Teaching part of a group in person and part of it remotely produces a room with two tiers. The first tier gets eye contact, the aside after a question, and the tutor turning towards a raised hand. Remote students get a video of all that.
It is not shyness, and it is not the connection. Cutting into a live discussion from a call costs more than it does from the third row. There is a lag, you cannot read whether someone was about to speak, and if you get it wrong you have talked over a room that cannot see you. So the remote half waits for a gap that never quite arrives, and the tutor reads the silence as everyone keeping up. Asking a question that everybody answers in the same place removes the interruption entirely: nobody has to find a gap, because there is no floor to take.
Six questions across the session, not six in a row. The first goes before you teach anything: it tells you the split you are working with, and it shows the people at home that an answer from a kitchen table lands in exactly the same place as one from the back row. The same shape works for a hybrid meeting.
You need the split before you plan the next two hours, and the last option changes how you write every question after it. It also gets everyone's first answer in early, while it costs nothing to be wrong.
Cheapest possible contribution, and the cloud is the first thing all session where you cannot tell who was in the room. Put it before you teach, so you find out what you are correcting rather than what you are introducing.
Swap in your own item — the point is where it sits. Halfway through is when the room starts nodding along, and a quiz with a countdown closes for everyone at the same moment, so nobody gets the extra second of reading your face.
One tap, so it costs a distracted person almost nothing to answer. Compare the number of responses with the number of people you know are connected: that gap is the closest thing you get to looking at the back of the remote room.
This is the question the whole session is built around. It is aimed at the half that has been sitting on something for twenty minutes, and it works because answering it is not an interruption.
Ends the session on a decision the remote half had an equal share in making, rather than on whatever the loudest person in the room asked for last.
If the room calls answers out and the remote half types them, you have rebuilt the two tiers with extra steps. Everyone answers in the same place, including the student sitting two metres from you.
A shared screen reaches remote attendees late, small, or not at all if they are on a phone. Saying what the numbers show costs ten seconds and is the only version everyone gets.
The count against the number of people connected is your attendance signal for a group you cannot see. A count that slides between the second question and the fourth is worth stopping for; the answers themselves will not tell you that.
Otherwise the room hears only your answer and the person who asked has no way of knowing they were heard. Reading it out also stops you smoothing it into the question you would rather have been asked.
Remote attendees compose the real question once nobody is looking at them, which is usually several minutes after the moment they would have raised a hand. Something that is still open when they get there catches it.
Every question above, ready to edit. Put your own quiz item in, share the code with both halves, and open the first question before you start teaching.
Poll a hall of three hundred and find out who is lost before you move on
Discussion questions that start with everyone already committed to a position
Hear from all thirty, not the four with their hands up
Find out what the class understood while there is still time to act