Back in March 2020 when we first went into lockdown my remote teaching was very very different to what it is now. I was very green to using Microsoft teams and was unsure about muting students, adding students to meetings, sharing screens and powerpoints etc. Fast forward two lockdowns later and further experience having bubbles isolated for 2 weeks between lockdowns, I'd like to think I've got a lot better from those initial lessons. I want to highlight my progress during this year because even though my teaching is gone from being in the classroom to being online I am still looking to improve my practice. High performance is the constant pursuit of improvement.
So, let me take you back to March 2020 when we first went into lockdown. I was teaching using, primarily, a visualiser. I would print off my lesson powerpoint, model and explain the lesson and show the questions I wanted students to do under the visualiser. Now at first view you may think that's not too bad, actually that's probably a pretty good job however I still didn't really know what the students did or didn't understand. I also had issues with the screen lagging and being slightly behind my explanations in my talking and so often had to really slow down my teaching, which in turn, meant that I got through very little in a lesson. However I was happy with what I was doing at that time because it meant that the students were still being exposed to live modelling of the concepts using my prefferred methods. Besides, remote teaching was a new concept and very little guidnace was given on the most effective ways to teach.
In the next stage of my remote teaching development, I started to use a graphics tablet. It is safe to say it has been a gamechanger for me. Using the graphics tablet, coupled with Microsoft Onenote, meant that my explanations were much crisper and clearer and students could see diagrams a lot easier compared to using a visualiser. It reduced lagging and I felt that I could adapt my teaching a lot quicker to student needs. I had improved the teacher explanation stage of my lessons and enabled students to follow the instruction far easier. I was still unable to assess what students could independently complete, my only assessment would come from students asking me questions in lessons.
At my school we have use of the wonderful Hegarty maths website, and so I started to link my lessons to a hegarty maths task to be completed after my teacher explanation. I could then monitor the work being completed live during the lesson, picking up on errors and mistakes that were being made, using Onenote to reclarify the topic. I was also able to extend some students on to harder tasks much easier by encouraging students to complete the next available task. I do recognise some of the limitations with using Hegarty however it is a further improvement and another step to better remote teaching.
Fast forward to the present day, along with using Microsoft Onenote, my graphics tablet and linking lessons to Hegarty Maths, I have started to use the website whiteboard.fi. For me this has really developed my own online teaching and I am able to quickly check understanding before I set students off to do an independent Hegarty task. Some teachers may call them pivot questions, I think of it as being the 'WE' part of my lesson. I set 2 or 3 questions at the end of my teacher explanation (I phase) to check that students were able to follow my model. If the majority of the students were struggling I would go through further examples reiterating some of the key points to ensure success. If students were happy and could get the questions correct I would obviously move onto a independent task using Hegarty Maths (YOU). One of the big benefits of using the whiteboard website was that I was able to pick out some of the misconceptions, screenshot them and put them on the screen for all students to see. We could then discuss the errors made and highlight some of the misconceptions that students had within the topic we were going through.
As we all know technology isn't the be all and end all however I have found these few things have certainly improved my remote teaching during these strange times. One thing I am very aware of is the over reliance on technology which is why I try to restrict my lessons to only using Microsoft Onenote, whiteboard.fi and Hegarty Maths. I feel that overcomplicating what we are doing during these times will just add stress to an already tough job. The aim is just to get one percent better each time, marginal gains soon add up.