Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom

As has happened in much of Europe, Poland has now closed schools, universities and other places where people might gather in the hope of reducing the spread of coronavirus. Our school had its last normal lessons on Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday dedicated to training our teachers how to use Zoom. We start teaching on Monday 16th, so my total experience with Zoom so far has been in the training process. However, I wanted to share what we’ve done and some of the ideas we’ve had for our adapting our standard EFL face-to-face lessons, in the hope that others will be able to build on this.

Useful links

International House World arranged a live session run by Shaun Wilden on Tuesday 10th, in which he introduced us to Zoom. He has summarised tips for moving to online teaching in these two blogposts on the Oxford University Press blog:

• Getting started
• Practical tips

I’d also recommend Ceri Jones’s posts on the Cambridge University Press blog:

• Supporting every teacher: moving your classes online #1: focusing on establishing channels of communications
• Supporting every teacher: moving your classes online #2: focusing on planning lessons

Other useful posts:

• Zoom’s updates on which countries they’ve lifted the 40-minute free limit for.
• Graham Stanley on keeping learners’ attention when remote teaching.
• Advice to those about to teach online (mainly aimed at university lecturers).

On 20th March 2020, Lindsay Clandfield and Carol Rainbow will run a webinar for Teaching English British Council on using your coursebook online and ideas for breakout rooms (see below for a definition and our ideas).

There’s a very active hashtag on Twitter called #coronavirusteaching, which you can view without having a Twitter account. It’s full of ideas and experiences, and is a rich source of information.

I posted this tweet:

Looking for ideas for teachers as to how to teach a standard EFL lesson via Zoom. Have lots of thoughts for vocab, but not so many for grammar practice. #coronavirusteaching #eltchat

— Sandy Millin 🇪🇺 (@sandymillin) March 12, 2020

There are lots of great replies, with more being added – see this thread for access to all of them.

Technical arrangements

We’ve compiled a beginner’s guide to joining Zoom for our students (in English and Polish). Teachers will email meeting links and join IDs to each of their groups, with student emails in BCC so that we’re not sharing their contact information with each other. Students can email the teacher if they’re having technical difficulties during the lesson and can’t access Zoom.

We’ve signed all of our teachers up for individual Pro accounts so we don’t have to worry about the 40-minute limit on free Zoom accounts. If you have a school domain and teachers have school emails, Zoom have temporarily removed the 40-minute limit on the free account, but this doesn’t work for private emails such as Gmail or Yahoo.

We’ve also suggested that teachers using Google Docs to complement Zoom, so we’ve asked students who plan to use their mobiles to download the Docs app in advance.

The rest of this post is an adapted version of our guide for teachers, including lots of activity ideas which we came up with/found as we were writing it. Please feel free to share more! Thank you to Ruth and Emma, our ADoSes, for helping me put it together, and to all of our teachers for being amazing at suggesting ideas and trying to work out the kinks in the system so that we’re ready for things to run as smoothly as possible on Monday.

Zoom functions

Managing participants

As the host of a class/meeting, you can manage participants such as renaming, muting, stopping video and other controls for participants. For more, visit this page. 

If somebody joins the room late, or has been kicked out (e.g. due to connectivity), a notification will pop up for you to allow people to join the group.

The participants list also has options for students to give you simple messages:

These appear next to their name in the list. You have a ‘clear all’ button to switch them all off.

Students also have raise hand/lower hand options. A hand will appear on their video.

Participant video

As students join the room, a box with their name will appear. Once students click to give Zoom permission to access the camera, this will change to a video. 

This shows you the range of possible video layout options on Zoom.

• If you want lots of people to speak at the same time, ‘gallery view’ is much less chaotic. I’d recommend telling students to generally use this view.
• We don’t think there is gallery view on mobiles.
• If you’re using ‘active speaker view’, whoever is speaking will jump to the top of the column. This can get very distracting if lots of people are talking as it changes all the time. If you want students to show work they’ve produced on paper, ask all students to change to ‘active speaker view’, then ask the relevant student to unmute their microphone and start talking – their video will jump to the top.

As the host, you can switch all of the videos off if you want to. This reduces bandwidth (and is better for the environment!). 

