Engaging. Interactive. Encouraging. These are some of the words that students at Oak Park High School use to describe their experience with distance learning in Winnie Sloan’s 10th grade biology class. “I really like how you encourage us to be a better version of ourselves and work hard,” one student wrote in a survey Sloan sent to take the pulse of her class.

In her 32 years of teaching, Sloan has made a point of staying on the cutting edge of educational technology. She also makes the most of social media as a teaching tool to connect with students in the online environments where they like to be. 

She’s created hundreds of educational videos, which she posts to her YouTube channel. She also answers science questions and provides inspiration for her students in short videos on her hugely popular TikTok account, which has 83 thousand followers and 1.7 million likes. 

All of this meant Sloan was poised for success when schools abruptly switched to distance learning last spring. A tool called EDpuzzle that she had previously been using turned out to be ideal for distance learning. It lets her create video lectures that students watch on their own time. They’re not able to skip ahead and they have to answer multiple choice questions along the way. Sloan gets an automatically generated report of each student’s progress.

Sloan assigns the EDpuzzles as homework and uses the live class time to answer questions and interact with students. It’s a system she plans to keep in place even after schools reopen and students are back in class. “Forevermore, the homework will be watching the lecture first and then we’ll debrief about it in class,” she says. “That’s where I can help finesse anything they didn’t understand and ask questions that bring their knowledge to a higher level.”

Sloan mentors other teachers on technology and makes all of her materials available for them to use. But surprisingly, her best advice for teachers about succeeding in distance learning has nothing to do with computers, websites or apps. “You better love your kids,” she says. “If they don’t feel the love from your screen to their screen, we’re not doing our job.” That’s why Sloan starts each class by asking students how they’re doing emotionally and she’s open about her own state of mind. “Relationships come first, and that has been my motto for years,” she says.

To learn more about Sloan’s approach to teaching and distance learning and the tools she uses, visit her website at this link.