What does teaching look like now?

We have been back at school, doing onsite teaching for number of weeks now, post lockdown. Things have changed for me as a teacher. There are definitely some things that I am glad to see the back of and some things that I will be keeping on.

Hapara workspaces were an absolute marvel during lockdown. I had my work sorted onto workspaces for the first time this year as I was sick of loosing track as to where the students were up to and was going to give workspaces a really good try this year to help me with this. Blog post here. I was slow at our school coming to the workspaces party as other staff have been comfortably using them for a number of years and I have been happily picking their brains about the best way to do things. During lockdown, this became a totally different reality. It was no longer testing to see if it made things easier, it was full on “we are using this now” mode.  It was so good to be able to share work so easily with the students this way, it was all set up for those students who like the big picture and I could see students accessing and starting the work even if they weren’t coming online to talk to me during the Google Meets.
I will absolutely be keeping up with using workspaces with any new work that I plan in the future. I also really enjoy making them look pretty!

As some of my students were unable to come online and do work during lockdown, I have been spending a lot of time making help videos for my inquiry group to support them with their project work. Blog post here. When I asked them a few weeks ago if these help sections were of any use and how I could make them more useful.

"I don't really watch the videos but the examples are useful"

"I watched the first video. It was ok."

"They were useful. No they weren't too long. Yes I could understand what you were saying".

Not sparkling feedback, but not bad either. I have received more informal feedback since then. The Year 12 students are asking where their help page is like the Year 13 one. The Year 13 inquiry group are telling me they are up to where the help stops, am I making any more. This makes me think that this has been more helpful than I originally thought so I will definitely be expanding on this idea and try to include support like this in each project. It will be a fair amount of work to prepare but once it is there it will be really worth it. I have been drawing on my experience while doing Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher in 2015, where I looked at designing MOOC style courses. One of my main takeouts from that was short and sharp sections that were on task and to the point. Link to this work here.

Having the table top boxes of drawing equipment has been a yes and no from me. We had to do this when we first came back to keep the social distancing rules in place. Blog post 1 Blog post 2. I have kept them since going back to semi "normal" and I am not sure they are staying. I twitch every time I see how messy and mixed up they are and this is really not something worth getting grumpy over so they will probably not stay much longer. The tables are back in groups though. I absolutely HATED the rows.

Not sweating the small stuff. Hey. We are still in the middle of a huge global happening that doesn't make for great viewing if you watch the news so I am definitely still in the "don't sweat the small stuff" mode and am trying to make the class a good place to be with minimum nagging and maximum support.

What do I want from lockdown to stay? The MUTE BUTTON!!!!