging names.
Nod is a quick nonverbally check-in/feedback tool. Students can quickly share emojis to respond/react. Students can send a quick thumbs-up or nod. However, the most exciting part for me is that students can raise their hands! This is an awesome way to navigate the complicated web of large group, online discussions. This also makes it easy to take a quick poll or get student opinions.
This extension is handy when it comes to the pacing of a lesson. It makes it easy to keep track of how much time is left and how much time you’ve spent on each activity. I think this will be particularly helpful in the first few weeks as we begin to adjust to virtual classes.
Online Expectations
To save your own expectations visual right click the image and "Copy" or "Save as"
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