E-Learning and Distance Learning: Preparing if UK Schools Close in Response to Coronavirus (COVID-19)

We still don’t know for certain if UK schools will close as a government response to delay COVID-19. With schools in Italy and Poland closing many UK schools are now taking sensible precautions to ensure students can learn from home if UK schools are asked to close in the nearby future.

This article proposes a four fold strategy for training teachers to enable effective distance learning to take place, and provides resources to support this strategy.

A Four Fold Approach

Firstly, we can train staff to deploy their own webinars to remotely teach their classes from home. This should allow lessons to proceed essentially “as normal” but live-streamed over the internet in large video conferencing calls.

Secondly, we need to be sensitive to the needs of staff and, in the event of UK schools closing, many teachers will have child care commitments of their own which prevent them from delivering live video lessons on a strict schedule. Therefore we need to provide options for teachers to record content that can be developed at a flexible time and then consumed by students.

Thirdly, we need a strategy for allowing students to electronically submit work and for teachers to still provide effective feedback.

Finally, we need to provide teachers with a strategy for quickly deploying resources from a bank of material. If a teacher is ill and unable to live-stream lessons or record their own content they can quickly deploy valuable learning resources to students.

Strategy One: Live Webinars

Teachers can host live webinars at home which students can join in on and contribute. This essentially allows lessons to proceed “as normal” with a teacher facilitating, showing slides and modelling from their computer screen while students follow along at home. This can even be done to match timetabled lesson times.

A great tool for facilitating this is Google Hangouts. Google have recently rolled out their full Hangouts Meet functionality to allow schools to host Hangouts with up to 250 participants! A guide I have developed and a full video tutorial for teachers has been placed below:

Strategy Two: Recording Lessons

Teachers can also record content that can be shared with students and watched at home. Screencastify is an outstanding tool to facilitate this.

A great online guide is available online which can be accessed by clicking here.

You can watch two videos which outline how to deploy Screencastify with Google Classroom below – these can be shared as training resources with teachers:

Recording a video in Screencastify

Sharing a Screencastify Video with Google Classroom

Strategy Three: Electronic Work Submission and Feedback

Next, we need a strategy for allowing students to submit work to teachers electronically and to provide feedback over a distance. To this end we need teachers to be familiar with how Google Classroom works and the nature of the assignment function. Below is an excellent guide adapted from EdTechTeam UK and a video tutorial that I have produced:

Strategy Four: Material Banks

The next strategy that can be used is deploying assignments from pre-created banks of educational material that teachers assign. A great free tool that works brilliantly for GCSE classes is Seneca. A tutorial on using the tool is below:

I have also produced similar tutorials for GCSEPod and ClickView in case your schools deploy these tools and need to ensure all teachers are trained to share these great sources of content with students.

Hopefully, this provides useful resources to train teachers in the event of a school closure in the UK to delay COVID-19. There are resources to provide everything from live video lessons to banks of material so students do not fall behind.

Do you have any other tips and resources that you are deploying in your school? If so why not comment below to share?

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