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Building Community in a Flex-Hybrid Course – Series Overview

There are many definitions of “community”, but most encompass notions of trust, belonging, “feeling at home”, connectedness, interactivity, shared expectations, and shared conversations.

One useful way of thinking about community is to break it into three components:

  • Community as physical space
  • Community as a “communication process”
  • Community as shared values and interests

In common usage we often use the word “community” to refer to physical spaces – even if people in those spaces don’t know one another well, such as in a “bedroom community”. Because of this, it can be easy to feel that creating a classroom community in a virtual space is difficult or even impossible. 

The good news is that Gen Z already knows that this isn’t true! For our students, some online communities have become more vibrant and engaging than many communities that exist “IRL”. Research on class communities in online courses backs this up (1).

In fact, all of the aspects of community listed above can be (even more) successfully created in a flex-hybrid course with a little creativity – and doing so only rarely requires more work than for fully in-person classes. (Really!)

Below we’ve outlined some ideas for each of the aspects of community, and there are plenty of links to take you to “deeper dives” into the topics that interest you the most.

Near the end of this overview, you’ll also find some links to posts about some specific techniques for building community before, during, and after synchronous class sessions.

Space

Your flex-hybrid course does take place in a “space” – it’s just a virtual space instead of (or in addition to) a physical one. With a little effort, you can make that virtual space (Canvas, Google Meet, etc.) as comfortable and conducive to learning as your physical classroom.

Here are some basic principles for making your virtual classroom space comfortable and conducive to learning:

  • Make it safe and inclusive.
  • Make it welcoming – that it’s got good “curb appeal”. 
  • Design the space to account for your students’ physical responses to working on a computer.
  • The less your students have to think, the better (yes, we know this seems paradoxical, but it isn’t!)

Read more about how to make your virtual course “space” welcoming and comfortable.

Shared Communication Processes

When designing a flex-hybrid course, you should make sure that everyone understands what communication channels you will use and how, and how often, you will use them.

However, online communication can easily end up feeling like a “firehose” of information. Thus, it’s important to streamline communication by limiting the channels of communication you use with your students. Also, using the Canvas Template and the Canvas “due date” feature is extremely important to keep things simple.

Keeping things simple will help students feel comfortable – and make them more likely to stay engaged with your course.

In other words, “less is more”! Learn more about how to streamline and simplify communication in your flex-hybrid course.

Shared Values and Interests

Agreeing upon and articulating shared values and interests is essential in all class communities.

The fundamental challenges of negotiating classroom values so are the same in both in-person and virtual learning spaces: 

  • Balancing freedom and openness with inclusivity and safety.
  • Making sure everyone is able to participate in class discussions and projects – and feels comfortable doing so.

Fortunately, flex-hybrid classes offer many options for navigating these challenges – and in some cases, may offer tools that make it easier to do so. Here is a description of some of these tools and how you can use them.

Building Community Before, During, and After Synchronous Class Sessions

These posts offer specific techniques for using your synchronous class meetings to create connections with, and among, your students.

How Do I Choose Which Tools to Use?

As you will see as you read the posts in this series, the real question when it comes to creating community in a flex-hybrid course is not whether it’s possible, but how to choose from all the multiplicity of tools available for doing so: Canvas, Google Meet, Zoom, chat, Docs, Jamboard, and more.

Three questions can help you choose the tools that are right for you:

  • What’s your desired outcome? A good discussion? collaboration among students?  reflection? sharing? getting help? Then, pick the tool that is most appropriate for your goals. This is known as “backwards design” – you start with the end in mind.
  • Is the tool easily accessible to your students, in terms of cost, learning curve, and technical requirements (bandwidth, hardware)?
  • Are you personally comfortable using the tool – or learning how to use it?

Remember that the Center for Learning and Teaching is always available to help you find a tool for your needs and to help you get up to speed with it!

(1) https://www.ideaedu.org/idea-notes-on-instruction/formed-teams-or-discussion-groups-to-facilitate-learning/; see also Garrison, D.R., & Vaughan, N.D. (2008). Blended learning in higher education: Framework, principles, and guidelines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(2)  See https://library.gwu.edu/utlc/teaching/building-community-and-interaction-online; see also https://clt.champlain.edu/fall-2020/course-design-principles/.

Zoom Chat – What You Can Do With It and How

“Fall 2010 hackNY Student Hackathon” by hackNY is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Chat is an often unfairly maligned feature in Zoom and Meet. Many instructors worry that they will lose control of the class discussion if they allow students to use the chat during an audio/video/in-person class discussion. 

However, chat should definitely not be dismissed as a “distraction”. 

First of all, chat is a wonderful tool to promote inclusion. It can provide a comfortable participation option for students who would otherwise feel reluctant to join the audio/visual/in-person conversation (hello to all my fellow introverts out there). It can also facilitate participation by students who are dealing with technological constraints or who are participating remotely from a place with a lot of background noise.

Even better, Zoom chat can be leveraged as a way to enhance everyone’s participation. 

Below you’ll find some effective techniques for using chat and instructions for how to adjust the settings in Zoom to make “chat” best serve your individual pedagogical aims. (Many of these also apply to the more basic chat feature in Google Meet.)

This post covers three basic topics relating to chat: 

  • Ways to Use Chat as a “Side Channel” or “Back Channel”
  • Ways to Use Chat to Encourage, Ensure, and Grade Participation
  • Ways to Use Chat to Facilitate Classroom Logistics

Ways to Use Chat as a “Side Channel” or “Back Channel”

There are all sorts of ways to use chat during a lecture or discussion class. Here are a few.

  • Q&A. While you’re presenting information to the class, or while student groups are presenting their work, people can post questions to the chat as they think of them for a really good Q&A at the end. 
  • Ask comprehension questions. You can ask a comprehension question to make sure students understand the class material and tell them to post their answers in the chat (you can also do this via polls and clicker questions but often chat is much easier and you can do it spontaneously without any advance setup).
  • Take a poll or a vote. You can take a quick vote on something via the chat (you can do “nays only” to streamline things).
  • Defuse a tense situation. If you are having a difficult conversation and things get heated, you can ask everyone to take a few deep breaths then offer a prompt that will take students out of their limbic systems and back into their cerebral cortices. Ask them to post their answer to the chat. (While they’re writing, you get to collect your wits.) From here, you can have students pair up to discuss what’s in the chat, respond thoughtfully to one other person’s comment, see if they can identify trends or basic lines of argument – whatever you think will make the discussion thoughtful and productive again.

