I wanted to offer some of my favorite distance learning tools (including tutorials). These are simple enough to use and effective enough for any classroom.
Screencastify
With this screen recording program (best used as an extension with Chrome web browser), you can record lessons or instruction to send to your students. You can record your screen with yourself as well! This has streamlined instructions for at home packets or digital learning. It connects directly with Google Classroom if you have that.
Phonics blending slides can be found here.
Edpuzzle
Want to send videos to your students, but don’t want them to just sit and watch them all day? This tool is excellent for making YouTube videos interactive. In this tutorial, I show how I add questions to a YouTube video to get more interaction and reflection. If you are filming read alouds or lessons, this tool would help you put purposeful “stop and reflect” points throughout your video.
Used Screencastify to record this video.
Online Voice Recorder
If you’re sending out anything in Google Classroom, you may want to embed some audio into it for directions or read alouds. This simple website online-voice-recorder.com makes its really simple to record and then embed into your Google Slides. Here’s an example of how I have used it and how to do it.
Bonus: Google Classroom
I’d hate to reinvent the wheel here, so I’ll send you over to my friend Aris from Sailing into Second for a wonderful Google Classroom tutorial. Google Classroom is one of the best distance learning tools. It is a platform to host your students’ digital assignments.
Angela says
Hi Jen! Your “Screencastify Tutorial for Distance Learning” video in the “3 Simple Distance Learning Tools” blog post (03/26/2020) is scrambled a couple of minutes into the video, and then it skips and loses audio for a little bit. I don’t know if anyone else has had trouble watching this video? I have tried watching it on a couple of different devices, and the same thing happens.
Jen says
Oh gosh you’re right, going to fix that, thanks for letting me know!
Angela Andrews says
You’re welcome! I’ll check back in a couple of days to watcg the whole video, because I plan on using Screencastify for the remote part of our hybrid model once we return to school next month. I’m a visual learner, so this tutorial was perfect for me! Hope you have a safe, productive school year!