Tip: Switching your own video off when students are doing individual work gives you a breather and allows you to check what’s happening next. It also means students aren’t looking at your funny faces while you figure out what’s next 🙂 It will also mean there is less to distract them!

Tip: In the first lesson, we recommend keeping the videos on so that students know this could happen, and so you can make your expectations clear about this online classroom environment.

Tip: Having all students with their videos off makes the room much more smoothly as it uses a lot less bandwidth.

Participant audio

When students join the room, their microphones will be on mute. (We recommend our teachers choose this setting when they set up their Zoom meetings.)

It’s best if you only unmute microphones for students who need to speak – otherwise it can get quite chaotic.

For drilling, you could unmute all microphones at the same time, but warn students before you do this!

Allow silence during your lessons – don’t be afraid of it, and don’t feel like you need to fill it. It’s a little strange initially when you feel like you’re not talking to anybody because you can’t hear them responding when students are on mute, but you’ll get used to it pretty quickly.

Tip: Mute your audio when you’re typing/opening up the next bits of your lesson. 

Sharing your screen

Tip: make sure you have everything you want to share open and ready before you start the lesson.

You can use the screen share function to:

• Show powerpoint
• Show a picture
• Show a document/gapfill
• Show the coursebook software
• Share computer sound (to play a listening, or background music before the lesson starts)
• Share a video (see below)

You can share the full desktop, a particular window only, or a portion of the screen (i.e. part of a picture). Here’s how. To share a portion of the screen, click on ‘advanced’ in the ‘share screen’ menu.

Screen sharing a desktop DOES NOT share any Zoom windows that are open.

If you give them permission to, students can also share their screens. Teachers can take remote control of students’ screens. Teachers can annotate students screens as well. Once this feature is enabled, all students can annotate whoever’s screen is being shared. 

Playing audio

• Put the audio on your computer.
• Use the ‘share screen’ function. Tick the ‘share computer sound’ box. 
• Press play on your computer and students should be able to hear it as normal.

Audio activities:

• Normal comprehension questions. A gist could perhaps be done as a poll.
• Listening dictation. 
• Write the next word. 

Tip: switch off your audio when playing audio from the computer, otherwise the students will hear you and the listening.

Playing video

• Click on ‘share screen’. 
• Choose the window where the video is playing.
• Tick the ‘share computer sound’ box. 
• Tick the ‘optimise for full-screen video clip’ to make the video smoother on students’ computers.
• Press play on your computer and students should be able to hear and see it as normal.

Tip: Streaming Youtube videos takes up less bandwidth than playing a downloaded video.

Video activities:

• What’s my line: write three lines from a short video clip, two which are really there, one which isn’t. Students write the number of the line which isn’t there in the chat box.

Chat box

There is a chat box in every Zoom meeting. Participants can send public messages to everyone, or start private chats. Here’s how. 

In teen classes, change the settings in the chat so that students can only chat with everyone publicly or privately message the teacher. It’s better for them not to be able to chat privately as you can’t monitor their communication. See ‘Changing in-meeting chat settings’ on this link.

If you send students to breakout rooms (see below) they cannot see anything that is sent to the chat box. You can only send them written messages to the room.

Also, when students return from the breakout rooms their chat box may have been wiped clean (especially if they are on a mobile). However, the host can still see everything that was in the chat box. 

You can use the chat box to:

• Chat!
• Have students complete a statement you give them e.g. ‘I really like using Zoom because…’
• Elicit answers to questions in feedback stages.
• See what questions students have.
• Play vocab revision activities like binomials (see number 5)
• Spelling tests. Students can also go on the video to choose the word to spell or the sentence to complete.

Annotating a screen/whiteboard

This allows you or the students to annotate a blank screen (whiteboard) or whatever you’re sharing at that point. You can annotate in the following ways:   

• Draw – insert lines, arrows and shapes
• Text box – including copying and pasting text from elsewhere
• Stamp – e.g a star or a tick
• Arrow – click to make an arrow with your name on it stay in one place. Each time you click, the previous arrow will disappear and a new one will appear.

Here is a fuller description of annotation tools and here’s how to share a whiteboard.

