There were a good number of schools and educators that were caught flat-footed when the COVID19 pandemic hit, and educators were forced into emergency remote teaching. Not prepared for how to make the transition from classroom learning management to remote teaching management. Parents were forced into emergency homeschooling. Not ready to keep a child-focused on ensuring they are doing all the necessary work, let alone if they were retaining any of that information. It was very challenging for educators, students, and parents. These points were highlighted through many social media posts, a lot of the posts referencing wine being served.

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As an educator, how do you ensure your students are learning in a remote teaching scenario? How do you ensure that your efforts in remote teaching are not wasting your time or your students? What tools are available to educators that would help maximize remote education?

One tool to look at is Mayer's SOI Model. Richard Mayer, a professor at the University of California, developed the model and published his paper on his SOI Model in December 1996. SOI stands for Selection, Organize, and Integrate. This SOI model academically breaks down the three steps required to summarize a concept or topic. The process that a person goes through to create a summary is the Mayer SOI Model. A recent article by Mark Enser titled "What's the key to remote learning?" highlights summarizing as a way to ensure remote teaching is working. Structure lessons so students will need to walk through the three steps, as pointed out in Enser's article:

• Selection - The learner has to think hard about the information from the text or explanation they want to include in their summary and discard it as either irrelevant or, at least, less important.
• Organize - Next, they need to organize the information they have selected in their working memory to put it into a coherent form.
• Integrate - Finally, they will have to integrate this newly structured information into their long-term memory by drawing on prior knowledge to make sense of it.
  

How does this translate to what an educator can use? Instead of making the summary of the assignment. You could ask for the key points, how the key points relate to each other, and lastly, how the critical point(s) refers to a broader context.

Or challenge your students to write better summaries.

Erticulate offers a video platform that can assist with ensuring your students are retaining the knowledge. Have them research a topic, develop a presentation, record themselves delivering their performance, to be turned in for a grade. These steps will ensure they retain what you teach.

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