Teaching in a lockdown

Teaching in a lockdown isn't just about just maintaing relationships and engagement/well-being but also about tracking student development and progression within a curriculum framework.

Simplifying it into two strands allows us to review the tools we have at our disposal to support students much more effectively. Of course, we could break down this type of activity into multiple strands and create comprehensive lists, however, that is not the purpose of this post. Keep it simple so to speak. If you want a decent one - Start here.

Engagement, relationships and well-being

Video conferencing tools like the ones below are quite common and utilised to maintain a face to face connection with your students

• Microsoft Teams
• Zoom
• Google Hangout/Meet
• Flipgrid (Asynchronous version)

Communication tools allow more immediate messaging to students and have a low footprint on that all essential bandwidth.

• Email
• School Authorised Chat Apps 
• Learning Management Systems e.g. Firefly, Edmodo, Classroom
• SeeSaw

Ancilliary tools allow teachers to plan teaching and learning experiences akin to what they would have in the normal classroom.

• YouTube
• Web based tools like Google suite/Microsoft O365/Apple suite
• Pear Deck
• Explain Everything
• Quizlet
• Book Creator

• Ted Ed

These allow teachers to connect with students and support them with synchronous learnimg as well. Pace is set by the teacher and you can also emulate the normal classroom experience to a certain extent. It does take a lot of work to set these up and ancillary tools are often required. Teachers end up managing a lot of the planning, assessment and feedback.

Progression with the school curriculum

These are packages that schools buy and cover the curriculum offered in greater depth. More importantly they track student progression and in some cases offer bespoke pathways for students. These often support the asynchronous model of learning and allow progression at the students pace. A lot of the heavy lifting is taken care of by them, freeing the teacher to make use of the data they generate and in my view allows them to focus more on supporting students in this time of crisis.

• Century.tech
• Mangahigh
• Literacy planet
• iXL
• Kognity

Looking at your context (student and your access to devices/Internet/training) you might want to employ a combination of both approaches. The key is to not reinvent the wheel but look at what the immediate needs of your students are and address those.

As always, start small, keep it simple and then build upon your tech offering, layer by layer.