In this episode, John shares 20 strategies for increasing synchronous virtual classroom engagement. They are:

1. Seating charts – A great tool for keeping notes about your students, to help build connections.

2. Communicate early – Let students’ parents or guardians know early about issues, but do so in a non-confrontational way.

3. Crystal Clear Directions – Set cue, give time, task, materials, and drop cue.

4. Silence can be Golden – Give students quiet work time.

5. Chat Waterfalls – Give an opportunity for all students to write, and submit their answers simultaneously.

6. Breakout the Steps – Give all of the steps in breakout groups on breakout slides.

7. Assign Specific Roles – When working in breakout groups, assign each student a specific role.

8. Group Active Students Together – Reward active students with active partners in breakout work.

9. Gallery Walks – Allow breakout groups to show off their work through gallery walks.

10. Stations – Have students move to various stations to learn.

11. Escape rooms – Create escape rooms for students to work through, like this one from Peters Township Public Library in McMurray, PA: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSflNxNM0jzbZJjUqOcXkwhGTfii4CM_CA3kCxImbY8c3AABEA/viewform

12. Choice Boards – Give students choice in how they engage.

13. Cold Calling – Call on various students to get a sampling of class understanding, not just volunteers.

14. Participation Squares – Divide screen space between participants, to have multiple participants working on screen at once.

15. Teach Routines – Just like in a brick and mortar school, teaching routines will save time in the long run.

16. Welcome Students by Name – This will start the session off right!

17. I Don’t Know Yet – Adding this choice to polling questions allows you to distinguish between students who don’t know the answer, and those who are not engaged.

18. Practice Success – Allow students to change their answer to the correct answer after reteaching.

19. Voice – Your body language becomes less important and your voice more important in an online setting. Use it well.

20. Find You Passion – Get excited about your subject area, and share that passion with your students.

In this episode, John is joined by three Agora Cyber School parents, Sonya, Valerie, and Jamie. They share some background about themselves and their students, and offer advice to cyber school teachers, family coaches, and schools on how to build partnerships between schools and parents.

Intro and outro music provided by BenSound.com.

In this episode, Agora High School World History, and AP World History Teacher, Jesse Nicholas joins John and Robin to discuss scaffolded writing techniques. He tells how distributed practice, combined with his three-step process of using sentence starters, guided constructed response paragraphs, and differentiated rubrics led to writing gains for his students.

In this week’s episode, John and Robin are joined by Agora Elementary math teachers, Jessica Boyer and Beth Ann Stevens. Jessica and Beth Ann have been on a journey to learn all they can about teaching word problems, or story problems, to students, and have been trying their techniques in the cyber school classroom. In today’s episode, you will be able to discover what some of the current research shows about teaching story problems effectively.

John and Kelly welcome Agora Cyber School Reading Specialists, Janet Whippo, Lisa Samar, and Michelle Tilsner to discuss "the summer slide." They share strategies on how teachers can motivate students and parents to get reading over the summer, and to avoid the dreaded summer slide.

Why have high school students mentor elementary school students? How does it benefit the high school student? How does it benefit the elementary student? And how would a school go about setting up a program where elementary school students are mentored by high school students? 

We also welcome Agora Kindergarten teacher, Amy Lutz who has a high school mentor in her classroom. 

And we welcome our very first student guest, Erica M., who mentors Amy's Kindergarten students. 

The four hosts of the Cyber PD Podcast, Katie, Kelly, Steve, and John, are reunited in this episode to discuss differentiation in cyber schools. They define the term, discuss its importance, the philosophy behind it, and some strategies that could be used to incorporate differentiation into your classroom.

This was a listener requested episode. If you would like to request a topic for an episode, please do so in the comments section of our blog.

John and Kelly welcome Pam Sieger to the show to discuss methods for teaching students who are advanced learners or who are gifted in cyber schools. Pam is an ELA teacher at Agora Cyber Charter Middle School, and is also on the board of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education (PAGE).

• Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education (PAGE) Website

• When Gifted Kids Don't Have All the Answers

In this episode, Katie and Steve take a closer look at being trauma informed and trauma sensitive with guests, Maegan Bregenser and Mike Scheirer. They discuss signs of trauma that cyber school teachers can see when they are on the other side of a computer, how teachers should respond when seeing signs of trauma, research about the importance of building relationships with students affected by trauma, and more.

• Routines

For a complete list of resources, visit our blog, at cyberpdpodcast.blogspot.com.

Jennifer Barrios and Gina Sczepkowski join Katie and Steve to discuss being trauma informed and trauma sensitive. They briefly discuss how trauma affects the brain, and why language, empathy, listening to students, and recognizing that “one-size-fits-one” is critical to student learning. They also discuss the unique situation Agora Cyber Charter is in for addressing the needs of students who have suffered through traumatic experiences.

Episode Resources available at CyberPDPodcast.blogspot.com