Learning to teach remotely

It was late March and we were all surprised by the prospect of remote teaching. There was no time for schools to train staff and no time for teachers to model the new types of lessons with students. I didn't even have time to see some of my students, hand books out etc. One day they were there and we told them everything was going to carry on as normal and the next day they were gone and starting online lessons.

The challenges are huge. In the last few years I have slowly been introducing some ITC into my teaching, but it was always widely modelled, always required a number of lessons to go through things and to answer questions. This time we had none of that.

It's been over 10 weeks now, with a lot of ups and downs, but overall it's been a learning curve. Since remote learning started, one of my greatest complaints has been that students were unable to follow all instructions. Not because they are incompetent, but because there are too many instructions, and they get lost.

In the classroom we can give one instruction at a time and check that they understand it before moving on. Remotely, however, it is a lot harder to do that. When I started teaching online I was posting slides with information and booklets where they had to complete questions. Don't get me wrong - this was all broken down and scaffolded, but I think that switching back and forth between documents with several pieces of instructions was too much and students were getting lost and overwhelmed.

Here is an example of a lesson in that format:

I started to get lots of emails from confused students and could see that only very able students were managing to complete all the work. So this week we had an online PD in school that presented a new way to scaffold instructions. I decided to try it and it has been working much better for me, so I decided to share this here :)

Here is an example of a lesson I'm doing this week:

We are using google classroom, but I'm sure other platforms allow similar things. Here each task is posted separately and are numbered so students can follow them and complete one at a time. When they click on the task it will have instructions, any other resources (images, videos, links) and say how long they should spend on it. They can also submit the work for that task specifically and I will (hopefully) be giving feedback straight away. It's working really well as they don't have to spend time finding things in different documents; it's better scaffolded and they can find everything they need in one place.

Non of this was my idea, all credit to my school and their awesome PDs :)