Online Teaching and Learning #1: First few days in Lockdown

Getting ready for lockdown 

When we went into lockdown, there was like a short amount of time to get ourselves sorted, both staff and students.  On the Monday of the lockdown week , I spoke to my seniors about the fact that we will be learning online and not to freak out.  For my year 13's, I spent a whole double period just answering any questions or worries that were top of their minds.  For both my year 12's and 13's, we tried out a hangout meet in our classroom.  They found it strange and were quite shy at first but a test run was a good way to gage how it look and feel.

Trying the hangout in class

Getting our teaching sites ready

The main platform our Social Science department chose to use to connect with our learners were calendars and sites.  I had oversight of our department and took on the job of checking for consistency and accessibility.  In our department we don't have individual teachers sites as such, but a one stop shop website that functions as a centralised hub.  On the landing page, each of the senior subject branches off into it's own specific site.  From those sites, each teacher is in charge of the functionality of that site.    Each landing page has an introduction to the course, calendar, assessment information and a year planner.  

Social Science landing page

For the juniors, I designed a landing page for each tutor class for ease of finding their work.  The aim was to have a centralised place where kids could see a tracking sheet of their work and blogs.

1st days of teaching online:

For the seniors, I had on average 7 students which was great.  Most of them just used the chat function to communicate which I found strange as I felt like I was talking to myself.

For my year 9 class, we had 14 students in the hangout with our project leader Karl and our student support Mr Dunn.  The challenge for this class was to figure out how to continue to work on our projects and in their groups in lockdown.  This is something I want to think about over the next few weeks.  I enjoyed teaching this class and the highlights were discussing what Covid-19 meant to them, Nevaeh asking to use the bathroom and Mathew multi-tasking feeding his baby brother.  I’m really looking forward to ‘hanging’ out with my kids online!

Mr Dunn showing us how flash the internet is

Mathew feeding his little brother