Learning @ Home

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1. Establish expectations and routines for the teacher and students. The role of the teacher has changed, how are you going to change your teaching to meet this new role?

2. Take breaks - Ensure your workload allows both you and your students the time to build play, have social connections, and physical activity in the day. The quality and understanding of knowledge is more important than how much knowledge is acquired.

3. Continue relationships - Include a 30-minute check in the morning to connect with learners. Read them a book, ask some students to share what they did yesterday. Can you encourage your students to comment on another class or students blog or online file?

4. Comment on the work - whatever you expect your students to do needs to be seen by the teacher. The students will be looking to see if you are paying attention, and parents too, so make sure you comment on their work and on their blog. Encourage students to comment on each others blogs. Feedback also enables opportunities to stretch your students.

5. Determine how you will identify student success, could you quickly use a tool like Hapara Teacher Dashboard to see who is successful and managing their work? What do celebration assemblies, house points, certificates etc. look like when learning at home? How will you keep your learners motivated? Will there be a class competition where the class works together to get to a goal and reward?

6. What is the value add that you are contributing as a teacher. What does teaching online look like for you? How will you encourage students to read interesting everyday texts, that can be accessed independently and are engaging your students? What are you going to do to promote student lead discussions that promote critical thinking? Are these through commenting on a document, blog or small video conference? How will you facilitate collaborating and making choices in learning, creating and sharing?

7. Plan simple lessons with clear steps and small chunks, make their day shorter. It will also help keep your workload manageable. The learning environment needs to recognise the learners as the core participants and encourage their active engagement.

8. Use the tech to plan to the margins, think about how you will connect and support the students that are on the fringes. Create screencasts explaining lessons or instructions, utilise video and audio content to create rewindable opportunities, use appropriate fonts and colours.

9. Use the tech to create and share as part of the learning. Remember creating non digital is just as important - playdough, lego, painting, cooking, drawing, building

10. Accountability - how will you track learning? Can a student timetable also double as a tracking sheet?