Teaching During Lockdown; Ubiquitous Learning

During the lockdown, our students are learning in multiple ways. Some are learning independently, some with limited resources, some with help from whānau, and everyone at different times of the day.

This highlights the need for learning to be ubiquitous. 

Here are some ways I have adapted my teaching practice during this time to make sure children can access their learning anywhere at any time.

1. Making instructional videos. This is a fun way to create lessons that you would normally do in the classroom at home. Using materials takes the new abstract concepts easier to understand.

2. Using Jam Board and Screen Castify to make recordings of lessons, massive thanks to Matua Stefan for introducing us to this tool. Lessons like the one bellow allow you to make a visual representation as you explain concepts to your students.

Jam board has been such a great tool this lockdown. Having students talk to the Jamboard and explain their thinking as you record it is interactive and allows you make valuable formative assessment of where your students are at. You begin hearing things that would get missed within the busy classroom environment.

We have been using Jam board for online phonics lessons. We use the stickies to put the phonemes together in words or change the phoneses within a word to make new words.

3. Using Screen Castify to record shared reading books. This idea was gifted to me my colleage Whea Lee and I don't know why we hadn't thought of this last lockdown! It is always hard to get students to read texts at their level at home but how easy is it for them to follow along to a story read by the teacher. The teacher can use this opportunity to teach concepts about print and decoding strategies. They may not be reading the text independantly but hopefully they will be looking at the words and taking in some of those key concepts modeled.

4. Language Experience Videos gift students new vocabulary which is learnt in context, sentence structures and a range of new experiences. For these videos I have tried to slow my speech down and repeat language multiple times so that students hear it more than once. I have also explained some of the new vocabulary used.

These videos may not be the most well crafted but they hopefully do the trick and help my students connect to their learning. I hope this has inspired you to get creating and given you some new ideas for online learning during lockdown.