During periods of national lockdown, schools closed for the majority of children. Children of key workers and vulnerable children could still attend school, but many families decided to keep their children at home to protect them from the virus. Schools offered lessons online using a range of apps and employed different strategies for engaging with pupils who were learning from home.
Some schools offered ‘live’ online lessons. These were difficult for some families to attend as they might have several children who had to share digital devices, therefore not all children could attend their live lessons. Additionally, some children explained that they did not like to post comments on boards or during live teaching sessions because the other children would see what they were saying and that made them self- conscious. It is interesting to note that there is something about typing a question that seems to make people more uncomfortable than saying a question out loud in a face-to-face context, and that should be taken into consideration when choosing apps to teach children.
In addition, families spoke of how children found it difficult to concentrate on online learning for long periods of time. The parents also said it was hard for them to support the children’s learning as the topics and concepts they were learning about were difficult to understand, either due to language, or due to not being familiar with the way things were taught. Therefore, learning from home could sometimes be frustrating for parents who wanted to help their children but didn’t know how to do so. This issue was worse for parents who did not have a lot of internet data as they could not spend a long time browsing the internet to look up the meanings of concepts.
The schools interviewed in this study responded to the challenge of educating children initially by providing physical work packs to families with enough work to keep the children engaged for a week or two. At that stage, it was unclear how long children would be away from school for. However, as time passed and it became clear that the children were going to be physically absent from school for months, schools responded by looking at digital apps to provide teaching to children. A variety of apps were used by schools.
One school used Google Classroom- an app that enables teachers to hold classes in real time, upload pre-recorded classes and to share files between children and teachers. The teachers found that Google Classrooms was helpful for setting up a blog so parents could look at it in the morning and see the day’s tasks, then they were encouraged to check in again at the end of the day with the work they had completed.
Another school preferred to use Seesaw Class App as they felt it was easier for families to use and more interactive. The teachers put pre-recorded lessons on the app for children to watch. They did not do any live teaching as they were worried if they told children to be at a certain place at a certain time, it might be difficult for them to access the lessons. In addition, they recognised some families were sharing devices between siblings, which would have been difficult to manage.
Another school used ClassDojo app to communicate with families. One family expressed that they found this really helpful as they were able to send direct messages to teachers if they were unsure about something. The school that used ClassDojo also found that it was useful for them to create designated contact lists, for example the inclusion team and the safeguarding teams had lists of families they would contact weekly.
An added benefit to a two-way communication app for families that speak English as an additional language is that they were able to use Google Translate to help them understand messages from teachers. The interviews revealed that apps that enabled families and teachers to communicate directly were preferred. This helped children to overcome their fear of asking questions in front of the class.
One school in particular made the extra effort to set practical tasks for children, tasks that didn’t necessarily need technology. This was important as it meant that people who had limited access to the internet were not excluded. In addition, children who found it hard to concentrate on learning digitally for long periods of time also found the practical approach to teaching more engaging.
In addition to providing taught sessions to the children via these apps, schools made sure they were aware of families who were not engaging with the online materials and some schools continued to create and deliver physical work packs for these particular children. Some of the families that took part in this study commented that they found the physical homework packs were really helpful to compliment the work they were engaging with online. One family who arrived during lockdown said their school provided them with text books, and that these were really helpful for supporting their children’s learning. In addition, one family who did not receive physical work packs said they wished they could have been able to as they wanted to support their children to do the homework by hand, but they did not have a printer as it is very expensive. In conclusion, it is recommended that, where possible, schools provide digital resources and physical resources to families as the optimum scenario is when families have access to both.
A further recommendation is that schools could find ways to help parents support their children, or they could sign post parents to video tutorials and resources that would help them to understand the concepts being taught.