I had never heard of Microsoft Teams before April 2020, before lockdown, before remote learning and before COVID-19: I simply did not know it existed! Now it has become an integral and daily part of my teaching life.
If you had said in February that we would spend the whole of Summer Term teaching from home, I would have been gobsmacked. The last term has been the strangest of my decade-long teaching career. Not all of the events that unfolded post-lockdown were unpleasant. If you believe some online ‘commentators’, teachers spent that time sitting on the couch, which I did at some points. I spent more time with ...
Nothing transforms a young life more than literacy. And, for a few young children in Years 1 and 2, the hours at home during lockdown might have been a blissful opportunity to devour books that they hadn’t previously had time to read. For many others, especially among the 380,000 UK schoolchildren who don’t own a single book, regular reading will simply have stopped when schools closed. With no daily reading record ...
Covid-19 had struck. We sent the children home from Roundthorn Primary Academy three days before schools closed nationally to all but key workers and vulnerable children. We’d had an outbreak; a number of staff fell ill and I was taking no chances. With little time to plan and just a few photocopied sheets in hand, we sent the children home not knowing what the immediate future might look like ...
In the final months of 2019/20 schools were forced to adapt, with many attempting live-interaction classes through solutions such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts, but the inherent privacy concerns and safety issues of these meeting platforms became apparent.
I am not the only teacher who dreaded “going back” after the Easter break, but I had more to dread than most as I had been off sick for a number of weeks before lockdown. This meant that I had no preparation time for remote learning and felt totally out of the loop, both professionally and digitally!
How's your last term been?
My last term in my new Assistant Head role has been somewhat different. It has consisted of responding to parents each day, Zooming my class and setting learning (Creative writing, Reading Comprehension, Grammar, Maths and Topic Learning) each week. Just want to say a big thank you to Pobble @HeyPobble and Maths Shed @mathshed for providing brilliant resources for the children and parents to use.
The teaching profession has been shaken this year by enormous numbers of PGCE teachers having been under lockdown without access to months of valuable class-based experience they would otherwise have received. The upcoming NQT year for these new teachers is going to be challenging, strange and mentally trying. Having recently gone through my own NQT year, I’ve assembled a list of the 5 things this year’s NQTs should take ...
Post-Brexit, and within a global pandemic, discussions around what should or should not happen in education has been both taken back to its roots, and quite simultaneously connected with innovation and future ‘ways of being’. The lockdown gave us all time to reflect and re-evaluate.
From as early as January 2020 our school’s leadership team could see we were going to have to prepare for delivering all learning and pastoral care remotely. Education during the pandemic has had to play a crucial role in engaging children whilst key worker parents continue to provide frontline services to the nation.