Don’t forget – you don’t have to manage the chat on your own! In fact, it’s usually not a good idea because it’s hard to keep your train of thought going while trying to manage both the audio/visual/in-person conversation and the chat. It’s easy to designate a student to manage the chat for you and it’s empowering to the students to have a role in classroom management.

One of the things that’s great about using chat in these ways is that it levels the playing field between students who are in-person and remote and it can be a great work-around when the tech isn’t cooperating – everyone has equal access to the chat and everyone can “hear” what everyone else is saying in the chat. People don’t have to try to shout through their masks!

To utilize these techniques effectively, you’ll want to adjust the chat settings so that students can only chat with the people you want them to chat with. Here’s how:

There are four different settings for Zoom chat. If you’re the host of a meeting, you can allow participants to chat with 

  • “No one” (i.e. only you can post things in the chat – no one else can respond)
  • “Host only” (i.e. students can write private messages to you)
  • “Everyone publicly” (i.e. you and the students can all send messages to everyone on the call) “Everyone publicly and privately” (i.e. you and your students can send a message to everyone or to any one person at any time)

During a Zoom session, you can adjust these settings by opening up the chat window and then, next to the word “file” on the lower right, clicking the icon with the three dots to open up a menu with the four options listed above. Choose the option that you think will best facilitate the kind of class discussion you want to have. 

You can change this setting at any time during a session to support different types of classroom discussion activities as you move through your material for the day.

If you want to adjust these chat settings more globally (i.e. for all the meetings you host), you can change them in the “Settings” in your Zoom account. Of course, you can still change these settings at any time – it’s just a few more steps.

  • Open up your Zoom account in a browser window. 
  • From the left navigation menu, choose “Settings”. 
  • Click the “Meeting” tab above the menu of security options.
  • Choose “In Meeting (Basic)”.
  • As you wish, adjust the sliders to on (blue) or off (gray) allowing participants to send everyone a message in the chat and/or to participate in a private chat. (For both of these settings, the default is “on”.) 
  • Note that if you turn off a chat option here, it will no longer be available to you in the chat menu during a Zoom session – you will have to go back into your account settings and change it to restore that option for your sessions.

Note: depending on the content of your course, you might want to prevent students from saving class chats. Scroll down to learn how to do that.

Ways to Use Chat to Encourage, Ensure, and Grade Participation

We’ve all had them – I call them “crickets classes”. And even the best class section sometimes has an off day. Chat can help wake things up. Here are some techniques for doing that:

  • Warm up a class ahead of time. You can get your class going even before it officially starts by posting a question to the chat during a “soft start” (i.e. that period between when you open the Zoom and the official start time of the class meeting) and repeating it every so often in the chat as people join the Zoom. Encourage people to post either to the class as a whole or to one another, privately. (It doesn’t matter if they stay “on task” for this during the soft start – you’re just giving them a pretext to start connecting with each other and it totally doesn’t matter what they’re connecting about. The point is to get them to bring some good energy into the class instead of having the pre-class time be full of awkward silence.)
  • Shake things up during class. You can liven up a sleepy class by encouraging everyone to post something to the chat. It can be something related to the class material or something completely random (“What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?” or “Which celebrity should just delete their social media accounts because they’re so lame?”) just to shake things up.
  • See who’s really there. You can periodically check to see if students have “ghosted” you (i.e. logged in, turned off their camera and audio, and then stopped paying attention) by posting questions to the chat that students are required to answer immediately.
  • Track participation. If your grading system incentivizes participation, chat can be really helpful in ensuring that your evaluation of students’ participation is objective. You can keep track of who’s participating in the chat much more easily than you can accurately keep track of participation in a fully in-person discussion. Simply save the chat when your class is finished (see below) and record in your gradebook who joined in the chat and how often. It’s a good idea to let students know ahead of time – ideally in your syllabus – that you will be doing this.

Here’s how you can save a Zoom chat:

During a Zoom session, you can save the chat by opening up the chat window and then, next to the word “file” on the lower right, clicking the icon with the three dots. When the menu opens, choose “Save chat”.

This will save your chat to your local computer. The default save location is your Documents folder/Zoom/Folder with meeting name, date, and time.

If you want to save the chat for every Zoom session you have with your students without having to think about it, you can set it to save automatically. Here’s how:

  • Open up your Zoom account in a browser window. 
  • From the left navigation menu, choose “Settings”. 
  • Click the “Meeting” tab above the menu of security options.
  • Choose “In Meeting (Basic)”.
  • Adjust the little slider next to “Auto-Saving Chats” so that it’s blue (on).

Depending on the content covered during your classes, you may want to prevent your students from saving the chat. If you want to turn this feature off, you must disable it in your account settings. Here’s how:

  • Open up your Zoom account in a browser window. 
  • From the left navigation menu, choose “Settings”. 
  • Click the “Meeting” tab above the menu of security options.
  • Choose “In Meeting (Basic)”.
  • Below the “Chat” slider, check the box next to “Prevent participants from saving chat”.

Disabling students’ ability to save the chat will also disable your own ability to save it or auto-save it. It will even make it impossible for you to select, copy, and paste it manually from the chat window. However, even if you and your students are prevented from saving the chat as text, it can still be saved by taking a screenshot. 

