As online learning becomes our new normal, teachers have been thinking outside the box to create dynamic lessons for their students that give them a bit of their usual sense of community while adapting to a 100% e-classroom.

Recently, the beijingkids editorial team took part in an online class under the guidance of Beijing City International School (BCIS) teacher, Adam Hassan. What was originally planned as a school visit with the kids turned into video sessions due to COVID-19.

Hassan, originally from London, England has been living in China for 14 years and teaching English Language Acquisition and Language and Literature to Grades 8, 9,10, and 12 at BCIS for the past four years.

Instead of visiting the kids at school, Hassan’s students sent us lists of questions and we sent back videos answering each as honestly as we could. For myself, an introvert who loves being behind the camera, overcoming that anxiety took several takes before I was happy with a version I could send to the kids.

Why are your students interested in journalism?

Journalism relates to my unit for four reasons:

Firstly, I wanted my students to think about people using the skills we learn in English class to make a living. This shows the practical application of the skills taught in my class.

Secondly, as readers of English, we have to investigate a book in the same way a journalist investigates a news story – gathering facts, considering perspectives (the key concept for this unit), weighing bias, and finally presenting this understanding in a comprehensible and coherent manner. I wanted the children to learn from the professionals, so to speak, by studying the methods and skills a journalist uses.

I also sought to tie this unit to a project which could connect to the real world. This came out of work my school has done with Kyle Wagner and project-based learning, and with Inspire Citizens and their Empathy to Action model.

I imagined my students taking the topics studied in this story – the persecution of minority groups –and creating a newspaper article to “spread knowledge” on this topic. Thus, the last two reasons were to use their knowledge of English as a practical tool of their English skills to affect change in the real world. Journalism seemed the natural choice to do this.

And here we are.

Interviewing journalists was one of the learning experiences on this journey.

How have you been conducting your class during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Technology has been an important tool in my practice for a long time. The stuff that goes on during a regular lesson is just one part of the learning process. The other stuff – the research, feedback, self-assessment, individual work and contemplation – all goes on roughly as before.

Like other teachers at BCIS, I have received training in the SAMR framework for integrating technology into the classroom, and taken the Common Sense Media certification course on using technology in my instruction. So, much as before, students are using technology to do the following:

• Students upload work to OneNote which I highlight with feedback to be corrected.
• Record video and audio presentations of learning. Some teachers have used Zoom, Seesaw, Flipgrid, Padlet and other platforms for this, but I have been fine using Microsoft Teams to do the same.
• Students have been collaborating well on group tasks such as annotating a text, poem or image using a shared Word Document, or the collaboration space on OneNote.
• They have given peer assessments on each other’s work and reached a compromise on interpretations of texts

Teachers such as myself have shown amazing creativity in supplementing the lack of physical closeness through the use of technology. I have personally found this challenge exhilarating, and have come up with many ideas which have been extremely successful in achieving my educational goals.

But it is obviously not just about the teacher. The experience has been successful because of the amazing buy-in we have had by both parents and students, who have worked so hard to persevere when obstacles get in the way. Technology is fickle, and random things get in the way of a task going smoothly, such as a student needing to update their software, forgetting to sync their changes to a shared document, or misunderstanding the instructions. However, students have worked so hard to figure things out, help each other and find creative solutions to persisting problems. Parents have impressed me in the way they support their children at home, and both parents and the leadership at BCIS have supported us financially to purchase the apps and technology needed to facilitate online education. I am confident that they have played as much a role as the teachers.

What’s your feedback on e-learning? Do you think it can replace face-to-face interactions?

I am confident that every one of the students at BCIS has not suffered any set back, despite these unprecedented times. That is a sign that e-learning can substitute face-to-face learning. But is the physical classroom dead? Not by a long shot.

I have spoken about how important technology is in the classroom, but the classroom is equally important. Getting a bunch of kids together in a single room is still an integral part of education for a number of obvious and hidden reasons. In fact, much of my work these last few weeks has been taken up recreating or mimicking the experience of working together in the same physical space. Certain activities, such as brainstorming ideas on a passage, can be done so much more efficiently with five people standing around a piece of paper, each holding a pen. Then there are the social and behavioral issues associated with a lack of physical presence. No matter how much you try to substitute face-to-face communication, this digital “barrier” is always there.

