DIGITECH Lessons from Lockdown, Spring 2021

The past 12 months have taught practitioners a lot about what it means to educate. We have been through many, many trials and challenges throughout the pandemic, and have had to adapt to a host of different situations to ensure our children continue to learn in their various different circumstances. Teaching in 2021 has changed drastically from what it was even 12 months ago. Whilst the pandemic has been a struggle for so many, there are positives to come out of it too. We have, as a profession, learn that we can overcome lots of barriers to meet the needs of our children, likewise, there has been significant steps in innovation that add to the quality of education we provide. At the willows we have been using the app's seesaw and Microsoft Teams to deliver our remote education, our teachers have used their school iPads with Apple pencils to create recorded lessons, so the children and their parents can access these when it is convenient for them. We felt this was particularly important for those parents who are working from home, whilst also trying to support their child's learning. Hi you three and welcome to our English lesson. Today we are going to be identifying verbs and I'm going to show you how you can add them to your sentences. This is a lesson created by our year three teacher. She is using her iPad and an app called notability to mimic the whiteboard in her classroom. She has used the screen recording feature to record what she is saying and what she would normally write on the board in her classroom. As we move out of the pandemic, our teachers will continue to use seesaw and their iPads to set the children their homework. The recorded lessons which our teachers are so confident with will be able to explain the concepts to the children before they complete an independent activity. This has worked well throughout the pandemic as it is allowed the parents to understand the methods we use in school in order to support their child at home. Help. One thing we found works really well at English martyrs and we will certainly be taking forward and developing is the use of pre recorded PowerPoints with voice recordings. Staff had sound bites over the PowerPoint to explain key concepts. The PowerPoints are used without south of face to face teaching class and then instantly uploaded to purple martial seesaw with the annotations and modeling completed in the main input of the session. These are then accessible to all learners in the class as a self support tool during the lesson or for intervention work, homework support, as well as accessible to any child learning from home for whatever reason. We've been experimenting using moat, which is a verbal feedback tool at a plugin for Google Classroom. This allows more detailed comments through the teacher's own voice rather than typed comments, thus removing or dissolving in part that screen barrier. This is really great work. Well done, I love what you've done with the science wick. You've obviously tried really, really hard. Just be aware on your English work in that last line. Just check some of your spellings there and make sure that you stayed in the past tense. Well done, great work, keep it up. In the future, moat will be an excellent tool to use in the classroom for feedback on electronically produced pieces of work and homework, for example. And we aim to use it to drastically reduce marking time whilst actually providing valuable feedback for the children which is more personal and easier for children to understand and use to improve in the future. Great database teacher planned content. As you can see here, we have a selection of information on marine life, mini beasts in The Rock walls and in the soil, looking at life. And if we go on these we can see questions that we can click on. If we click on this one, we'll have a question from teacher. Did you know that Julie says, do you not have kids? You can also access videos and images within here. Mouse can be found in the ocean. They have a soft body covered by an outer layer. Furthermore, there are options for videos directly linked from websites like YouTube. This enables learners to have plethora of choices when they are learning. We have used balloon, which is new to school, loom is a screen sharing software with the ability to see the teacher at the same time. This has had such positive feedback from parents that we are looking to continue to use it when we all return back to school. It has avoided the argument of marketing. It doesn't do it like that. And it has enabled parents to feel more able to support their child in learning at home. One of the areas that we are going to use it is for parent workshops, particularly for phonics and early maths as we feel that being able to access it sort of remotely at a time suitable to parents will mean that they are more willing to access it. Setting an assignment on teams is super easy and in YouTube we try and mix it up by setting assignments and setting quizzes to involve the children when we are creating our daily assignments provide the children with a recorded lesson with annotations and follow along activities which lead into their independent learning. Children are offered a mixture of resources which can be annotated on the screen or completed on paper, which means they don't need to print things off. I'll with the staff meetings are now also hell via teams. These are open to all staff and are recorded so that they can be shared with anybody who has not been able to join the session. When lockdown is over and skills return to normal, we do still plan to keep teams as very much part of our learning and environment. We will continue having our homework set through home learning challenges and celebrate our home learning showcase will provide focused lessons and guides online for parents and children to use at home. We anticipate to still do parents evening online and also we are developing ideas for sharing our parish events with our church and supporting our local community. When school returns to the new normal, we will continue to use Microsoft Teams in a variety of ways. The secure video calling platform will enable to maintain contact with children who are off school for whatever reason, and where appropriate continue to deliver their education. Our parent consultation sessions will move to an online only format with parents using their child's school email account to meet with their teacher. Our reception in year three teachers have met with every family via teams during this latest lockdown, the feedback suggests that parents prefer this method as there are less people around to overhear conversations. Our children are growing up in a world which is intrinsically technologically driven. Many of you are children as digital natives who are naturally confident and competent when it comes to using technology. This often appears to be the case, but these skills need nurturing too. The children have admirably adapted to a new style of teaching and learning, and it would be a huge loss to forgo these new skills when the children return to school in a rush to return to normal or return to how school should be. We plan to make sure that all children have the opportunity to continue developing and flourishing. In that digital skill set, when learning remotely and when they return to school.