In this - let’s be honest - crappy and uncertain situation, communicating clearly for connection and understanding is more important than ever.
With a lot of your teaching moving online, I wanted to share some tips and free resources with you to help keep your teams and students engaged, and to reduce your own overwhelm too. We are all humans in this together after all :).
For the abridged version of this article, see the one page summary below (will take you 1 minute to digest). For more detail, keep reading (will take about 3-5 minutes to digest).
1. Be engaging - up your visual communication game
Teaching your students in person is out of the question, meaning you lack the ability to use your body language, teaching aids and handouts to back up your powerpoint presentation; and you are now directly competing with lots of other sexy attention sucks like social media, online chat and cat meme videos on YouTube.
Switching to online teaching means you are relying on your slides to tell the story of your session alongside your verbal narrative. 65% of your students will learn best through visuals (Mind Tools, 1998), and as we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text (Vogel, G. W. Dickson, and J. A. Lehman, 1986), harnessing the power of pictures will ensure your students keep learning effectively in the wake of COVID19.
So, how exactly do you pimp those presentations?
Plan on paper first - think about what your students REALLY need to know, draw the timeline of how they’ll get to that knowledge base, and break it down into steps. Here is an example below of how to plan your teaching first:
Tell students the point - yes, students need to know lots of information about specific topics, but they should be learning the details through their reading. Keep headers concise, snappy and focused on top line key points, and don’t bombard them with so much information on a slide that the lure of Facebook becomes too much.
Use the rule of three - our brain loves threes as it processes information best when it is presented in thirds (Cuidiz, 2020). Think about how to split your lecture into three parts, with three key points in each part for better information retention.
Choose your visuals wisely - death by clipart is equally as bad as death by powerpoint. Only choose visuals that illustrate your point, whether that be a well constructed diagram, a humorous but well-placed meme or a visual metaphor. Great resources to find your visuals are: Flat Icon for simple icons; Canva for laying out your images; free Nifty Fox Creative visual metaphors (simply crop the images to what you need); Unsplash for free photography stock images; Procreate on iPad for drawing your own visuals; Lucid Chart for creating diagrams; or Prezi for a completely animated online experience.
Branch out with videos or animations - Powerpoint and KeyNote has lots of scope for adding in YouTube videos, GIFs and animations to add something extra to your teaching. You could even make your own whiteboard video to explain challenging ideas clearly with software like Doodly, or Videoscribe. Nifty Fox is also here to help - I have created explainer videos like this for Leeds Social Sciences Institute, and whiteboard explainers for NHS training here, that improve understanding of tough topics.
2. Stay Connected - use online tools for tutorials and collaboration
Virus or no virus, students will still have questions and still need one-on-one time with you to process their learning. Here are some useful tools to help you continue to offer first class student support:
Run tutorials with video conferencing software - Zoom is my favourite as you can share your screen easily, Microsoft Teams is used by a lot of unis, Google Hangouts works for seminars
Use a virtual whiteboard to work through ideas/problems together - there are online white boarding apps out there that your students can view alongside your video conferencing software, to create the experience of working through a problem together in the classroom. Try Groupboard or A Web Whiteboard with your laptop or tablet, and create an immersive classroom experience.
Enable students to ask questions throughout your teaching - your online learning system might already do this, but if it doesn’t, think about using Sli.do for live Q&As with options for students to upvote popular questions too. If allowed by your institution, creating a Slack group for students in seminars might also be useful. (Slack is a secure collaboration tool with a chat function used by businesses for live project management.)
Screen Recording - for running seminars/lectures that students might miss live (and if you don’t have Lecture Capture), think about using Screencast O-Matic to create a sharable video recording so absent students don’t miss out on juicy learnings from group discussions. Also, your video conferencing software should have a recording option too - head to your settings and make sure it is set to ‘on’ before you start.
3. Be human - ask better questions to ensure your students are engaged
With no face-to-face teaching, you can’t gauge how your students are responding to your teaching as you normally would. So, you need to ask direct and better questions about their experience, their understanding and hey, even their wellbeing at this difficult time!
Build in time for feedback during your teaching or why not use Pin Up as an online noticeboard (or utilise your learning management software’s group chat/course question function) to ask questions, share stories and generally check in on each other. Also, don’t be afraid of friendly emails, and having virtual office hours online.
How can Nifty Fox help?
Nifty Fox can help you deliver your courses online through:
Visual thinking and storytelling training to equip staff with the practical skills and understanding of visual theory to teach and engage students more effectively on and offline
Co-producing whiteboard animations with you to create engaging teaching materials
Presentation design for teaching materials that ROCK
Illustrated infographics to explain course content
For more ways Nifty Fox could help and examples of other work, see the introduction pack here.
Key takeaways
Harness the power of visual communication to improve student engagement and learning
Stay connected using online tools
Ask better questions to support students
If you have any questions or need any support, email me on laura@niftyfoxcreative.com and let’s have a virtual coffee!
Stay safe,
Laura