Fun, engaging remote learning lesson

One rather fun and engaging remote learning lesson involved students guessing which song was a teacher’s favourite. I also tried this with a hybrid class at year 9/10 level. This meant that half my class was face to face at school and half were still learning from home.

Preparation:-

1. I sent out a request via MS Teams in the Staff Team chat asking teachers for their favourite songs. Approximately 12 replied. Some were great and shared the actual youtube link to music clip.
2. A table in Word showed the teacher name, song title and youtube link. (It would probably have been easier if I had put the links on a blog post on my class blog)
3. Setup 2 more Word documents – one for students with the Teacher name in one column and the a heading for the song title. This was shared with students via the chat feature so that they could add the teacher’s name upon hearing the song. Another word document was for my use with the links to the songs. As I shared my screen I couldnt use the one with the answers on)
4.  Setup the live meeting with Meet Now in MS Teams when it was class time. The word document was shared in the chat. I briefly explained what we were doing.
5. Then I shared my screen. Make sure you check “Share system audio” so that students can hear the music remotely. See image below
   
6. I worked my way through the youtube clips, played the clips for about 30-60 seconds, with students typing up the teacher whose favourite song they thought it was.
7. After each group of 5 or 6 songs, we went through the answers.
8. In the next class, students wanted to share and guess each other’s favourite songs.
9. The sent the youtube link to their favourite song to me in the chat.
10.  I played them through to ensure that they were ok and then set up similar word documents. Except this time I added the links to my blog which was much easier to quickly access the clips in real time.  See this blog post COVID19 and scroll down till you see the links to the songs that were favourites for some of my year 9/10 students.

I was pleasantly surprised with their music choices and only one student had shared an inappropriate one, which I censored prior to the class.

Summary: Students really engaged with this activity and wanted more. There was no real lag from me playing the song clip over Teams to them listening to it. For those students who had trouble with internet access, they could be given the sheet with the song links and teachers names on and do it in their own time, when internet access was stronger.