Ways to Use Chat to Facilitate Classroom Logistics

Especially in a flex-hybrid classroom, where writing on the board can be challenging, chat can be very useful for managing logistics. Here are some ideas:

  • Post prompts for writing exercises or small-group discussions in the chat.
  • After you give verbal instructions for a class activity, post them in the chat (this is helpful because in a flex-hybrid classroom you will have a much harder time seeing those confused/quizzical looks that guide you to the students who need help.)
  • After you give instructions for an in-class activity, ask students who are having trouble to alert you via the chat so that you can answer questions.
  • Post reminders about upcoming assignments in the chat (you can do this at the beginning of class and again at the end).
  • You can (re)post reading materials and links to the chat when you’re ready to discuss them so that students don’t have to poke around on their Google Drives or in Canvas to access them. 
  • Even better, you can post links to specific parts of documents to save all that hunting and scrolling and all those “where are we again?” questions.
  • Have students share documents with each other via the chat. 

Here’s how you share a document on the chat:

  • In a Zoom session, open the chat window.
  • Click on the “File” icon on the bottom right.
  • A menu will open showing various locations where you might keep files (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, your local computer, etc.)
  • Select the appropriate location and navigate to the place where the file you want to post is stored.
  • Note that the first time you post a file, you’ll need to authorize Zoom to interact with the storage software. This takes a little while, so you’ll want to set it up before the session if possible.

You can also prevent participants from sharing files or restrict the types of files participants share in the chat. Here’s how:

  • Open up your Zoom account in a browser window. 
  • From the left navigation menu, choose “Settings”. 
  • Click the “Meeting” tab above the menu of security options.
  • Choose “In Meeting (Basic)”.
  • Scroll down to “File transfer”.
  • If you want to prevent files from being transfered in the chat, adjust the slider so that it’s gray to turn off the file transfer functionality.
  • If you want to limit the types of files that participants can transfer in the chat, check the box next to “Only allow specified file types”, then enter the file extensions that you want to allow, separated by commas.

If you want to use chat to bring students directly to specific parts of documents, here’s how:

Here’s how to link to a specific paragraph of a Google Doc:

  • Move your cursor to the beginning of the paragraph to which you want to link. 
  • Go to the Insert menu in the top navigation and select “Bookmark”. 
  • You’ll see that your cursor has turned into a little blue ribbon icon. 
  • Click the ribbon icon, then right click on the word “link” when it appears. 
  • Choose “Copy link address”. 
  • Paste this link into your Zoom chat.

Here’s how to link to a specific cell in a Google Sheet:

  • Go to the cell to which you want to link.
  • Right-click on the cell.
  • From the menu that appears, choose “Get link to this cell”.
  • You’ll see a notification that the link was copied to the clipboard.
  • Paste the link into the Zoom chat.

Here’s how to link to a specific page of a PDF file:

  • Open the file in a browser window, not in PDF editing software like Adobe.
  • Copy the link. Paste it into the chat and specify the page number to which you want the file to open by adding the following at the end of the link:

#page=[pagenumber]

  • Note that when we tested this, it worked much better in some browsers than in others. Some Chrome extensions seem to interfere with this functionality.

Ways to Use Google Slides in Flex-Hybrid Teaching

A lot of people underestimate Slides as a teaching tool. Sure, it can do slide presentations for standard lecture-type classes, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, one ed-tech blogger calls Slides the “Swiss army knife” of G-Suite – it can be repurposed to do all kinds of interesting things.

Our primary school colleagues have been doing amazing things with Google Slides for a while. There’s a lot that we can learn from them as we adapt our in-person teaching style to the new flex-hybrid world. This post features some of the best techniques we’ve discovered for using Slides, adapted to the collegiate environment. 

One great basic tip one of our primary school colleagues offered is worth mentioning right at the start of this post: You can learn a lot about using Slides and pretty much any G-Suite app by right-clicking. Just explore! 

There are a lot of techniques discussed in this post, so here are links to help you jump right to the sections you need:

Resources to Help You Do the Techniques Described Here 

The Tried-and-True, Part I: Post a Writing Prompt or Other Prep-Ahead Content

Writing on the board is a bit more challenging in a flex-hybrid classroom than it is in a fully in-person classroom. Document cameras and Jamboard (see here, here, and here for more CLT materials on Jamboard) make this easier, but you can also reduce your tech stress by prepping some content ahead of time using Slides. This doesn’t have to be fancy at all! Sometimes a single slide with plain text on a plain background is all you need.

Things you can post on a Slide:

  • A writing prompt
  • Instructions for how to carry out a class activity
  • A short written explanation of something you know you’ll cover that day
  • An icebreaker or discussion-opening question 

Single slides can be a great addition to “soft starts” of your synchronous class meetings (that is, opening up your session a few minutes ahead of the scheduled start time and encouraging students to “arrive” early for some informal chat. Learn more about “soft starts” here.)

The Tried-and-True, Part II: Use Google Slides for Lectures and Presentations

A classic thing to do with Google Slides is, of course, to use it for its stated purpose: to create a slide presentation and present it in class.

For flex-hybrid courses, you need – at a minimum – to do two additional things with your presentation:

  • Screencast and record your presentation for students who are attending class remotely. You can do this with Panopto and/or by creating a Google slides presentation with auto-advance and audio (see below to learn how to do that).  
  • Share your presentation with your students by clicking the yellow “Share” button on the top right. You can share with individual students by typing in their names and selecting whether you want them to be editors, commenters, or viewers; and you can share with your whole class by choosing “Change link to Champlain College” to open up a box that lets you change the presentation sharing from “Restricted” to “Champlain College” to “Anyone with the link”. 
  • Tip: If you’re cutting and pasting a shareable link to a Slides presentation, publish it to the web first so that when people open the link they see a preview, not the Slides interface with all the editing tools.

The Tried-and-True, Part III: Flip Your Classroom with a Self-Guided Lesson

If you’re flipping your course, the watch-ahead component does not have to be a video – a Slides presentation will often do just as well or better (and be easier to make!). 

You can enhance your students’ class prep materials using some of the “Level Up” techniques below.

Level Up Your Presentations

While the above will meet the basic requirements for a flex-hybrid course, there’s so much you can do to make your presentations more accessible and useful to the students in your flex-hybrid courses.

Design Your Presentations for Screen Reading

Many of your students will interact with your presentations primarily via a screen. Eye-tracking studies have shown that people read differently on screens and are less able to concentrate and retain what they’ve read. Fortunately, there are a number of simple techniques to improve the readability of your Slides presentations and other documents designed to be viewed on a screen.

