Primary Pad is a web-based word processor; it allows multiple people to chat and to edit the same document, at the same time. It allows real-time collaboration. And it’s free!

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I chose to use Primary Pad as it offers a text-only solution to working together, and because of this I believed that it would be able to handle a large number of users. And that it did; it easily managed between 30 and 40 people per lesson. Although images and videos can’t be displayed within the Primary Pad environment, they can be linked to – this was my plan for the lessons.

I entered the pads before inviting children to join them so that a welcome message could be displayed upon entry.

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I planned on using the shared document area to, at first, display instructions. This worked well.

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I then invited children to comment, answer questions and to share their thoughts.

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I split the Primary Pad document into year groups as this helped ensure that children were not writing on the same lines as each other and that the writing wasn’t becoming muddled. The different colours represent different writers – this is a nice feature of Primary Pad, although as there are only a few colours for users to pick from it can be hard to determine who’s writing. Some children automatically started writing their names beside their responses to overcome this.

The number of responses to questions amazed me. And to see it happening live was incredible.

After a few minutes of using Primary Pad it was clear that real learning was taking place. Children were watching videos and looking at images and were then thinking about words and sentences to describe what they’d seen. The sharing nature of this kind of work has huge potential – children could see and reflect upon what others had written.

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This was exciting to see, and best of all, the children were really enjoying learning in this way (I stopped one lesson half-way through to ask them). Again, younger children were being supported by parents – they would have struggled accessing the lessons if this wasn’t the case.

One of the issues I haven’t discussed yet in relation to online lessons/learning is child protection. I was aware, during all lessons, that potentially anyone with access to my school’s website could join a session. This did worry me. Primary Pad offers a password-to-enter service, but I had to display passwords on the school website as there was no way of me knowing who wanted to join given the time I had to set up and promote the lessons. If our school’s learning platform was used more widely by children, this would have been the perfect place to post the passwords to the lessons. As this wasn’t the case, and the passwords were public, I (along with other staff) carefully monitored the lessons. Twiddla, the website I used in my first lesson, gave me the option of banning people; Primary Pad didn’t. Because of this, I was ready to close lessons if inappropriate language occurred or if I wasn’t happy with the behaviour of an individual.

In summary, online learning can and does work. The right online tools need to be selected for the purposes required so that learning can occur – the number of users is a key factor in choosing a tool. There are some very exciting online tools available and these will most surely be developed over time.

I guess the big question is: will online learning ever replace in-class learning?

Sitting at home, something exciting was happening online. Teachers on Twitter were thinking and discussing teaching from home using online tools as their schools were closed too. Some were adding learning activities to websites and learning platforms for children to complete, and a few others were experimenting with teaching live lessons from their homes using real-time chat applications.

Live lessons – I had to do this. A quick text to the Headteacher to check that he was happy, and I was away.

Here’s what I did, what happened, what I learned and my reflections.

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Lesson 1 (11am on Thursday 7th January) – English (using adjectives)

For this lesson I was going to use Twiddla.

Twiddla is an online tool that allows people to share a chat room and a whiteboard (which users can draw and type on and which images can be imported to). I chose to use this tool as I wanted a space where I could show images and where children could work collaboratively. I signed up for an account (a free trial for 30 days), set up a room and imported the images I was going to use for the lesson so that I didn’t have to worry about doing this when the lesson was live. Twiddla offers educators a free account when a trial ends (well done Twiddla!); it’s well worth signing up for an account to explore everything that it can offer.

The day before the lesson was due to start I updated my school’s website to let children and parents know about it. All children were invited, although I recommended that younger children were supported by parents. On the day of the lesson, just before 11am, I posted a link to the Twiddla room that we were going to use. I sat and watched, turned around, looked back, and 50 people had joined. 50…

Here was my first problem…  Twiddla struggled to cope. The room was flooded. My browser crashed. Children were sat at home trying to access the lesson and weren’t able to do so. I managed to join the lesson again, despite my browser crashing a few more times. Here’s lesson number one: ensure, when conducting online sessions, that the service you use can cope with the number of people you need it to. Twiddla’s excellent, but at the moment it can’t manage 50 people effectively. It can, however, manage fewer people well – it responded much faster when the lesson had ended and only a few people remained.

Although the Twiddla room was cracking under the pressure, I decided to continue. It was worth carrying on to test the potential of Twiddla and to see if any learning could take place. And it did, but not to the extent that it could have if things were running more efficiently. Of course, the different speeds that users connect to the internet also played a part in the poor performance.

I started by showing the children (and a number of parents and teachers) a snowy image and asked them to brainstorm words related to that image. Some children typed their responses in the chat room to the right of the screen, others tried drawing or typing their responses on the shared whiteboard. It worked well, except for the whiteboard part… imagine giving 20 children a single, shared piece of A4 paper and asking them to scribble their thoughts on it, at the same time. That’s what happened. It was chaotic, but fun. The children were enjoying themselves.

The lesson continued like this, with the chat room being the best place to share ideas. I continued to use the whiteboard to show images and instructions – some children reported later that they couldn’t view these. I attempted to ask the children to write sentences using the brainstormed words – some did and some didn’t.

A big part of this experience was allowing the children to experiment with online learning and the tools provided by Twiddla. The excitement of seeing their friends (and some of their teachers) online was enough for some children; some just wanted to generally chat. But that’s OK – for most of them it was their first time trying something like this. Allowing children to get used to new things and experiment with new ideas is a good thing and we must give time for this. What I could have done was open up the Twiddla room before starting a lesson for children to explore and play with – this way, when it was time for the lesson to begin, the playing and exploring would have been over. Maybe I jumped into using a new tool too quickly.

I felt, after this lesson ended, that learning had taken place, but not the kind of learning that I was expecting. Mostly, I feel the children learned how to use new online tools. The English learning came second to this. I was impressed with the number of children who attended (probably around 35) and the year groups that they came from (right from Reception to Year 6). Children from different year groups rarely experience working with a wide range of children of different ages – it was nice for them to be able to share in this way. It was also brilliant to see parents supporting younger children and taking a real interest in online learning.

So, now that I had experienced live learning online, had a rough idea of how many people were interested in joining these lessons and had reflected on this first lesson, I booked two more sessions for the next day.

Part two coming soon…