You can use this function to:

• Display a controlled practice activity using a text box.
• Draw a timeline (if you want something more permanent than holding up one on paper to the camera)
• Copy and paste a gapfill or similar from elsewhere for them to write into (though this is probably better as an activity on Google Docs or as a Powerpoint for them to handwrite the answers to).

You can download whiteboards and send them to students.

To stop students from being able to annotate the whiteboard, i.e. to make it so you are the only person who can write on it, there is a setting in the ‘more’ menu called ‘disable participant’s annotations’. (Thanks Shannon!)

Breakout rooms

A breakout room is a way to put your students into small groups or pairs. 

Watch this 2.5-minute video to see what a breakout room is, how to set it up, what it looks like for the teacher (host) and the students (participants). You can assign students manually or automatically, and you can move students around before you send them to the rooms.
If you want something more technical, here’s Zoom’s written guide to how breakout rooms work.

You can use this function to:

• Do the homework check.
• Create discussion groups.
• Divide the class into two teams e.g. to make a decision/plan.

Tip: Students cannot see any of the materials from the main room while in a breakout, or do any type chatting, so ask them to take a photo of the task or write it down. 

Tip: Remind students of breakout room etiquette before you start those stages each time.

You can’t monitor all of the breakout rooms simultaneously. You can only join one room at a time. Students can request help from inside the breakout room and invite you to join them. This pops up on your screen with a direct link to the breakout room. Your video will join the students – it’s very obvious that you’re there!

From your master breakout room list, you can broadcast a written message to all of the rooms which appears as a banner for all of the students.

• If breakout rooms aren’t visible on Zoom, you need to go to your main settings and switch them on. This video shows you how.
• Students may have trouble having a conversation if there are connection issues.
• It might be a challenge to have more than 3 students in a breakout room because of sound problems/noise, but it could work for a game if there is clear turn-taking.
• If you set a timer for breakout rooms, the timer starts regardless of whether or not the participants are in the rooms. When you close the breakout rooms, you can choose how much of a countdown the students get. 

Hands up (and other non-verbal feedback)

Students can put their hands up to draw your attention to them. To do this, they:

• Click on ‘participants list’.
• Click ‘raise hand’.
• When their question has been answered, they click ‘lower hand’.

As a host, you will see a ‘hands up’ icon appear on their video. If you’re using active speaker view, ‘hands up’ should push their video to the top of the list.

You can also see a summary of how many people have their hands up by looking at the complete participants list.

There are other options for non-verbal feedback, such as ‘clap’, ‘yes’, ‘no’ etc. Find out more or see the participants list section above.

You can use this function to:

• Find out which students want to speak on audio/camera.
• Check understanding of a particular term/concept/instruction.

Using Google Docs

Before the lesson:

• Create your Doc.
• Click on Share (a blue button in the top right or go to the ‘file’ menu).
• Click ‘get shareable link’. Make sure that it says ‘anyone with the link can edit’ – not just view!

During the lesson:

• Check that all students on mobile phones have downloaded the Google Docs app.
• Paste the shareable link into the chat box.
• Students click on the link and can edit the document simultaneously. This should be fairly smooth (we hope!) as we’ve asked them to download the app before the lesson.

Tip: if you want to have students work on different specific parts of the same document at the same time, put their names at the points you want them to write/specify ‘group 1’ ‘group 2’ etc in the document. Here’s a (view-only!) example.

You can use this to:

• Get feedback after a discussion task – students can all write their answers in the Doc simultaneously.
• Brainstorm ideas.
• Get students to complete a table when they have proved they can do something (like we did in the session)

Using Google Sheets

Students might not have the Google Sheets app. If you want to use it in your lesson, please ask students to download it when you send them the link to the lessons.

You can use this to:

• Get students to complete a table when they have proved they can do something – for example, a list of can-do statements.
• Do a ‘board race’ using a Google Sheet with columns that small groups need to add their ideas to.

Advice for planning your lessons

Start with activities you’re familiar with from the face-to-face classroom and consider how to adapt them. Look at the activities throughout this post for ideas of how you could do this. Be creative, and ask for help if you’ve spent more than 5 minutes trying to figure something out!

