As you will be aware with the new Government advice and the possible changing situation I thought it would be good to share my experience from working from home and moving to more online learning.

 

I have had a few stumbling blocks this morning, but the majority of students have responded well to the work which has been set.  From this morning the points I would consider are;

 

• Make sure that all instructions are as clear as possible on whatever online platform you are choosing to work from

• Scaffold tasks as much as possible.  Some students rely heavily on teacher input and some of this will be new to them so make it explicit what you want them to do.  I found a lot of templates and examples worked well thus morning.

• I have tried to run working from home to coincide with my timetabled lesson.  This has built on the factor of routine and students are aware when I am available to help them with specific tasks

• Students have asked a lot of questions about the tasks set.  It was hard to keep up at times and similar questions were being asked by different students.  I started to open a discussion on canvas or through teams (whichever you prefer) for that allocated lesson time.  This seemed to work better as students could access the question feed and see if anyone else had a similar problem/question.  It also meant that I wasn’t typing the same question.

• I tried to give some verbal feedback in canvas, but this is going to be a work in progress as I think I need better equipment.  (if you have some I think this would save time in feedback)

• I set up tasks as assignments that I gave submission times (these expired at the end of the lesson) this gave SOME students a sense of urgency in getting the work completed as I could see which students hadn’t completed work or handed in work late.

• I have created a working from home section in canvas with allocated dates of what students should complete in lessons.  This was mainly to make it user friendly.

• You can also track students interactions with canvas easily to see if they have accessed the page, if not a message to them has worked to ask what they are doing.

• As I say it is all new to us all.  Any other experiences I have I will let you know as the days go on.

 

Regards

Andrew