Add Images and Audio and Video Files

Google Slides allows you to add music and audio to your presentations. This can be a great way to spice up your content. 

One great suggestion is to use historical audio or video, such as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many recordings are in the public domain. 

Here are simple written instructions for adding images, audio, and video to a Slides presentation. 

You can do this yourself – and/or you can have your students create an audio presentation! One interesting genre that you can ask your students to work in is Ted-Ed talks.

Important: Don’t forget to add captioning to your audio. You can do this automatically in Slides.

On the first day, if Slides audio is something you’re going to use a lot during the semester, you can have students practice it by creating a single slide with audio that introduces themselves to the class (or you could assign it after the first class to be presented during the second class).

You can also put your syllabus on slides and present it to your students this way, as long as you also post a PDF of it to Canvas to fulfill the College’s requirements.

You can link from a Slide straight to a specific paragraph in a Google Doc or to a specific cell on a Google Sheet. This can function like a paper in-class handout – it can point students to a particular passage or calculation you want them to analyze together. 

First, make sure that your Google Doc or Google Sheet is accessible to your students (that is, either make it public or open for all Champlain addresses, or share it with students individually if you haven’t already). 

To insert a link to a specific part of a Google Doc, create a bookmark in your Google Doc. Do this by highlighting the paragraph you want to link to. Click “Insert” and then “Bookmark”. You’ll then see a little box with two options: “link” and “remove”. Click “link” to copy the bookmark, and then insert the link into your Google Slide as you would insert any link. 

To insert a link to a specific box on a Google Sheet, highlight the cell to which you want to link, and then right-click and choose “Get link to this cell”. When you do this, the link will automatically be copied to your clipboard and you can simply paste it into your Google Slide as you would any other link.

In addition to linking to web pages, you can link between slides in your presentation. This can be very helpful in creating a guided lesson.

To do so, simply highlight the text you want to use as your link, then right click and choose “Link”, and then, instead of typing or pasting a URL into the Link box, click “Slides from this Presentation” and choose the slide you want.

This can be helpful for creating a table of contents for a longer presentation (you can even have just one slide presentation that you use for lecturing the whole semester long if you think it would be easier for students to find and reference). 

Stop-Motion Animated Diagrams to Demonstrate a Process

When we teach in person, we sometimes “animate” diagrams we draw on the board by adding to them, erasing parts of them, drawing arrows, labelling, circling to emphasize, etc. This “animation” helps our students to understand the various steps of a process or the way something changes over time.

Google Slides can fulfill the same function in a flex-hybrid classroom, with the added bonus that your explanation will be available for students to review later if they need to.

Here’s how to create a stop-motion animated diagram in Slides:

  1. Create a new presentation with an initial slide with the diagram you want to animate. 
  2. Duplicate that initial slide (Slide>Duplicate slide) and move/add/erase/change the parts of the diagram as needed. (The shape, image, text box, and line icons in the top menu are very helpful – if you don’t see them, you can also access these features by clicking “Insert”.)
  3. Repeat this process as many times as necessary. (Tip: Make sure the movements and changes in your diagram are small enough that when you play the “animation”, it isn’t too jerky.)
  4. Click “File” and then select “Publish to the Web”. (Tip: Yes, you have to publish to the web to make the animation play. Because of this, it’s not a bad idea to add a copyright to the footer to protect your IP.)
  5. You will be taken to a screen on which you can choose the rate at which your slides will auto-advance. You can also select the option to have the slideshow begin automatically and to restart automatically after the last slide (looping). Choose the settings that will work best for you.
  6. Click “Publish”. If a confirmation box appears, click “OK”.
  7. After you click Publish, a new link will appear in the window. You need to use this link instead of clicking “Present”. (Clicking “Present” will show the slides, but without auto-advance or looping.)
  8. If you want to edit your content after you publish it, go back and repeat this process and copy the new link. 

The quickest auto-advance setting you can use is one slide per second, so this technique is not suitable for creating exciting content, but it’s a wonderful tool for those of us who want to make a simple animation without having to go through a steep learning curve.

Don’t feel like making an animation yourself? Have your students create animated diagrams instead to demonstrate their understanding of a concept you’ve just explained. (Sneaky version: use your students’ animations next year – with their permission, of course.)

Here’s a quick sample animation made by your friendly neighborhood CLT.

Here’s another sample animation from teacher Matt Irwin.

Add Polls and Assessment Questions to Slides to Increase Student Engagement During Lectures

Student engagement improves when you use “active learning” techniques such as polls, clicker questions, and so on.

You can incorporate interactive questions and assessments into a Slides presentation. 

For quick polls to spark engagement and assess comprehension in real time, you can use PollEverywhere, which allows students to respond to survey questions using their mobile phones. 

You’ll need to sign up for a free account (be sure to use the higher education plan, which gives you more features than the free business and non-profit plan) and then download the PollEverywhere Google Slides Add-On. 

Here’s how you use the PollEverywhere Google Slides Add-On once you’ve downloaded it. 

You can likewise link to a Google Form from the text of a slide (you simply set up a link like any other, but to the Google Form). Obviously, to make this work, you will need to ask your students to have your presentation open on their laptops or smartphones so that they can click on the link from their screens. 

To see and and show Google Forms survey results in real time, click on the link on your own screen. This will automatically take you out of “presentation” mode and show you the Form as one of your browser tabs. Click on the appropriate tab to go to the Form, and then, at the top of the form, click “Responses” and then “Summary” to show the results to your class.

(If you want to get fancy, you can download the responses to your Google Forms surveys and turn them into polished content that can be exported into Docs and Slides and presented to your class next time. Form Publisher and Form Director are a couple of the add-ons that do this.) 

You should only use Google Forms for quick surveys, not for graded quizzes, because you’ll have to manually transfer the quiz grades into Canvas later, which is tedious.

If you want to give your students an actual graded quiz during a Google Slides presentation, set up a quiz in Canvas, post it to the appropriate Module so that students can access it later as well, and then add the URL of the quiz into the text of a Google slide. (To do this, simply right-click on the name of the quiz in the Module, copy the link, and then paste it into the text of the slide.) As with Google Forms, students will need to have the presentation open on their laptops or smartphones so that they can click on the link. They will then need to sign into Canvas to take the quiz.