Best practice

Students recording lessons or taking screenshots (our advice to our teachers)

In the invitation email that we send for every lesson, students will be reminded that they may not record any part of the lesson without first asking the teacher’s permission, to keep in line with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, RODO in Polish) which is EU law. 

During the lesson, if any students ask to take a screenshot, you may NOT give them permission if any other students are on the screen. If only you are on the screen, it is your decision. If it is only the work (e.g. the whiteboard) then it is your decision. Unless the work is incomplete or there is a particular reason you do not want them to take a screenshot, then it is probably OK to say yes.

Other tips

Include a summary of the lesson right at the beginning – I think this is more important in online lessons so that students know what to expect.

Always plan an activity at the start of the lesson that isn’t crucial to the lesson as a whole – this activity can ‘buy’ the time needed to make sure everyone has connected and issues with audio etc. are ironed out. (quoted from Shaun Wilden)

Give time for activities, especially if they have to switch between apps and views. Everything will take longer, especially if things have to load. Aim for simplicity in the plan in general – fewer chances for things to go wrong! 

Include breaks for students: decide with the students what they want. You may decide to have a couple of shorter breaks, e.g. 5 minutes each after 30 minutes.

Look for as many student-to-student interaction opportunities as you can – not just student to teacher or lecture-style. It’s worth putting interaction patterns on your plan to be aware of this. Plan for every student to be on camera taking to the group at least once during the session. 

Include movement in the plan – chances for students to get up. Tell the students why you’re doing this (it is better for your brain to move regularly, and you’ll remember more English). This is also a change for you to move around and take a break from looking at the screen. Ideas include:

• Stand up and mime the actions/ verbs.
• 30-second stretch break. 
• Brain gym
• Simon Says…
• Run and write: put books on the other side of the room. Look at a sentence, remember it, run and write it in the chat box/ on a Google doc. (A kind of individual running dictation) 
• Run and write in pairs: as above, but with the runner dictating to the other student, who has their book hidden.
• They’ve done an activity in their books. You say a sentence – they stand up if it’s right, sit down if it’s not. Or a little more complicated: stand up and jump, stand up turn around and sit down again.
• After a breakout room: students stand up if they agreed / turn their back if they disagreed. Teacher can turn on their mike and they can say what they thought.
• If all students are on phones, they can walk for 2-3 minutes from their seats, then switch videos on and comment on where they’ve ended up/describe where they are/display it on the front camera/write about it. Could also be used for modals of speculation: other students guess where they might be, then turn on the camera and find out whether the guess was correct.

Other considerations

• On the mobile phone, students can only see a super tiny whiteboard and can’t do much except draw on it. If they need to type, it should be on a Google Doc as they can still hear Zoom but can’t see anything. 
• Chat box activities should be focussed on only the chat box, not while doing something else (e.g. watching a video). Students on mobiles can’t look at two things at the same time with Zoom.
• If you disconnect and reconnect, the chat refreshes and you lose all previous messages. If a student has lost the connection partway through a task that you’ve written in the chatbox, you need to copy it back into the box again.
• Some students might not have their coursebooks in front of them. Make sure you have another way to show them the activity.

Other activities

• Flashcard games
• Draw pictures and hold them up to the screen
• I can… statements on the whiteboard for students to annotate/add to the chat
• Dictation: email half the group with something to dictate to their partners in breakout rooms, using a Google doc. 
• Kim’s game: show a picture with various objects or various things happening. Take it away. Students list what was in the picture. Chatbots, docs, breakout rooms all work for this. 
• Quizlet flashcards: share the screen, students write the words they see in the chatbox. With smaller groups, put the microphones on and use them for drilling. Also works with normal flashcards when you have them.
• Students write a selection of words in the checkbox. You can take suggestions then choose one to display on the whiteboard. They then create sentences using the grammar structure. Then challenge them to add the context around the sentences: who says it/ where is it written, what comes before/ after it. 
• Remove/ replace/add: give students a starter sentence. They have to change/add/ replace words to make new sentences. Students can also suggest the original sentences. 
• A tour of my favourite website. Students would need to prepare this before, or have something and time in the lesson. You could also use it as a lead in to a topic, showing them around a website linked to the lesson theme. Aim for 2-3 minutes maximum four presentations like this. Alternatives: my favourite app, my favourite game, my favourite book, my favourite room where I am now. Note: this should be on a voluntary basis.
• Research time: students have 15/20 minutes to find out about a topic and prepare a mini presentation, which they then report back to the group as a live listening. This could work really well in a breakout room.
• Picture dictations: as a whole class, followed by students dictating to each other in breakout rooms.

