Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools and universities have been dealing with shutdowns to keep their staff and students safe. We know that adapting to teaching online can require a bit of time and can be a difficult transition to make from a traditional classroom. To help our hardworking educators, we’ve created a short guide on getting the most out of your lessons with LiveWebinar. It's high time for online webinars for teachers and teaching online.
First Steps
To create a lesson, go to your account, and select “Schedule Webinar”. You’ll be able to choose the name, date, and time of your lesson. Another important feature is the possibility to send reminders that your online class is coming up so that your students have their calendars marked and ready.
Online webinars for teachers and students are a great way to hold lessons. But before your lesson starts, try to check a few things off your pre-lesson to do list! Make sure that you send your students reminders a couple days before your class, and the day of. To be able to join your lesson, send your students personal Attendee link, which will take them directly to your class.
Right before starting your webinar, remember to also enable your audio and video (for a tutorial click this link and scroll down to “How to give access to camera & microphone on your PC”). Also decide whether you’d like to record your online lesson, if you choose to do so, your students will have a great resource to fall back on in case they need to review your material again. If you’d like to read more on how to record your webinars, click here. See? Teaching online can be easy!
Features of LiveWebinar to be used in classes
Online webinars for teachers are simple to use, easy to explain to students and allow you to take advantage of many new features such as screen sharing. Here we’re listing a bunch of the features that LiveWebinar offers that are perfect for educators and make attractive online webinars for teachers and students. To access these features, click the “+” icon at the top left of the LiveWebinar screen or click “Open Share Menu”.
Video sharing
Videos are a great way to imbue students with knowledge, and capture attention very easily (I’m sure older students remember the excitement of a teacher rolling the TV cart into class – think of sharing video as the online alternative!). Video sharing can be done with the help of YouTube, Vimeo and Brightcove players. You can autoplay the videos, or choose when to include them in your online class. Need a tutorial on how to share videos for teaching online? Click here for help with sharing videos from YouTube and click here for sharing videos from Vimeo.
Document sharing
Share your documents and presentations by uploading them to your LiveWebinar account storage and access and share them during your class and teaching online. In the drop-down menu simply click on “Storage”, you will be redirected to your documents that were uploaded to your LiveWebinar account. Simply click on “Present” when you hover your cursor over your selected document, and voilà, your participants now see the document as well. You can also link a Prezi presentation if you want to add some more lively presentations (thanks to this, online webinars both for teachers and its students can be held in a more interactive way)! For a tutorial on sharing documents from storage, click here.
Tests and Surveys
Quiz your students on your subject with the help of the test feature, create short quizzes, in multiple choice or yes/no formats. Polls and surveys are good for getting feedback during teaching online or answers which might involve a longer response. If you need help with getting started with polls and surveys check the manual here.
Breakout rooms
Split your students into teams in breakout rooms, give them problems to solve, or projects to work on when teaching online. Facilitate teamwork and remember to check in on the room throughout the lesson to see how students are doing. To check out how breakout rooms work, click here.
Screen sharing
Share your screen with your students so that everyone is on the same page (literally). Screen sharing during online webinars is salutary for teachers. We must note however that the screen sharing feature is not yet available on Safari. For a manual on how to screen share, click here.
Whiteboard
Use the whiteboard feature to better teach online. Draw on documents, videos and presentations to help bring a point home. Your students also can use this feature, increasing your classroom interaction. If you need more information on how to work the Whiteboard, click here.
Tips for getting started
- Send reminders! - We’re not saying that your students will forget about your class because they don’t need to leave home, but it’s a possibility. Send email notifications to students about class a couple days before and the day before class.
- Don’t Fumble - Keep all your materials in one place – before your class, make sure that you upload them to your LiveWebinar storage so that you can access them directly (and don’t need to lose time during class looking for them).
- Engage your students! - Keep your students engaged during your lesson by taking advantage of features offered by your software – Tests and Polls, Whiteboard and Breakout Rooms are great ways to keep your students on their toes during an online class.
- Get to know what you’re working with - Before using a new software it’s always best to take a little time and see what you’re dealing with so that you can keep your class running as smoothly as possible.
Teaching online can be fun! All of this will build online webinars for teachers more interesting ways for lessons, and teaching online will become more enjoyable. We hope that this quick rundown will be help you get an idea of how to harness the power of LiveWebinar for teaching online. For a more in depth guide to online classes, check out this article on Online Classes - Five Ways to Success, or this article on How To Create Webinars That Teach?. If you want even more tutorials, visit our YouTube channel here. Good luck and happy (Live)webinaring!
We’ve also added a concise (yet handy) infographic for teaching online, download it here!