Digital Poster Sessions and “Gallery Walks”

Designing Posters 

For classes that include poster sessions, Slides is a great tool for designing posters – it has the same “aspect ratio” (i.e. ratio of horizontal to vertical) as typical 4×3 horizontal posters. 

Displaying Artwork in a “Digital Gallery”

Students can “mount” a digital image on a single slide like they’d mount a physical piece of art on a wall. 

They can also mount multimedia content on a Slide, too – particularly other forms of media from G-Suite. 

Here’s a helpful set of instructions for embedding videos (both YouTube and non-YouTube videos) in a Slides presentation.

How to Do Digital Poster Sessions or “Gallery Walks”

Until we can do in-person poster sessions and gallery shows, Google Slides can offer a handy stand-in. Students can share their posters or works of art with the class for comment/critique using one of the following techniques:

Combine all the poster/artwork slides into a single presentation that you share with your students. If you show the poster presentation in a synchronous session, you can use “Chat” as a way for students to respond to what they see in real time. You can also use Google Forms or PollEverywhere to collect feedback from students to help others improve their work.

Set up a Canvas discussion board to which students should post their Slides. Students would then “circulate around the room” by going to other students’ posts, opening the links and viewing/playing the presentation and responding to other posts. 

Graphic Novels

Use Slides to have students create graphic novels and present them to the class. They can even draw the panels of the graphic novel, photograph them with their phone, and then paste the images. Students can advance the slides automatically (see above) or they can advance them manually as part of a presentation to the class.

A fun idea from ShakeUpLearning: students can even add audio to their graphic novels.

Add Slides to Google Sites Pages and Blog Posts

This is another great idea from our primary school colleagues that will work well at any educational level. 

At the college level, you can assign your class to collaborate on creating a Wiki about a shared topic – and a Slides presentation can be one option for students to contribute.

Here instructions for adding a Slides presentation to a blog post. 

Here are instructions for adding a Slides presentation to a Google Site.

Idea Collection and Brainstorming

Sticky Note Board

If you like to use sticky notes on a whiteboard in an in-person class, you can use Google Slides to replicate this technique in a flex-hybrid classroom. Bonus: When the brainstorming session is over, everyone’s ideas will be recorded in a presentation you can share and archive for your students.

You can share the Slides with everyone in the class for group brainstorming, keep it just to yourself and control the sticky notes more tightly, or designate a few students as note-takers to manage the sticky notes.

If it’s only you or all the students, present your own screen in Meet (and project it on the screen in the classroom, too, if there is an in-person component to the class); if you have designated note-takers, have one of them present their screen instead while you moderate the brainstorming session.

This can even be done asynchronously if you prefer, or you can start the brainstorming in class and then assign students to continue it after class is over.

What’s nice about this is that unlike with physical sticky notes, your brainstorming session gets saved. At a certain point, you can even change students’ editing permissions to view-only so that no more brainstorming can happen.

Here’s a good description of this technique, and there’s a sticky note template here.

Interactive Notebooks

This is similar to “sticky notes”, but handy if you’re trying to collect ideas on a number of different topics. 

You can also do a multi-slide “interactive notebook” to which students can add content as they need to. The slides can be in sticky-note format or anything else that seems appropriate to you.

(The difference between doing this in slides and docs is that Docs will automatically add pages as students add content, while Slides will not – which might help keep things organized. Students will have to edit content so that it all fits on one page. You might want to designate students who will do this.)

Lock the Background of a Slide

Lock the Background of a Slide to Create a Drag-and-Drop Assessment

This is a very interesting idea that might be especially good for science courses.

On Google Slides, you can create a slide background and then lock it so that others can’t change it. (Here’s how to do that.)

This background could be an image, a diagram, or anything else you want your students to show that they understand. You can then add moveable elements to the Slide that can be dragged around by anyone with editing privileges. These elements can be images, arrows, text boxes with labels for things depicted in the background – whatever you wish.

As a learning activity or even an assessment, you can challenge your students to drag the movable elements around the slide and position them to demonstrate their understanding of a concept. 

You can even have students start with the original slide and then create their own animation to show that they understand a process.

You can require students to create and submit to Canvas a PDF of their changes to the Slides presentation to “freeze” their answer so that you can assess it.

Alternatively, you can ask students to record and add audio to explain their answers (you can also add audio to the presentation to record your feedback).

Lock the Background of a Slide to Let Students Mark Up a Text Passage (or Solve a Math Problem)

You can do this either as an assignment or as a group exercise in real time. You set the text or the initial problem as a locked background and students can annotate it using text boxes and drawing tools, especially the “Line” menu, which includes a “scribble” option that lets you move the cursor freely to draw and write (awkwardly, but it does work). 

You can set up a presentation made up of identical slides, assign each slide to a different group of students and then show all the slides at the end in front of the class to compare the ways the different groups approached the annotation.

(Or, you can start out with individual slides for each group and then combine them into a single presentation, just as you would to make a poster session or digital gallery. Note: This is not something you can do in real time – it takes about 5-10 minutes to do. You’d need to do it for the next class.)

If you like, you can ask the students to record their discussion as they mark up the text and add it to the presentation as audio so that you can hear their thought process. Different students can even add audio at different times as a way to communicate with each other while completing the exercise asynchronously.

Here’s a video that demonstrates this technique – it shows a primary school example,  but this technique lends itself to work at any level.

Lock the Background to Play with Magnetic Poetry

You can also do “magnetic poetry” using the same “drag and drop” idea. Here’s a fun template by Kasey Bell, or you can make your own. 

Create a “Virtual Office” in Slides and Embed It into Your Canvas Front Page

We’re all being encouraged to use the Canvas Template and put a fun, personal image on the homepage of our courses. What could be more personal than your own “virtual classroom”, “virtual office”, or any other virtual scene that you like, made in Slides? 