Warmers

These activities are also good to maintain the group dynamic/connections between students, something which can very easily be lost if the primary communication is with the teacher.

• What can you see: describe your room, the view from your window, a photo. Alternatives: what you can hear, what you can smell. 
• First lines: open the first book you can find in your house and bring to the screen. Type the first line into the chat box/ Google Doc. Choose a favourite and write the next line/ continue the story/ say what happened before/ describe the character. 
• Tell students three adjectives. They write a noun which connects them in the chart box. Ask students to come on camera to justify their choice. Alternative: three nouns, they say a verb. Three verbs, they say a noun or adverb. 
• Odd one out: Write a list of six words on the board from a lexical set. Students have to decide which one is the odd one out. They must explain this. Once they have, then challenge them to nominate another one which could be the odd one out for different reasons. Great for lateral thinking. The variation is great too, where every time they argue one is the odd word out you cross it out and they repeat the activity with the words left until there are only two words.
• My neighbour’s cat is… page 54 of 5-minute activities by Penny Ur. This activity is great for eliciting adjectives from A-Z. You write up all the letters of the alphabet on the board and then you begin by saying “My neighbour’s cat is awful”, and write awful next to the letter “a”. Give students a timed limit eg 5 minutes, for them to add more adjectives in any order. For online purposes, challenge your class to get from A to Z, either in the chat or on a Google doc, or in breakout rooms as a competition. Variations: My neighbour likes… with verbs (adding up) or nouns (apples)
• Taboo: email a student a taboo card. They have to define the word, either on the video or typing in chat. Or they create their own. 
• Display a picture, then take it away. Students write the dialogue, list what they can see, describe what happened before/afterwards… should work well in breakout rooms.
• Students choose an object in the room with them. They share them in breakout rooms and say why they chose  that object/ the story behind it/ who they would sell or give it to. 
• Messages to the world/ the group: questions can promote discussion. Breakout groups can discuss, then one iteration can report back in the chart or on the video to the group. What’s the best thing in the world? If you could change one thing about school, what would it be? I’d you could day one thing to the world, what would it be? Also works with Thunks
• Mind reader (I’m sure there’s a way to adapt this!)

The online teaching activities index has loads more ideas, though not all for live classes.

The rest of the series

Each week I’ve summarised what our teachers and I have learnt during the transition to online teaching. Every post includes some tips about using Zoom, activities we’ve tried out (many adapted from the face-to-face classroom), and reflections on how my teaching and management have been affected by working from home. Here are all of the posts so far:

• Ideas for adapting group lessons to working on Zoom (this post)
• Moving a school online: reflections from week one of using Zoom
• The transition to working from home
• The world is changing
• The new normal?
• Half a week
• Calmer seas
• What we do
• There’s always a story
• Smouldering
• What a difference a week makes
• The end of normal teaching

You may also find some other posts on my blog/which I’ve written useful:

• Separating work and life when you’re quarantined in one room
• Adding movement to online lessons (a guest post by Olga Stolbova)
• Adding movement to your online lessons (crowdsourced from IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• 4 tips for teaching teens online
• Online activities that really work when teaching teenagers online (a compilation of activities used by IH Bydgoszcz teachers)
• Using NearPod for asynchronous online teaching (a guest post by Katie Lindley)
• Moving teaching online (IATEFL panel discussion recording – I was on the panel)
• How do we teach when we’re teaching online (a guest post by Laura Edwards)
• Mentimeter and word clouds
• TEFL (online) Tantrums (a guest poem by Jenna Edmondson)
• Fortune teller decision maker
• A post-corona SWOT analysis

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay kind. And stay at home (if you still have to!)