John's World Wide Wall Display

Watching Higher Ed from afar and seeing some discussion of online teaching, in the face of the coronavirus, from school teachers, Alan’s post is really valuable.

But really, if I was helping folks, my suggestion an strategy would be… do as little as possible online. Use online for communicating, caring, attending to people’s needs, but not really for being the “course”. Flip that stuff outside.

I am reading that along with: HEWN, No. 344 – HEWN (Hack Education Weekly Newsletter):

‘This may be our moment,’ ed-tech folks exclaim, giddily sharing lists of their favorite digital learning tools (with little concern, it seems for questions of accessibility, privacy, or security) and tips for quickly moving ‘to the cloud.’

In schools I have no doubt that there are some (more than some?) classes that are already tooled up and are fortunate that their pupils all have good access, practised with the software and  savvy parents and teachers. If not diving into high bandwidth apps or ones that need the ability to navigate a complex UI might not work that well.

Athole has been teaching primary online for 6 weeks:

@IanStuart66 @Sfm36 @johnjohnston #TeachMeet Virtual Learning Scotland – meet up to share tools, pedagogy and banter to help Scot teachers to support one another and prepare in case of school closures – from one who has now been teaching exclusively online for 6 wks! A goer???

— Mr M (@athole) March 10, 2020

I suspect his pupils might have better home kit, access and tech support? Athole I’d love to know.

My thoughts at the moment are, unless there are school, LA or national diktats :

1. A place to post stuff that is easy for me and familiar for the pupils (for us most probably a blog)
   On that the stuff might be:
   • Links to practise that the pupils are already familiar with, sumdog, some of my own pages, the odd quiz.
   • Ideas for open ending learning either on or offline.
   • Thing that can be done on paper or with easily available materials.
2. A couple of lightweight ways for contact, email, which hopefully most parents will be able to support and possibly Teams, although not all my pupils can use Teams at home. I’ve only used it a couple of times in class to discuss comms software, I can usually communicate with most of my class by talking;-)

I am sure if I am in the situation of teaching from home my instincts would be make something, but I think that might serve my own itchs rather than my pupils.

I might be tempted to try a multiplayer Minecraft Edu edition as we have dipped our toes in it for maths work, but it might be quick tricky across different home networks. My pupils enthusiasm for the game might make it worth it.

I am glad I am not in the position of supporting pupils heading for exams.