Last night the heavens opened and let out their snow again which meant that we were shut as it was all very dangerous out on the roads. We officially shut at about 7.30am then the online lesson buzz started via Twitter! If you have read a previous blog post you'll know that a few teachers tried this last week - as did I and another teacher at my school.
A fellow teacher -Emma Barker at a neighbouring school was online and already talking about her online lesson using Coveritlive. I had this idea that we could do something together about differences and similarities between the 2 schools. We decided that as the schools are not that far apart, some of the children probably knew each other already.
Then along came more collaboraters! We couldn't have done it without them. Massive thanks to my HT for giving the go ahead, Dughall McCormick for massive help on the Digital Brain - also helping on the DB thanks to Tom White and James Greenwood!
We started off with a primarypad that enabled us to share ideas for online surveys to get the differences and similarities ideas flowing. Primary pad also enables you to share with others and chat. We then created 2 wallwisher walls for then children to post their ideas and questions.
The DB was firing on all cylinders with ideas! Dughall created the joint community, children were added, surveys created, threads in the forums were added by all of us. As we - or someone else had an idea the whole thing grew and grew - now all we needed were children!
We sent out a group text - Emma Barker will guest post on here and tell you how she contacted her class. So far we've had some uptake but not massively - this gets my brain working...
I've recently read a blog - can't remember who but if it's you then get in touch! - about how schools could have something in place for online lessons in weather such as this when many schools are closed. If online lessons are to be truly successful then most of the children in a class need to want to log on and access it. So far we have had a few between us - it's still early days and many may well contribute this evening.
So - how do we get the children to log on for some part of the day to access online lessons?
Here are a few ideas...
A fellow teacher -Emma Barker at a neighbouring school was online and already talking about her online lesson using Coveritlive. I had this idea that we could do something together about differences and similarities between the 2 schools. We decided that as the schools are not that far apart, some of the children probably knew each other already.
Then along came more collaboraters! We couldn't have done it without them. Massive thanks to my HT for giving the go ahead, Dughall McCormick for massive help on the Digital Brain - also helping on the DB thanks to Tom White and James Greenwood!
We started off with a primarypad that enabled us to share ideas for online surveys to get the differences and similarities ideas flowing. Primary pad also enables you to share with others and chat. We then created 2 wallwisher walls for then children to post their ideas and questions.
The DB was firing on all cylinders with ideas! Dughall created the joint community, children were added, surveys created, threads in the forums were added by all of us. As we - or someone else had an idea the whole thing grew and grew - now all we needed were children!
We sent out a group text - Emma Barker will guest post on here and tell you how she contacted her class. So far we've had some uptake but not massively - this gets my brain working...
I've recently read a blog - can't remember who but if it's you then get in touch! - about how schools could have something in place for online lessons in weather such as this when many schools are closed. If online lessons are to be truly successful then most of the children in a class need to want to log on and access it. So far we have had a few between us - it's still early days and many may well contribute this evening.
So - how do we get the children to log on for some part of the day to access online lessons?
Here are a few ideas...
- Give online lessons a high priority in class, especially if the weather is forecast to be bad
- Decide on the online, collaborative tools you will use - live or not live
- Teach the children how to use them
- Give them the expectation that there will be an online lesson and how they will be notified as to the time if it is in live real time
- Be enthusiastic and excited, make them want to log on!
My evaluation of today is that what we achieved could not have been achieved without online collaboration. Several varying activities were set up for the children to do that involved learning at their level - collaborative project + work via their year group page on our VLE.
The way forward is to set this in stone so that all KNOW that there will be an expectation to take part in an online lesson should the school be shut due to bad weather.
Emma Barker did a fantastic online lesson using coveritlive which I hope you will enjoy reading about.
There is no reason that this should not become the norm - we the educators just need to embrace the technology and use it!
Comments (0)
Post a Comment