Back-To-School - Distance Learning Style

Early on in 2020, a difficult and disruptive journey began! The rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic left several schools around the globe scrambling to transfer their organisation onto an online platform, any online platform. This meant taking a look at budgets and staff's skills to decide which particular platform would be best suited for individual schools. Unfortunately, as with all things that carry such importance, the 'one size fits all' concept simply does not apply and with very few educators having mastered the art of teaching online at that point, no-one was available to provide adequate training to prepare a human being to relearn their entire vocation again from scratch; being left alone to develop those all essential skills of interaction and motivation in a new and scary digital world.

Initially being set up for businesses, online platforms were not fully prepared to take on what would be a demanding onslaught of requests from education professionals. Frequently asked questions including how do I mute the children? They are kicking me out of my own lessons how can I stop this? I can't see the class, how can I present the lesson while simultaneously implementing behaviour strategies? The children in my class have more than one teacher, how can we coordinate this? The list is endless and undoubtedly is growing by the day, becoming more complicated as teachers around the world grow comfortable with their new technical skills and decide it is time to explore more in a bid to deliver stimulating and interactive lessons through a screen.

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The future remains uncertain, but many predict the most likely outcome to be a balance between online learning and So what did we learn from our mistakes and how can we move forwards and prepare for the next school year?

1) The students are just as nervous as you are!

Just like the 1st day of school (real-life school), everyone experiences those 1st-day jitters. Everyone has been propelled outside of their comfort zone, add that to the mounting pressure you feel from the question - does the camera really add 10 pounds? Then anxiety and apprehension are bound to be normal feelings that educators everywhere will experience. However, the good news is that the children will be feeling exactly the same as you do. The best way to move past this for all in the call would be to introduce yourself in a creative way to immediately strike that personal connection with the children.

• Have some appropriate holiday and quarantine snaps ready to share - if there is one thing parents, teachers and children all have in common, it's a lockdown. Tell a story about a fun time you had and support your story with visual aids this will help your confidence as well as make you more relatable. The sillier the activity the better, build suspense - you'll never guess what happened next...

• Collect some objects that represent your hobbies and interests, if you're a teacher and don't have time for hobbies, make something up.

• Use them to play a guessing game, slowly reveal a tennis ball or a book cover - luckily if you are faced with an awkward silence, they are your hobbies so you can simply keep talking.

• Tell the children to leave the screen and find an object that represents something they are interested in and come back to the lesson and show everyone.

• Keep screen time short on day 1 and set an offline activity

2) The parents are watching everything we say and do!

This is inevitable - parents and guardians will be floating around in the background, if not taking up the entire screen! This is perfectly normal. It is a natural reaction to their own worries and fears of anxiety, but don't worry - once they see that their child is comfortable in front of a screen and understands the basics of a working computer - they will soon be off doing their own things, confident that their children are once again in safe hands!

• Address the parents directly with a hello and hope you had a great summer - don't ignore the fact they are there.

• Ask them to help the children get into position in the centre of the camera and other tasks such as muting and leaving and joining a call.

• Play Simon Says with the whole family using commands that you will help children practice commands that you will need the children to be used to; such as raise your 'virtual hand' and sharing and un-sharing the video feed. Throw in some brain break activities in for good measure - tap your head and rub your belly!

• Involve parents in lessons where you are teaching how to use the different platforms.

• Thank the parents for their help with this and dismiss them in a friendly way! For example, parents you can leave now, thank you so much for your help if we need anything I'll ask your child to bring you back to the call. Now I'm sure you all have so many things that you need to be getting on with - don't worry about us - Class 3c will be fine! Bye for now!

3) Essential agreements and rules

You wouldn't let your 1st week pass you by in the classroom without setting rules to follow and goals to aim for!

• Ensure you dedicate a couple of lessons in that first week to outline your expectations and guide the pupils to agreeing upon online rules together.

• Create a slide with 4/5 of your most important rules, you may find the need to cover these at the start of every lesson for some time.

• Include parents in this process as well, you will rely on their support to enforce these at home.

4) Early burn out!

Many schools, especially private schools, blindly threw out incredibly high expectations of teachers with little or no training for online lesson implementation, leaving teachers vulnerable to technical issues, undue stress and parental complaints. Branching out into the numerous teaching apps that you have never used before, is not only going to rapidly increase your workload but will also overwhelm the children.

• Keep the first few weeks simple and stick to a platform you are personally familiar with, such as PowerPoint.

• Try not to go overboard with exciting technological skills and plough all your time into videos with green screen backdrops and animations. These are essential motivational tools which will be needed further down the line.

• Find activities that the entire class can do independently and avoid differentiation in the first instance to allow children time to adjust to this new form of learning, new class and teacher.

• Plan for shorter activities and an extension.

5) How do I log on? How does it work?

Teachers are experiencing questions of how to do something incredibly simple on a platform that has been used every day for months! This is something everyone can relate to, with several memes depicting teachers' reactions to such requests as the weeks pass by. While this may never be overcome, there are steps that can help reduce the quantity and frequency of such requests.

• Prior to the first class, record a video or find a ready-made tutorial on how to use the basics on your school's chosen platform.

• As parents to watch the video and help their children out before the first lesson. Let's assume that at least 20% of parents will carry out this task.

• Deliver lessons on how to use the platforms BEFORE expecting children and parents to use them.

• Share your screen and model the use of the platform in every lesson, for example, if editing activities in Seesaw, share your screen and show them exactly how to access and edit activities, ensuring to commentate and describe exactly what you are doing.

How do I login again? What's my password?

• Ask parents to support the logging on of different platforms by saving the username and password information to log the children in automatically each time.

• Where possible, download apps for the platforms which don't require students to log in every time they need to access them.

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With several of the main issues circulating around children and parents, the most effective solution is to unite the two and allow your lessons to evolve with all of the new factors and members with which it finds itself. If you don't yet have distance learning experience, these tips are a great place for you to start. If you do, then ask yourself "What would you do differently next time?" and create your own action plan to support your return to distance learning with a new class.

Share your own experiences and tips in the comments section.

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