Although I love my career and can’t see myself jumping ship anytime soon, teaching is tough. It’s been especially tough over the last year throughout the pandemic as we’ve had to get to grips with teaching remotely and trying to engage students in learning via a computer screen, when often we can’t even see or hear them. Luckily we have a ton of online tools at our disposal to enable us to do this, so I’ve compiled a list of my favourites.
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This is the fourth in a series of blogposts about remote teaching. As I've said in my previous posts I am by no means an expert in any of this. Although I'm fairly confident with technology, this has all been a major learning curve for me, but I'm happy to share what I've learnt in the hope that someone might find it useful. In this post I'm focusing on some of my top tips for teaching a live lesson via Microsoft Teams.
This is the second in a series of blogposts looking at remote teaching during a pandemic. Click here to read my previous blogpost. At our school each class has its own group set up on Teams, so for example the only people who have access to my 8ESP3 team are the students in that class and my colleague who also teaches this group. Whilst exploring the tools available on Teams I noticed you can add links to the tabs at the top. I’ve added the specific links for Memrise and Seneca, so that students can simply go on and click the tab, then sign in to be added to the correct groups on those sites. I also changed the class avatar for each of my groups to make it easier to find the class I’m looking for. Simply click on the avatar and choose one of the many images already there, or click upload to add your own. I made my own using Canva. I blogged during lockdown one about virtual classrooms, so you can read more about that and find a free template by clicking here, but essentially it’s everything my students need hyperlinked on one PowerPoint slide. I did this to make things a bit more student friendly and because I wanted them to have everything in one place. The one below is actually one I made when the schools were “open” (the schools have always been open) before the current lockdown, so it needs updating, but it has links to any websites we use, as well as links to any important folders and documents on Teams. A lot of us are already doing all of the above anyway, but I thought I'd share just in case someone is struggling to get to grips with Teams. Hopefully it's helped someone somewhere! Feel free to ask me any questions and I'll do my best to answer them.
If you've found this or my other posts useful please consider contributing to my tea/coffee/hot chocolate (gin) fund. It's very much appreciated! Dannielle I’m going to start off by saying that I am by no means an expert at teaching remotely and there are many people out there who are far more qualified and competent than me at it. The wonderful Joe Dale is the expert when it comes to all things tech. I also highly recommend following Esmeralda Salgado, Jane Basnett, Jerome Nogues, Elena Díaz, Jimena Licitra, Miss Fedrizzi, Swavesey MFL on Twitter, as well as EmmaMFL on Instagram. To be quite honest I don’t think I even knew Microsoft Teams existed until Covid19 came along and forced classroom teachers everywhere to essentially retrain as online educators overnight. I'd say I’m reasonably competent and confident when it comes to using technology. Often I can figure things out for myself simply by playing around and learning from my own mistakes. Whenever I’m not sure about something I head to Google or I’ll ask the #mfltwitterati – or even, as was the case in my Year 9 lesson last week, ask the students (I couldn’t figure out how to stop the notifications, so I asked a student who I know is a tech expert and within about a minute, he had posted a screenshot and instructions in the Teams chat: problem solved). We’ve also had some fantastic in-house training from incredible colleagues who are experts at all things Microsoft. I feel very lucky that we’ve been given so much guidance on how to use Teams and we’ve had all our Teams set up for us. However I know that not everyone is in the same boat. Every school has approached things differently and although there are many teachers for whom teaching remotely has been a breeze, there will also be many who are naturally feeling quite anxious about it and are just getting to grips with the basics. I think we are all just doing our best and it’s important to be kind to ourselves, as well as to others. This blogpost will be one of a series of blogposts in which I’ll be discussing how I’m getting to grips with teaching my students remotely, as well as sharing some of my favourite tips and tools. In this first blogpost I’ll just be providing a bit of background and letting you know what I did during the first lockdown compared to what I’m doing now. Keep your eyes peeled for future blogposts where I’ll be sharing a few of the things that I've found helpful when using Teams and teaching live lessons. These might be things I’ve learnt from colleagues in my school, ideas I’ve seen on Twitter, or things I’ve picked up myself when exploring Teams. Hopefully there will be something of use to someone. Rewind to the first lockdown in 2020: Weekly rotas being sent out by email with different staff in school each day to teach / supervise a group of key worker students; each member of my department responsible for the setting of work and teaching of live lessons for certain year groups; students encouraged to email their work to their usual class teacher (cue daily deluge of emails which I found myself responding to even on my days off and at the weekend, just to keep on top of everything); responding to emails from students and parents who were naturally struggling to get their heads around Teams. This was all at the same time as looking after a two year old at home. Although we were allowed to send our little boy into nursery, we decided to keep him at home with us and it was really tricky at times. I would be constantly responding to emails on my phone whilst looking after a 2 year old, or my husband (who works full-time) would work in the evening and look after our little boy during the day to allow me some quiet time to get on with lesson planning or to teach my live lessons. I know many people were (and still are) in the same position. Current set up: This time our son (two year old) is at nursery the days that I'm working. This is not a decision we have taken lightly and I know it’s a decision some people will disagree with, but it’s our decision to make and so far it’s working well for all of us. If he was older and didn’t crave as much attention, we would probably keep him at home with us. Rotas are being emailed out with different staff in school each day to supervise children of key workers; students are mostly following their usual school timetable remotely; I’m still working part-time and teaching live lessons from home on the days I am not in school supervising, as well as marking and responding to emails from students. I now have a much better understanding of Teams and am using a variety of tools at my disposal to support my remote teaching. How have you found the transition to the "new normal"?
Is there anything in particular you're finding difficult that you'd like me to blog about? Let me know in the comments or via social media. As I said before, I'm no expert and I definitely don't have all the answers, but I'm keen to help where I can. Dannielle x One of my favourite tools, and probably my most used website of 2020 is Canva. There is a free basic version, which in my opinion is excellent anyway, but luckily for us educators we also have free access to their premium account.
Canva is a design platform that allows you to easily create presentations, worksheets, posters and much more. You can do this from scratch or adapt one of the 420,000 templates which are readily available on Canva. |
AuthorYorkshire lass living down South || Part-time teacher of MFL || Proud wife, and mummy of the best boys || Sharing MFL teaching ideas and resources || Creator of @morganmfl || Author of 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding MFL Lessons. Archives
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