Teachers are amazing! With a word of encouragement, a quick check-in with a student, or asking the right question to the class to help unlock understanding, they drive learning! Traditionally, this has taken place in-person in classrooms. This year, however, teachers are finding tools to facilitate learning from a distance.
As educators at Edcite, we want to make sure teachers have the tools they need to keep reaching students where they are, academically and literally! This spring, we prioritized, designed, and built a free tool for teachers to support students during assignments and assessments: Real-time Connect.
Real-time Connect allows teachers to provide video and chat support to students while students are engaging in academic independent practice. Plus, it’s intentionally designed to align with the ways we support students in the physical classroom as they are working.
The tool is built so the teacher can see and support all students, but students can only see and engage with the teacher. The students don’t see each other. Also, you can see if the student is on the assignment or has navigated away based on whether they are outlined in green or red!
The tool also simplifies the process for a teacher communicating with a student while they are working because it keeps everything within the same tab, so the student doesn’t have to toggle back and forth.
Here are three ways you can use Edcite’s Real-time Connect with students this school year.
- Provide a simple pathway for students to ask questions while they are working.
With Real-time Connect, students can send questions about the material within the same page they are working on. Students can also choose to flag the teacher for one-on-one support.
- Provide real-time one-on-one reteaching when students are struggling. If a teacher notices in the live progress dashboard that a student is getting most of the answers incorrect or if a student has flagged for help, the teacher can start a one-on-one discussion with the student. Calling a student privately automatically pauses the video and sound from the teacher to the rest of the class and when that one-on-one is closed, the teacher is back on for the rest of the students.
- Reteach to the whole class based on common mistakes you are seeing.
Edcite’s Live Progress Dashboard shows how students are doing on each question. If you notice that students are missing the same questions and there is a large misconception that should be addressed class-wide, reteach right then and there. No need to wait until students submit.
You can learn more about how to use Real-time Connect in this 20-minute webinar and access directions for setting it up here.
If you would like to learn about how to use Real-time Connect at your school or district, please contact schools@edcite.com for more information.
