Converting your current teaching to online

For this exercise you can work on the whole or part of your weekly teaching set out in the plan from Step 1.4. It will help to think in terms of the intended learning outcomes, as these determine the kinds of activities you will design.

One of the great advantages of online is that it allows flexibility: you can run a face-to-face (f2f) session online and record it for those who cannot make that time. But it is important to link that to a quiz, or a report back to you, to motivate students to actually do it. That also means you can monitor their presence, and follow up with anyone not attending.

This exercise is to redesign part of your normal teaching for online learning. Think in terms of a session that you know well, has clear intended learning outcomes, and that normally runs successfully.

Look at the case studies in Downloads from teachers who have thought through what it takes to move online successfully.

Exercise: Planning from a successful class session

This is a way to think through how best to take the students’ learning into the wholly online world.

1. List the digital resources you already use, and any online tools you currently use for discussion and feedback, such as chat rooms, online forums, Google Classroom, WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, quizzes, polls, Padlet, Mentimeter, Kahoot! etc. Start with what you know, if you can.
2. Use a section of the plan you made in Step 1.4, or work from one of the examples or a blank template in Downloads.
3. Specify the intended learning outcomes, and list the sequence of activities.
4. Complete your plan to convert this session to either blended or wholly online, deciding which learning types and which digital tools you will use. Add extra rows if you need them. If you don’t know which tools to use, just describe what they should do.
5. You could record your presentations, or do it live and record the session. Either way, note that once you have made the video you may be able to re-use it for other classes or contexts.

This plan can be used in the next Activity.

1. To coordinate your plan with your colleagues, especially synchronous online sessions and deadlines for assignments, use the column on the left of the table to specify time and date for each part, as in the Download examples.

You can also send the plan to your students, and to parents and carers of schoolchildren, to support them in ensuring a regular learning pattern.

Comments

Describe any difficulties you found in converting to a blended or online session, so that we can discuss possible solutions.

Let us know the types of digital tools or resources you need, and we can check that we have them covered in the course.

If you have any general questions you would like to discuss, you can post them into Step 1.11. The educator team will begin answering the questions you raise on Saturday.