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How to use your smartphone for your online teaching

At this time because of the Covid-19 pandemic more teaching has moved online. Consider your smartphone as one of the devices you could use for your online teaching. You can send lectures or materials by audio and video. This post will focus on sending audio.

Sending audio

I find that participants in a course like to receive audio feedback on their performance of an assignment. Here is one way of recording and sending an audio file to your online class. This audio can be a lecture, an explanation, a review or feedback on performance, a story that you read or even instructions for participants to follow. You want to record it so it will be available for students whenever they wish to refer to it.

First you need to install a voice recorder app on your phone. Go to the app store on your phone and in the search, type “voice recorder”. Several apps will show up. I use Easy Voice Recorder. It is simple to use and it is free.  Here is how to make a recording with it. After you have installed the app, open it. You will see the app is ready to record.

Click on the red button with the microphone at the bottom of the screen and you can begin recording. It would be best to write the script of what you want to say before you begin recording. Speak clearly and in a natural tone. The internal microphone of your smartphone will pick up the sound. When you begin recording the screen will show that.

The app has a timer at the bottom of the screen so you can see how much time your recording is taking. You can pause the recording by pressing the red record button. Below the timer you can see a check mark on one side of the record button and an X on the other side. If you are not satisfied with the recording click on the X at any time while recording and you will be given the opportunity to delete the recording. You can delete and start over.

On the other hand if you continue your recording until the end of your message or lecture you should click on the check mark to show that you are done. At this point the app will show that it is ready to start a new recording. As you are not ready for a new recording click on “Listen” to hear your recording. Click on the blue play button at the bottom of the screen, to listen to your recording. You can also fast forward or rewind to listen to particular sections of the audio. You can also see the duration of your audio and the data size of the audio.

Click on the three vertical dots on the right of the recording and you will see several actions you can take. You can delete the recording if you are not satisfied and redo it. If you want to keep it choose “Rename “ to give it the name you prefer. You will want to share the recording with your course participants. The easiest way is to share by Google Drive. After renaming your audio touch the three dots again and choose “Share with Drive”. A window will pop up showing the name of the recording. Choose Save.

The recording will be uploaded to your Google Drive. Your phone will notify you when the upload is completed. The time it takes will depend on the length of your audio. From your Google Drive you can share the recording with your online course participants directly or you can email them a link to the recording in your Google Drive.

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Covid-19: Google Forms – a great resource for online teaching during coronavirus

Covid-19 has caused so many schools and universities to offer more online classes that teachers need to find resources that will help them with the time and effort required for online teaching. Google Forms is a free resource well known for its use in surveys, but it’s also a very useful tool if you teach online classes.

Quizzes and tests

You can use Google Forms to create quizzes and tests. It is especially useful if you want to create a multiple choice test. I always wanted a way to create a multiple choice test that would let me give the correct answer and explain to the student why that answer is correct. Google Forms allows you to do that. You can also use Google Forms to set tests requiring short answers and for quizzes in which the student can fill in answers in blank spaces.

You can create a test on Google Forms by choosing the Blank Quiz template under the Education section, or you could click on Settings and choose Quizzes.

If you choose to create a multiple choice quiz you type in your question and also type in the options which are possible answers to the question. Click on “Answer key” and that will let you identify which option is the answer to the question.

Sample of question and options on Google forms quiz

Self- grading and feedback

With Google Forms you can choose settings that allow you to let students know if their answer is correct or not. When you include the answer key students can then grade their own tests or if you wish you can let them do peer grading. When you choose to include feedback then the student can see the explanation for the correct answer. If a student chooses a wrong option then he can see why he is wrong. These features in Google Forms help both students and teachers.

In Google Forms, Settings for quizzes is the place where you will choose the features that allow you to show the correct answer and to provide feedback to explain the answer. Click on the Settings icon then choose Quizzes. Turn on the button for Make this a quiz.

When you make the form a quiz you have the feature that tells the students how many points or marks you are giving for a correct answer. You can change the points according to the question as you find appropriate. The same button allows the student to grade her own work. If you want students to see which of their answers were incorrect check the box for Missed questions. You can let students see which answer was correct by ticking the box for Correct answers.

Some other helpful features in Google Forms allow you to grade manually. This you can use if you are not giving a multiple choice quiz and instead you are asking students to give answers in short sentences or short paragraphs. You can also use manual review if you do not want students telling the correct answers to other students who are waiting to submit their quiz.

Evaluate your teaching

Google Forms has a feature that will give you instant feedback and a summary of how ech student performed. It gives you the statistics to show how the students performed for each question. This lets you see if all the students answered Question 1 correctly or if more than half the students missed that answer. This tells you what areas of the quiz the students found difficult. If a significant number of students were missing the answers to questions on a particular topic then you can use that feedback to evaluate your success in teaching that topic. According to the statistics you can make a decision to re-teach the topic or teach it differently. The information collected by Google Forms helps you assess your own teaching.

Google Forms will also allow you to focus on the performance of individual students. You can see if Student B answered all the spelling questions correctly but missed the answers to most of the questions on subject and verb agreement. That helps you to identify the problem areas of individual students and take action to help such students improve.

If you had to summarise manually these statistics that Google Form provides, you would find it very time-consuming and you may not note or record performances in such detail especially if you have large classes.

When you are teaching classes online you may not have the opportunity to read student’s body language and other cues that would tell you whether or not they are understanding what you are teaching. This feedback and summary in Google Forms is very helpful if you teach courses online.

Easy to distribute and submit.

When you are ready to send out the quiz, click send and the easiest method is to send by email to each student. You can also copy the link that is given when you choose ‘link’ and post it on your website.