Why are teachers not teaching live lessons online

[Shouldistayorshouldimove]

This is not a teacher bashing thread.

Talking online with another mum in my son’s class today, both ourDCs are in p1 (Scotland). She is outraged that teachers next term will be posting work online rather than actually teaching using Zoom etc. Her argument is that universities are doing it so why aren’t teachers? And how is she supposed to work from home and educate her children?

Personally I don’t think teaching a bunch of 5 year olds a live lesson using Zoom is going to be all that effective and would probably require quite a lot of supervision anyway. AIBU to think that tasks posted online are quite sufficient given the circumstances? So as not to drip feed, I am also working from home with 2DCs.

@MsTSwift "No support" is not the same as not supporting in the specific way that you, a non-professional who does not work in the situation we are talking about, think that support should be provided. As many people have already said, work and support are both available in other ways that work better for the children that we work with every day.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Rosie that sounds awesome and proves my point. My kids are older 11 and 13. It would help immensely if they could at least watch a pre recorded lesson. But no. Nothing from either school. Dh and I both working full time trying to teach them too. We have had to adapt our working to this which is hard particularly for me dealing with terminally ill clients but I have had to manage. . Seems lame to me that both schools gone to ground as this is “too hard” and the “unions” have said “safeguarding”.

Oh, and his school have told teachers they're not to use school computers to set their online learning/support. They must access google classroom via their own devices. So we've got a teacher and two children using one laptop and one tablet.

That's a bollocks
Excuse by the union . Most private schools and The rest of the world
Is doing it live. Kids are addicted to devices so why can't they focus for a 30 min lesson?

So because the minority have no phones you won’t provide this support to anyone? That makes no sense.

Her argument is that universities are doing it so why aren’t teachers?
Universities have huge IT resources and budgets to match. They have the resources to organise this. Even a largish secondry school would struggle to manage this, a small primary would have no chance.

Mrs t — are you saying you have had nothing at all?

Maybe your friend should try to teach 20+ 5 year old kids herself and write a book to let teachers know how to do it best...

Our school sent out messages asking who wouldn’t have broadband or IT so that they could loan out school laptops. (Not sure what they did if no bb) every kid in my class has engaged , even the ones you might suspect wouldn’t (I look over my child’s shoulder!)

And we are also in school on a rota supervising key workers kids, which means nearly all of the work for that day needs to be done before/ after the actual day .

why cant they record their lesson so kids can watch not in real time?

Who is going to be buying the teachers computers and webcams etc for them to do this?

My son's a teacher - we had to send him £500 to run out and buy a laptop when this happened but now his internet connection is barely good enough to WhatsApp video chat with him unless he's sitting in a certain place in his house. He can't really chuck his housemates out for six hours a day so he can teach can he? Plus it's like talking to Norman Collier with it breaking up all the time

Point being, I don’t see what live lessons would achieve beyond what they are already doing.

Hilarious!

Can you imagine? Even if you managed to get all 25 5 years online at the same time, all listening the instructions quietly, without other distractions and background noise, how could the teacher remotely support all 25 while completing the work?

It is an amazing insight into how some adults assume the classroom situation to be - teacher gives instruction for 10 minutes, pupils silently listen and compute; pupils complete task while teacher watches quietly, possibly giving support to one or two pupils while the rest sensibly, efficiently and independently achieve the learning objective. Lesson over. Next lesson begins. Repeat.

🤣

Not much no. No pre recorded lessons. A lame email in the morning which dd2 has completed in an hour. Dd1 would really benefit from visual online teaching not one to one or zoom I get the issues with that - but a pre recorded explanation. My sisters kids same age private school having a full school day taught via zoom. The contrast is painful. So forgive me for not falling over myself to praise teachers atm. Both my parents were teachers and my other sister so am very pro teacher but frankly disappointed tbh.

Fgs no one is suggesting teaching 30 5 year olds by sodding zoom 🙄 this is pre recorded for older kids.

It would help immensely if they could at least watch a pre recorded lesson.

I think you're massively overestimating how good these lessons would be. It is really, really hard to make good, engaging videos, especially without any specialist software to add decent visuals. Most teachers, perfectly good as they are in the classroom, would make terrible videos that the kids wouldn't actually watch.

As a university lecturer, I once had to record a lecture to an empty room for online broadcast (I was ill right at the end of term and it was the only way to make it up). It took me half as long as my normal lecture to deliver - I hadn't realised how interactive my lecturing was, a lot of it non-verbal. I always got really positive student feedback on my lectures; this one was incredibly flat and I could see from the viewing stats that almost none of my students made it to the end (and I couldn't really blame them). I'm no longer teaching but a lot of my lecturer friends are really struggling to transfer their teaching online and that's with older, more mature students with the incentive of assessment that they're worried about failing. It's a whole different ball game with a 12 year old. It's a specialised, difficult skill to make good remote content - if most people just give it a go then the result is something that no one finds worth watching.

Why is it a safeguarding risk?
I don't get it.
The teacher isn't going to say anything inappropriate. They are professionals.

@SirGawain is totally right. Universities have been investing in IT to enable blended and online learning for many years now. They’ve also spent a lot of time training their staff, and the students, to use all of this - and that is a really huge thing. Just having some software does not mean you know how to use it effectively.

And, even then, the switch to distance learning in HE only has not necessarily been smooth as people seem to imagine. Distance learning (as anyone who has worked for the OU, for example) is a very different beast to standard models of HE. You design it all completely differently to the materials and programmes most universities have trying to rapidly adapt.

It’s much more complex than just pointing teachers at google classroom or MS teams and telling them to get on with it.

Put another way, would you want to sit and watch an amateur monologuing at a webcam? If not, why do you think children would?

Private schools do it don't they? How do they manage?

If you look at the guidelines the Government actually suspended the curriculum in the UK.

Is there a link for this? I can’t find it on the govt website but there’s so many documents there...

Fgs no one is suggesting teaching 30 5 year olds by sodding zoom 🙄 this is pre recorded for older kids

I thought that was exactly what the thread was about?

@MsTSwift What do you suggest for teachers like me who don’t have the facilities at home to record my lessons as you suggest? I teach in a secondary school... I use lots of lovely IT in school but I don’t have the resources at home! I am using Teams in the most basic way to set and mark assignments. I’m still available to my students to answer questions. We are doing our best and that is enough in this situation.

As PP have said the curriculum is suspended, exams cancelled and we will be working our socks off to make sure the kids catch up!

You are aware that close to 30% of children in Britain today live in poverty? There are many other children and young people who have caring responsibilities, and yet more with additional educational needs.... not sure pre recorded lessons will work for any of these groups.

What are the safeguarding issues exactly?