This is cool and super-fancy and fun to do (thanks to Deborah Bloom in OIE for turning us on to this one) – and it introduces your students to you before they even meet you on the first day. It can also be used to help students do the most important things you want them to do – contact you, set up appointments, read your Canvas bio – whatever you think is important that you want to emphasize in this fun way.

To make a virtual office, you use simple graphic design features in Slides (inserting shapes, cutting and pasting images found on the web, etc), text, and hyperlinks to create an office scene (or really, a scene of anything you like). The idea is that the links take you to various useful things you want students to know – for example, one link could be to a Google Appointments page to sign up for office hours, another could go to an electronic version of the textbook, and another could go to your welcome video. 

Virtual offices, like real offices, don’t have to be static. You can update them regularly with new announcements, links to the module you’re working on this week, a quick video summary of what’s going on in the course this week – whatever you like.

Many K-12 teachers add Bitmoji images of themselves inside their virtual classrooms. You make these using a Smartphone app, which you can find links to at https://www.bitmoji.com/.

This is lots of fun and definitely would add a nice element of warmth to your homepage – but may not be a fit for all teaching personas. Obviously, the goal is to reflect your personality and give your students a sense of who you are, so do what seems right for you.

Here’s Deborah’s virtual office.

To show some fun things you can do with this “genre”, here’s another virtual office – which is not an office at all, but a favorite cafe.

How to Make a Virtual Office

The quickest way to learn the technique for creating a virtual scene in Slides is to watch or read a couple of tutorials. Once you get the idea, you’ll be off and running quickly. (Warning! Making a virtual office is addictive – you’ll likely spend more time on it than you intended because it’s so much fun to do.)

Elin Melchior and the team in the Office of International Education have put together these instructions for making a virtual office, which contain a quick written how-to as well as links to some videos.

Two additional tutorials are linked here (the first is written, and the second is on YouTube). 

One important thing to know: the Bitmoji Chrome extension helps itself liberally to information typed into your computer – which might even include credit card numbers. If you use it to make a Bitmoji for your office, it’s probably a good idea to install it, do what you need to do with it, and uninstall it again right away before you make any online purchases or type any sensitive emails. 

How to Embed Your Virtual Office in Your Canvas Homepage

  • Go to your virtual office in Slides.
  • Choose File>Publish to the web.
  • When the “Publish” window opens, click “Embed” and copy and paste the code that appears in the box.
  • Go to your homepage in Canvas and make you’ve got the layout set to show the “front page” as the homepage. 
  • Once you’ve done that, click “Edit” to edit the front page and add your virtual office.
  • On above the top right of the editing window, click the blue link that says “HTML Editor”.
  • Paste the embed link into the HTML code.
  • Click “Save”.

You should see your virtual office on your Canvas homepage!

(If you don’t see it, check that you’ve designated the appropriate page as the course homepage and front page.)

Start Class in an Interesting Way

Put a quotation, question, image, or sticky notes/magnetic poetry on a Slide, and present your screen (or share the slide if it’s interactive) for students to respond to or play with during the “soft start” to your class.

You can even include audio to add some fun background music.

Also, here’s a good idea from Google-certified trainer Jennifer L Scheffer: you can put your start-of-class announcements on a Slide (level up: link the slide to the Module for that week). 

Create Images for Use in Other Applications

You can use Google slides to create images such as flowcharts, Venn diagrams, etc. that you can then save as an image file and use in other applications. 

To save a slide as an image, go to File > Download as > JPEG image or PNG image. Save your image to your device. 

Tip: If you change your background to “transparent” your image will have no background in JPEG/PNG format and can be pasted nicely into other things. To do this, click on File > Change background, then choose Transparent. (Thanks to TheEduBlogger.com for this idea.)

Using Google Docs for Iterative Feedback – A Short Introduction

By Craig Pepin – many thanks to Katheryn Wright and Aziz Fatnassi for feedback and additional tips. 

“Fast fingers” by KatieKrueger is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Google Docs is less a pedagogical method, and more a powerful tool for providing feedback and tracking revisions electronically in student writing. It also works exceptionally well for collaborative documents including group projects, collective notetaking, and many other potential uses. It’s a particularly powerful tool for remote learning, in that you can remotely meet with a student, and both work in the same document simultaneously.  

Instead of receiving a standalone MS Word document or a hard copy, ask your students to share their Google Doc with you. This can be done through email, or you can have students submit a link through the Canvas assignment that the document is addressing.  Students often share documents in “edit mode” (which allows you to directly make permanent edits), but many instructors prefer to use the suggesting mode. In this mode, anything you type in the body of the document is highlighted for the other reader in a different color, and they have the option of accepting or rejecting the suggestion.  This gives the student final say in any suggestions, reinforcing that this is their writing. If a student only shares with “view” access, this removes the power of working directly in the document – make your expectations for access clear in your assignment instructions or syllabus.

One thing that makes Google docs so powerful in the remote learning environment is that it allows you to collaboratively edit the same document while socially distanced. As Aziz puts it, “This way the student can see how I go through different versions of [a] sentence, and end up with the final product.” Katheryn also uses comments to initiate conversations with the students.  Want to alert students that you’re expecting a response?  Add their email address, with a “+” sign at the beginning (such as “+cpepin@champlain.edu”) and they will get an email when you post the comment.    

Another useful feature is that anyone with access to the document can review the version history.  This allows you to see what changes have been made to the document.  Conveniently, it also allows you to see when the changes were made, giving you some insight into the students’ work processes. Version history does not show the comments, but all comments (including ones that have been resolved by the author) are also available for review using the Comments button in the upper right corner. 

(If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the basics of how to add comments in Google Docs. You can also use the commenting feature in many other Google Suite products such as Slides and Sheets.)  

One way to encourage student learning is to highlight spelling or grammatical mistakes, and not to correct them in the text itself, but rather to draw students’ attention to it and have them figure out how to fix the error.  For common grammatical errors, you can avoid typing out explanations by instead inserting links in the comments to commonly used writing support websites such as Purdue’s OWL (Online Writing Lab).  This website provides some additional details on these approaches.  I developed a barebones color-coding system for different types of mistakes, and if there’s interest, the College or a Division could develop a standard color usage which might be really helpful for students from semester to semester. 

