Despite the positive developments of the past week and a creeping optimism, it still appears that social restrictions, and consequently some form of disrupted teaching, will be with us for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of some useful techniques and applications to supplement your teaching, whether you are conducting lessons wholly in the classroom, online, or a combination of the two – i.e. ‘hybrid teaching’. It’s this sort of teaching that leaves you wishing that you had eyes in the back of your head – hence our title. If you have any suggestions, please comment below so that we can share as much ‘best practice’ as possible!
1. Pupil-Priming
Our first suggestion is a simple one, but it is a technique that will save you plenty of time over the course of a term. Anybody teaching absent pupils online will be familiar with the following situation: you ask that perfectly phrased question that has been formulated specifically for that pupil’s needs … and you are met with a mood-dissipating silence. Or, slightly better, a succession of ‘um’s and ‘ah’s.
Rather than wait for what might seem like an eternity, simply prime the virtual students beforehand with the question. By telling them (at the beginning of an exercise) precisely which question they should be focusing on, you circumvent any loss of momentum and keep the student fully engaged in the activity.
2. Assessment Near and Far
Restrictions on teaching in person have evidently forced us to develop in new directions at an astonishing rate: this is probably most true for methods of assessment, given the relative simplicity of communicating information and questions to our students, but the comparative difficulty of receiving useful (if any) clear evidence of learning from remote students.
As a result, the following applications have been helpful in enabling direct assessment, and bridging the gap between ‘present’ and remote learners, while allowing aesthetically-pleasing, smooth running activities. The first is NearPod: in short, this website allows you to interdisperse questions in videos, which your students can answer via their devices in real time. There a variety of options: you can select from a pre-existing catalogue of videos uploaded on the site (although the classics offerings are frustratingly slight); you can upload a video directly from YouTube, and then type your questions over the top of it; and you can even make your own recordings, or challenge your students to create quizzes for the rest of the class!
The second website is Mentimeter: this application might be built around slideshows, but it is similarly interactive and integrated. By creating your presentations via this website, students can easily switch from consuming new information to completing formative assessment, all within a few clicks. Again, devices are necessary for the students, and their (anonymous) responses are beamed straight back onto the presentation. In terms of immediate formative assessment that is adaptable for remote learners, this is a godsend: we also use it for starter / plenary activities, as a way of quickly reviewing key information. To us, it is far more malleable and useful than something like Kahoot, as well as offering the integration of information and testing.
3. Perfect Pronunciation
Depending on the software that your school has chosen to utilise, there will be a huge range of options for the following suggestion. We are currently using a combination of Microsoft OneNote and Firefly: focusing on the former for a moment, the ability to attach audio recordings to pages offers the opportunity not only to save time in written feedback , but it also allows you to record perfect pronunciations of key terms and vocabulary.
This function would also be useful for your aural learners as they prepare for set text examinations: one of our former students made ‘audio-book’ recordings (performed in different voices!) to be listened to by their sleeping classmates!
4. A Space For All
For years, we’ve been looking for a way to improve vocabulary lists: not only are there underlying pedagogical issues as to how we approach vocabulary lists as practitioners, but we’ve also struggled with how to make them more effective for students.
The use of the ‘collaboration space’ function on Microsoft OneNote has, consequently, been a revelation: its applications have been various, but it has been most effective as a ‘communal’ vocabulary tool. Our current U6th Latin set are beginning to translate unseen verse passages for the first time: hit by wave after wave of words unique to verse (and some to Ovid!), they have benefited from using the collaboration space as an area where they can write any frequently occurring (and forgotten) words. It’s an exercise that is subtly supportive (both in terms of language acquisition and in building class spirit), and it makes for an easy starter or plenary activity.
Naturally, this type of collaboration space is multi-faceted: one can use it for myriad activities, not limited to vocabulary games, grammar spotting and peer correction (only for the truly brave!).
5. Whiteboard Wizardry
Mini-whiteboards have long been an excellent resource for straight-forward assessment: it’s probably the easiest way to conduct formative assessment for an entire class at once. For those at home, whiteboard.fl provides a much-needed digital alternative; one simply sets up a ‘class’ online, sends the code to the pupils, and then watches as individual whiteboards appear. The teacher can see all of the whiteboards simultaneously, making it a brilliant tool to assess simple questions (like comprehension or vocabulary), or slightly more complex tasks (such as translation or composition). The extra level of discretion is perfect for less confident learners, or those who feel unable to volunteer answers in front of their classmates.
6. Essay Expansion
When a class is examining a ‘longer’ question – be that as part of a literature module or an essay for Classical Civilisation or Ancient History – it can sometimes be quite easy to lose a neat structure for particular arguments. Evidently, this is even more the case for those trying to contribute remotely. Kialo offers a workable solution, as we’ve depicted below: this debate forum allows a teacher to ask a particular question, and then creates a clear structuring device to the various points that the students bring up or type in themselves. The easy visualisation of the argument means that it is simple for the students to follow and add points as the discussion develops. This is an activity that could be readily incorporated into revision for any ‘long’ answer at GCSE, A Level or IB; the discussion is saved to the website, ensuring that students can refer back to it in their preparation for exams.
7. Channel Hopping
As soon as schools began to shut back in March, one of the most prominent problems (out of the many that arose) was the fact that students became increasingly reticent in the face of their remote classmates. It became apparent that, just as in the traditional classroom, pupils were more likely to voice opinions and interact with their peers if they were divided into smaller groups: Microsoft Teams offered the ability to split the class into separate ‘meetings’, through which the teacher could cycle throughout the lesson. This allowed us to provide a far more ‘safe’ environment for our pupils; the only limitations were the fact that you could cycle through *only* five calls at one time, and that you had to announce your ‘rejoining’ the meeting, so as to avoid eavesdropping inadvertently!
8. Traffic Lights on Teams
On a similar note, Microsoft Teams offers rather an oblique way to assess understanding and confidence for those remote pupils who aren’t confident enough to reveal weakness in front of the class. The application offers you a variety of options on how to present your current availability: ‘green’ for ‘available’, and so forth. It is simple enough to translate this system into a code or ‘traffic light’ system for your online learners: ‘green’ for confident, ‘yellow’ for ‘uncertain’ and ‘red’ for ‘I need more time!’ – just as we might use to check learning in the classroom.
9. Screen-Shackled?
It’s a point that has been repeated time and again, but that shouldn’t detract from the clear truth: in a period of time when our pupils are spending even more of their existence – both social and scholastic – in front of screens, there is immense value in finding an activity that gives eyeballs a break. We’ve spent a lot of time reading myths to our younger year groups, encouraging them to focus on anything but their computers; for those wanting to give their voices a rest or just in need of a good script, you can find an amazing collection of tales from Ovid here, kindly produced by the Faculty of Education at Cambridge! Although there are evident benefits in steering into this ever-changing digital world of education, there is no harm in falling back on some old favourites…
10. Letting Go Of The Past
That said, we shouldn’t be concerned with attempting to replicate our teaching from ‘the before times’. The teaching community is eminently adaptable, resilient and inventive: though we hope that some of the above has been useful, we are fully aware that, for many readers, our suggestions will be a few drops in the bucket of emerging practice.
Naturally, this has been written from a particular perspective, after six months of utilising very specific programmes and applications: as a result, we may be well unaware of some fantastic developments / resources that our peers are using – if that is the case, please let us know below!
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