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The most important piece of this blog post is the example. Here is a set of slides that is written for Novice High Students learning French. It is a week’s worth of remote learning, to be done at home. There are opportunities for live lessons with the teacher, but the set is intentionally simple and streamlined to not include any additional apps or technology tools. If you desire, there is room for you to add in apps like Quizlet, EdPuzzle, Fluentkey, Google Forms, Peardeck and Flipgrid, but I am encouraging you to use this set of slides as is, without additional tools, to keep it simple for you and for your students.

My intention with sharing an example is to show you how to include the components of effective lessons in your remote learning lessons while keeping your lessons simple. To start, when writing remote lessons, we have to draw in students, so the theme has to be specifically targeted to interest students and very relevant to their lives. At the same time we are trying to make it relevant and interesting, we have to build on vocabulary that we have already introduced in our classes and limit ourselves to vocabulary that we are teaching in the unit as we want to give students the building blocks for the tasks we are asking them to complete. Try to make sure your list is not too long and is high frequency language. And then we also have to find creative ways to repeat the vocabulary as repetition allows for students to acquire the language.

I tried to simplify the task of writing remote learning lessons into a limited list of tasks:

• Determine the length of time and level of your mini-unit of lessons. This will help you choose how many activities to include and what level of can dos to address.
  Choose a theme and an essential question. Make a title slide with the theme expressed.
• Find 3-6 authentic resources. Enter them into your slides. I like to find a couple readings, most often infographics, and a few videos.
• Plan what students will be able to do by the end and plan backward to come up with the targeted vocabulary. Take vocabulary from the authentic resources and from the formative assessments you plan to do along the way. Make a slide of the vocabulary.
• Plan the activities that students will do with the authentic resources as a way to build to the summative assessment, even if it isn’t going to be graded traditionally. Make sure to include the three modes in your activities, Interpretive, Interpersonal and Presentational.
• Create a summative assessment for the set of lessons so that you can give students feedback about their progress. It is through this feedback that you can motivate students to complete the lessons.

Vary your activities. To respond to things they have read, ask students to answer questions on the material, make captions to match to pictures, order events in a story, sort ideas into categories or check off items on a list. Ask students to respond to questions about themselves or ask them to interview others and then report back. When they listen to a story, ask students to pick out some vocabulary from the story or ask them to identify the characters and the setting. To be clear, these activities are carefully planned for teaching for proficiency.

Try to be clear in your directions. You will notice that for the level that I teach, I have made my directions in English. And, you will also notice that I attempt to highlight in blue where I would like to see students respond.

Your lessons should be the strongest materials that are on topic that will interest the majority of students. And, they are the ones that will be accessible to most students. Limit yours lessons to only the best resources. And, your interactions with students should be as personable as you can make them to try to motivate your students to participate. With proficiency based activities, topics of interest to students, personable feedback and authentic resources, you are making the best attempt possible to draw in students.