Craig’s color-coding system in Google Docs

Often Google Docs will give you an email alert when a student resolves one of your comments. You may like this feature but it can easily get out of hand and clog up your email inbox. This can be fixed (either by you, if you have edit access, or the student if you don’t), by changing the notification settings to “none”. 

One final note – If you have a tablet running Android or iOS, it appears possible to make handwritten notes on a Google Doc, although we haven’t explored that ourselves.  Check Tip #4 here if you want to try this. 

Ways to Use Google Sites in Flex-Hybrid Teaching

The homepage of a gallery Site created by Stella Marrs’ students in Spring 2020 (the site navigation, which takes the visitor to the work of individual students, is not shown here to protect students’ privacy)

Google Sites is a website builder that works well for presenting simple information. The learning curve is very quick and it’s extremely easy to use once you know how it works.

Google Sites ad-free and is included with your Champlain Google account – and it’s also included with your students’ Google accounts, too. That means you not only can use Sites yourself, but ask your students to build Sites as part of assignments – in some cases, a simple website is a great alternative to a paper or Slides presentation.

Google Sites integrates extremely well with other G-Suite applications like Docs, Slides, YouTube, etc., which makes it a great choice for many academic uses.

Sites also has many of the same sharing settings that other G-Suite applications have, which is handy because it allows you to make a basic website that is public, limited to the Champlain community only, or limited to just a few select users in the community. This increases its potential as an academic tool because it can serve as a private digital gallery or portfolio that is shared only with the student(s) whose work is in the portfolio and you as the instructor. 

Google Sites’ feature list is still short – it covers the basics but doesn’t offer many advanced features (although more are being added over time). However, for many people and many purposes, Google Sites’ simplicity and user-friendliness are just the right thing.

Some ways you might use Google Sites in your flex-hybrid courses include:

  • As an online gallery showing the work of a group of students or a class section – for example, some instructors use it as a way to showcase students’ final projects
  • As a digital portfolio in which individuals or small groups of students collect and curate their written or artistic work over the course of a semester 
  • As a way to collect documentation showing progress in project-based learning
  • As a way for students (or groups) to present research findings. This can be a nice alternative to the conventional research paper format because it allows direct linking to sources and the posting of multimedia content related to the research topic.
  • As a way for students to collaborate on a project (even if the final presentation format is not a Site)
  • As a “knowledge base” or “wiki” on the topic of study for the course, to which every student is expected to contribute.

Easy and Effective Techniques for Using Jamboard in a Flex-Hybrid Course

(An important caution that applies to all of these ideas: Items placed on a Jam are not locked, which means that students can move and delete items. You may find it best to open up the sharing settings for a period of time and then “lock” the Jam by changing the sharing settings to “view only”.)

New to Jamboard? Here are instructions.

Learn how Champlain faculty member Kerry Noonan uses Jamboard to support small-group work in her Core classes.

Brainstorming

Add one or more sticky notes with questions or prompts to a Jam and ask students to respond by adding their own sticky notes, images, drawings, etc. 

Character/Scene Analysis

Same as brainstorming, above, except the prompt can be either a name or an image. Students can add notes describing the development of the scene or the character, citing evidence of character development, or anything else that pertains to that character. (If you start with simply the character’s name, and the character is from a book, students can add images of what they think the character looks like – a fun way to get discussion going, since everyone will have a different idea.)

Collecting Research Ideas and Sources

You can start by posting sticky notes or using the “Add text” tool to label one or more frames in a Jam and then ask students to add files from their Google Drive (note: as of August 2020, the only way to add Drive files is via the Jamboard app, which is free to download from Google Play or the App Store).

Storyboarding/Wireframing

You can use a Jam to set up a sequence of a story as a pre-writing or brainstorming exercise, or as a draft of a series of wireframes. 

As the instructor, you can, if you wish, set up the Jam in advance by putting sticky notes or text on frames indicating which scene or webpage should be planned on which frame.

As students evolve their ideas, you can add notes commenting on their work.

(Note: As of August 2020, you can add really good drawings to a Jam using the app – a feature that is not yet available on the desktop browser version.)

Collages

This can be a fun “get to know you” activity for the first day of class, or a way to warm students up at the beginning of each class or during a “soft start” to a synchronous class session. It would also be a good way to incorporate current events into a class.

After you give students a prompt for the collage, they can add whatever they wish. 

You can do this as a full-class, small group, or individual activity – simply add as many frames as appropriate to the Jam.

Remember that you can save the entire Jam as a PDF or individual frames as PNG images – feel free to invite students to save their work if they wish!

Infographics/Flowcharts

Instead of asking students to respond to a prompt by posting sticky notes, you can ask them to work together in a small group to create a rough infographic or flowchart that captures their thinking.

Timelines

You can create an image showing a timeline with dates/events, add it to a Jam frame, and ask students to add sticky notes and other content to explain what happened.

How I Use Jamboard in My Flex-Hybrid Courses: A How-To Interview with Professor Kerry Noonan

Sample Jamboard image showing Kerry Noonan's "sticky note" technique for small group discussions

By Betsy Allen-Pennebaker

How did you use Jamboard in your class this summer? 

“When I’m teaching in person I do a lot of work on the whiteboard, especially if I’m teaching in one of those CCM classrooms that has whiteboards all around the room. I wanted to see if I could recreate that whiteboard technique virtually when I was teaching this summer. Jamboard ended up being really great for that.

“I used Jamboard to help students work in small groups to analyze and discuss readings. I also used it when I wanted students to apply a big-picture theoretical framework to a particular reading. 

“What I did was create one Jamboard for the entire summer session, that I wiped clean before each class meeting — I did this to make it easier for the students, since it was the same stable link for the Jamboard for every class meeting. I had one ‘frame’ [page] on the board for each breakout group. Then, depending on the length or complexity of the reading or the ideas I wanted the students to work with, I put up sticky notes on each frame either with the titles of the various headings and sub-headings in the reading, or with some of the most important topics or big ideas I wanted them to focus on, from the reading. I then asked students to talk together in breakout groups to pull out what intrigued them most, or what they questioned, or what they thought were the most important ideas from each section of the article, or to capture what their group said in their discussion about the reading in terms of the most important ideas or topics I’d identified. Then they would add their own sticky notes on the appropriate group page, near the ones I had already posted.

