Finally! After all these years my online experience comes in handy. Though actually having to pivot online at a few days notice is nobody’s idea of the ideal circumstances in which to do so. And while I was happy to help, I can see that there is an overwhelming amount of material coming out to do the same. I produced what I was commissioned to do but my main message would be to
look out for your students,
slow down the pace and
lower expectations where this is possible
The nightmare scenario is expecting a full school day on Zoom. This is wrong on so many levels. And the final piece of generic advice is that now is not the time to be experimenting with all sorts of whizz-bang tech.
Keep it simple and put well-being first, pedagogy second and tech a very distant third.
So what did I do?
A webinar on lesson planning and task design online for the British Council.
Blog posts for Cambridge University Press
Checking your students’ learning is a blog post on how to use Google Forms and Microsoft Survey to create quizzes.
Quizlet for teaching vocabulary is an introduction to the free features of Quizlet.
In the end we all have to remember that emergency teaching online is not at all the best that online has to offer. So please don’t judge online courses by what is going on right now!