Teaching children eight miles away (pt 1)

Like many in England, I’ve been stuck at home for much of this week. The snow really hit and my school shut its doors as many staff, children and parents were in the same position as me – unable to make it in.

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…