Expected to teach live online lessons?

[FlowerAndBloom]

Hi all,

We have received an email yesterday asking all staff to prepare to teach live online lessons during potential school closure on a new platform nobody has used before. My concern is that I cannot teach live all day while my own kids are at home and need supervising in their schoolwork. Has anyone else been asked this? How do I approach this? Private school in London if it makes any difference!

All sorts of safe guarding issues involved in this. I'd revise until they think it through. Kids could make all sorts of accusations

anothernotherone both platforms my older children use had crashed today.

The youngest's teacher is sendong out increasingly hectoring emails with tasks in shorthand, all of which we have to print out, explain to our children and mark ourselves, with heavy warnings that she'll be checking we (parents) have done this properly, followed by bolded reminders only to contact her if strictly necessary, and if so by email not telephone. I know her own children are all adults so childcare isn't her reason...

Not sure how I came to address my post to myself

actually training is tutorials. I assume being a school teacher = some tech knowledge lol!

its not hard.

Have they said it has to be via Skype or similar?

If not, you could use google classrooms to set up something live, with live tasks for students to submit, feedback in real time and a google hangouts where they can ask questions via message. This would be "live" but no streaming and potentially more doable with kids around.

If you set things up well enough in advance, then you may even be able to manage this from your phone.

You can e.g. direct students to watch a video, get them to do a task, give feedback, they do improvements, or something?

Hi from the ME!

We are 4 days in now.

Work set by 8am (Google Classroom scheduling - I did mine for the week in a few hours). But am then available to my classes in time tabled hours - which is where all the fiddly live stuff comes in.

Pre-recorded videos via sceencastify, which is fabulous & dead easy. You just talk for 5 minutes over the resources you were going to set anyway, to explain stuff & give it a bit of a human touch - this is working really well.

There is a fair bit of pressure to use Zoom for online live video chats. Strict rules that you can't go ahead unless 4 student particpants (safeguarding). I'm giving it a go with my nice year 7s tomorrow.

The biggest issue we have is probably the usual SUPER KEEN staffroom suspects videoing absolutely everything, & delivering whizz bang multimedia chuff knows what, coming up against Mrs Oldskool who seriously knows her stuff but isn't necessarily into all this newfangled tech, whilst parents compare & contrast from home.

It's all pretty stressful. But working quite well. My classes are mostly working rather hard, & whilst it's definitely challenging, I'm certainly learning new skills every day which I'll continue to use.

Oh & the marking is a sodding nightmare!

I wouldn't have so much of an issue using Zoom etc but not Google hangouts due to the safeguarding concerns. I'm probably going to use google classroom and any questions they can email me. I agree with the PP who said superwhizzy staff will do everything online and I suspect that would be child free keen younger teachers whereas those who are more experienced realise there are many ways to skin a cat. Looking long term, and I am if schools are going to be shut for all of summer term, we need to be balancing students on and off screen time properly. Watching some teacher singing and dancing (they're never as good as they think are they) for 6 hours a day is not conducive to good mental health

My school are literally planning to give them an A4 sheet with 'tasks you can do without the internet' and then set some subject specific stuff (tbh I've seen the ks4 one for my subject and it's a link to the spec, revision tips/tasks and links to YouTube channels and bitesize) on SMHW.

We've been told not to overload them and to try to set fun tasks.

If it continues after Easter I guess the tone will change as we realise how behind they'll all be by September.

I think our WFH will mostly consist of Curriculum Planning since were going for shiny and new next year.

There's no way I can teach live lessons and wrangle DD(3), and I think they'd rather I did some work maybe as and when in the evening than lose me altogether to unpaid leave, lots of teachers would be in the same boat, would the others have to live teach double classes?

I'm also at an independent. My school has struck a sensible balance. We have to set work for each lesson and be available and mark the work produced. We don't have to teach live but can record and upload video and audio for exam classes if we wish. We considered Zoom but there are child protection issues, students have to be a certain age and no time to train anyone.

It should be possible for part time teachers and those with young DC to manage. Although anyone with slow internet will struggle.