“Then, when we came back together into the large meeting, I shared my screen with the meeting, and opened the JamBoard, so we were all looking at it. I would ask each group to pull out a couple of the ideas they had captured on the JamBoard from their discussion, and talk to the class about them. Each group would present some of their ideas, and I would also chime in as necessary.

“Another way I sometimes used Jamboard was to have a single frame for the entire class (or maybe use two frames, and put, say, two groups together on each frame) and assign each small group a specific color for their sticky notes – that way, I could still see who was adding what and when we debriefed as a class, we could compare and contrast what the different groups said. Rather than doing this in breakout rooms, the students would only communicate through the sticky notes on the JamBoard — but they were in a larger subgroup (i.e., Groups 1 & 2 on one frame, and Groups 3 & 4 on another frame). This particular technique was especially good for making connections between a specific reading and a broader theory – I would put sticky notes with the main concepts of the framework on the jamboard and then students would add their own notes explaining how the reading connected to the theory, or come up with real-life examples for the theory.

How well did Jamboard work for this?

“It was great! It came quite close to replicating the whiteboard experience. There were a lot of things I liked about it.

“First, it held students accountable for doing the work in their small groups, even when it was a little harder for me to supervise them than it would have been in a regular classroom. 

“Second, it helped me manage breakout groups much more easily. I was using Meet to do breakout groups, which meant that I had to set up several concurrent Meets and then keep them all open on my screen and jump around between them as students were working. This was hard because, among other things, you have to make sure you mute all the groups except for the one that you’re interacting with, otherwise the students can hear all the background noise on your computer from all the other groups. It was just a lot of fiddling to manage all that. 

“With Jamboard, though, I didn’t have to actually intrude into the breakout groups all the time – I could see what they were doing in real time by watching what they were adding to the different frames on the Jamboard. I could also add my own sticky notes to the frames of groups that seemed to be having trouble to help them out. Sometimes I would also post notifications about when it was time to go back to the main Meet.

“Sometimes, too, I would ask students to go and look at the work that other groups were doing simply by clicking through to those groups’ frames the way I was doing, since we were all on the same JamBoard. This was helpful if a particular group seemed to be struggling and I wanted to give them some inspiration.

“Then, after we all came back together, we would review the Jamboard to see what everyone had added to it. I’d ask each group to present what they’d talked about and then we’d discuss what people had posted.

Any tips or tricks you learned that would be helpful for your colleagues to know if they try to use this technique?

“One trick I learned was that if I was running multiple Meets but recording only the main Meet, what would show up on the full-class Meet while students were in the breakout groups was simply me with an intense expression on my face, clicking around, listening and talking to other groups. This was not the most interesting content for the students if they ever came back to the main Meet while the breakout groups were meeting, or if they were watching the recorded version. After a while, I learned to do “present screen” and show the Jamboard instead of my face on the main Meet while the breakout groups were meeting.

“I would ask students to elaborate on the things they’d posted to the board on their stickies. I learned that I could not only just point to a particular sticky note, but also drag the corner of it to make it bigger and to make it clear to students which sticky note I was referring to. 

“I also learned that when you use Jamboard to facilitate small groups you can still get a sense of who has done the work to prepare for class and who has not, just like you can in an in-person classroom. This is especially true if you do occasionally drop in and out of the groups in person. And, just like in an in-person classroom, you can assign the students roles to make them engage in the work. For example, you ask a student who hasn’t prepared for class to write the sticky notes, or you can call on them to report out on what was said in a particular sticky note by the group. 

What did you do with the Jamboard after each class was over?

“If students missed class, I shared the recording of the class and the Jamboard. Sharing the Jamboard wasn’t hard, because it was the same one for the whole summer session, and I gave the students the link at the start of the course. The Jamboard would stay the same for a full week until I wiped it clean in preparation for the next class session. 

What pedagogical considerations did you have to be aware of when you were using Jamboard?

“My initial experience with Jamboard this summer made me think a lot about how I put people together in groups. I decided that in a virtual environment, which is new to everyone, it would be more important to have people stay in the same groups for consistency and to build community as much as possible. So, I not only kept students in the same groups all summer long for Jamboard discussions, but also for small-group discussion forums. Basically, I erred on the side of stability. 

“I am not sure I would do that again quite so strictly for the fall semester course because, first of all the fall semester is longer, and also, if you have negative group dynamics, they can get locked in and that’s not good for the students in the groups that aren’t working. I think I’m going to switch things up more.

At this point, as all teachers do whenever they’re talking about teaching, our conversation turned into a shared “riff” on teaching ideas, and especially about making the synchronous and asynchronous elements of a flex-hybrid course feel coherent and building connections between remote and in-person students. Here are some ideas that came out of that part of our discussion:

Kerry mentioned that she had learned over the summer to require students to end their discussion forum posts with a question to provide other students with an opening to respond in a meaningful way and not just with a perfunctory, “Great idea, Joe! I like it!”. We got to thinking that discussion posts that end with questions could also be used as a springboard for Jamboard discussions – perhaps by posting some of the questions on Jamboard frames on sticky notes, or simply by requiring each group to go back and look at the discussion forum for the week and respond to some aspect of it.

We also got to thinking that although Kerry was teaching in a fully-remote environment over the summer, a Jamboard could be a great way to connect remote and in-person students in a hybrid course – regardless of location, students can post pretty easily to their group’s Jamboard frame and participate in the discussion on an equal footing. They’d really only need to be connected via audio for that.

Finally, we also were thinking about ways that Jamboard could be used to enable students to make up missed synchronous class sessions. For example, it’s easy to save a Jamboard as an image or PDF. This could be shared with students who miss a class and, if you want, you could even ask them to “participate in the discussion” by elaborating in writing on one or more of the sticky notes.

Thanks so much to Kerry for sharing her experience and her great ideas!