We are back! Remote teaching is dead. Long live in-school teaching. Well, we said that after Lockdown one so those words may feel a little less promising now. However, it is time to evaluate how Lockdown 3: Electric Boogaloo has gone. From my point of view, most of the same arguments are being had. Is going live best?
Live teaching has always been a point of discussion in the press. Parents (rightly) want the best for their child and they often feel virtual face time with their class teacher is the best alternative to being in the real classroom. Some schools have taken the Teams pill and have gone fully digital. Lessons are delivered through online platforms like Teams or Zoom with independent consolidation activities set for after the sessions. Some schools have taken a different approach where teachers do their best to imitate childhood heroes, such as Michael Underwood and Jake Humphrey, delivering lessons through home movie style videos. Some schools have tried to strike a hybrid balance between the two and some teachers have had so many children in key worker provision that they have ended up working a dual role. So, as you can see, despite frantically praying to the Twitter education gods, there isn’t a consistent doctrine to consult on the matter.
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Sadly, this isn’t the golden plates you are looking for. But I thought I would share my observations of how my Lockdown 3: Covid with a Vengeance went. In my own year group, we embraced the home movie style of delivery. This approach wasn’t new to me as we had gone down this route through the first lockdown. The new addition was a daily registration session in the morning and one, more relaxed, social session per week. Over time, it became a challenge to maintain engagement. When you are in the classroom you can break your lessons down into bitesize chunks that foster independent thought and learning. Online is much more difficult. Different home environments, device availability, support, concentration, the dreaded technical problem: all of these problems are something we have to try and overcome. There are only so many scavenger hunts you can do before the children start questioning if I am teaching or just finding out what cool stuff they have at home. Just teaching from a PowerPoint becomes a mission as Teams doesn’t like certain fonts or the bandwidth boogeyman forces you to turn off the few webcams you can actually see. I often wondered if the grass was greener with Zoom: Microsoft spends more time telling me it is a good educational platform and less time fixing its flaws. One big lesson I learnt from this experience, that I thought I would never say, is that the live sessions were the most exhausting while the recorded lessons were the most rewarding.
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Which brings me to my video catalogue - what a journey this has been! In the first week of Lockdown 3: The Return of Covid my lessons looked more like they were shot for a horror film than for a Year 2 class. Dark, dingy, slow and often showing a balding man. They were not good enough: I needed to make my kitchen look less like a dungeon and more like a film set. Green screen ordered, I needed to show less of my thinning hairline and bring back some familiarity. I wanted to put myself in front of the lesson slides. Unintentionally, I started with the hard way of doing things: exporting PowerPoint slides as images to use in Doink’s Green Screen app. I then wanted to include some animations so screen recorded me going through the slides while I recorded my face on my iPad. I soon discovered an unknown nemesis (webm) as well as discovering that Microsoft Stream was the digitally embodiment of Two Face as it randomly decided how big the file size would be. I was quite close to giving up but the answer was right there in front of me: Good old reliable PowerPoint. Recording the PowerPoint as I recorded my face saved me both time and effort. It also allowed me to include two really important element of my practice: Humour and questioning.
At my school we use a system call Planet E-stream which has its own pros and cons but it shares a lot of similarities with Edpuzzle. Exploring remote questioning, I started with multiple choice questions and then moved onto a great interactive feature of touching the answer. Like my new lockdown hobby of trying to beat how many Jaffa cakes I can eat at the same time (6 if you must know) I became obsessed with how I could make these lessons better.
Cue, humour. One of the biggest ways of engaging children is to make lesson content exciting. I started using snapchat to film different lenses, which is something I had previously experimented with when creating my advent calendar for my class (a story for another day). As part of whole class feedback, I was a quasi-French artist highlighting good work. I used Chatterpix to have David Attenborough or a Texan Cowboy deliver lesson starters. Anything to keep the children interested and happy. But there was still something missing: A narrative.
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Ever since I was introduced to Seesaw I was hooked. In a nut shell it is a class blogging platform for their work. It’s blank slate design allowed me to include a narrative to my lessons. My first was a 007 themed consolidation lesson for addition and subtraction. My interpretation of Bond may have looked like a commuter on his way to his 9 to 5 but it brought excitement back to my lessons. We went on a mission to stop Adding Adam (pirate snapchat filter) destroying the world. The end of the lesson had a problem for the children to solve (find the code for the bomb). As Seesaw allows embedding videos into the worksheet I made a short 20 second video of us disarming the bomb. But to get them excited for the next lesson I added a new character (Subtracting Steve) who had another bomb. I carried on this process with my two-week shape lessons creating a character called Hank Quinn (Hank the most detective sounding name I could think of and Quinn from my re-watch of Dexter). Having an overarching villain, the Shape Riddler, helped sell the detective story to the children.
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Each school has taken its own approach to remote learning and, like everything to do with teaching, each setting requires a different approach. All we can do is make sure that approach is fulfilled to the best of our abilities and I am thankful for my school's leadership for affording me the flexibility to continue experimenting. But now we are returning and honestly, despite carving out a niche skill in low budget TV programming, I can’t wait as it is great to return to some normality. Lockdown 3: (I have run out of humorous puns for this depressing situation) might be behind us but the lessons learnt about how we deliver our remote provisions should not be forgotten.
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By The Prep School Teacher.
Published 8th March 2021 |