Teaching children eight miles away (pt 2)

For my next two lessons (English and Science) I decided to use Primary Pad.

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?