But saying that, there are obvious advantages to e-learning. In the example I gave of brainstorming, some students may be hesitant to take part in such an activity. They may need time and space to think about the problem which the immediacy of face-to-face collaboration doesn’t allow. It may be difficult to physically see the paper on a table if you are standing in the wrong place. It is really a case of “swings and roundabouts” when substituting a physical, for a digital learning experience.

That is the beauty of teaching, and the silver lining on the cloud of this experience. All these challenges require us to think of ways to adapt our instructional methods to suit the needs of our learners. Closing off one method leads us to think of others which often help our students in ways we hadn’t considered before.

There are also many positive effects of e-learning, too. The most obvious is the amount of student-teacher time a kid is receiving. As group interaction is reduced by technology, one-to-one interaction has increased, and the individualized care a student has been getting is much more.

Can you give us another example of creative and out of the box teaching material (like the video interview with the beijingkids team)?

I have had fun trying to use what students have around them to facilitate learning, such as live blogging their daily routine as part of my Advisory duties and getting kids to spend time watching their parents cook, noting down the recipe, under the pretense I needed new ideas. I did these things to try and lessen the strain students feel being cramped at home.

Some fun things I have done were having my Grade 12 students get their parents to teach them how to drive as part of a unit on transportation. I had them create a promotional video for their “dream car” using the AR function of Need for Speed Heat Studio in the same unit, too.

I had my Grade 10 students showcase what they have learned about poetry by explaining a poem to their parents and giving their parents a professional summary and having them evaluate their children’s responses in a recording. Having students stuck at home with their parents has made these activities easier to facilitate.

Are these particularly “out of the box”? No, I don’t think so. And I also don’t think that they are things I couldn’t have done as part of my regular classes. But the context forced me to consider them.

The whole experience gave us a brief insight into the new daily realities of teachers. Perhaps the idea that teachers can work remotely, from home or on an island destination somewhere, might sound laid back and relaxed. However online teaching takes extra time and effort that many of us haven’t given a second thought.

Photos: unsplash

Even though we’re still held up at home, quarantined from the rest of the world, things are slowly starting to get back to normal. Well, normal-ish. While the kids aren’t back to school as originally planned before the Coronavirus outbreak, they are starting to go back to their schoolwork.

Teachers and staff at international schools all over Beijing have been working tirelessly to create e-learning platforms for their students. But how does e-learning work and can it be applied to every subject?

We interviewed AISB School- Hope International’s Head of School Mr. Randal Eplin on their process of creating a productive e-learning syllabus for their students.

How has your staff been handling the current outbreak?

As we come back to work from the Chinese New Year holiday, I can honestly say that our teaching staff is ready to engage and work diligently in the midst of the novel coronavirus outbreak here in China. The faculty and staff at AISB School- Hope International (HIS) are highly committed to meet the learning needs of our students, and they have been working for several weeks now, even before the required date to return to work.

Are your teachers still in Beijing or have they returned to their home countries?

We have invited our entire community to make decisions that focus on their personal safety of themselves and their loved ones. At this point, we trust our community members as they make good decisions to keep themselves safe and secure during this challenging time. No matter where faculty and staff are in the world, they are all committed to delivering instruction where ever they are in the world.

Have you had similar experiences in the past?

I was working at the International School of Estonia many years ago during the SARS outbreak, and at this time, our school developed an online e-learning platform in case we needed to deliver instruction online. This experience has helped me in the planning and implementation of our HIS e-learning initiative.

What has HIS planned in terms of e-learning?

Our goal with the HIS e-learning platform is for students to learn. As simple as that sounds, it takes a dedicated and hard-working staff to achieve. Our goal is to meet all of our students, from preschool through grade twelve, at their instructional level. We are doing this by helping our teachers to plan manageable and relevant instructional tasks.

What platform will you be using?

There are many platforms that can be used for e-learning. The criteria that we are applying is to implement something that works seamlessly in China, and something that students can easily access and use. We are committed to finding, using, and changing the platform(s) we are using that fit this criteria.

Has it been difficult for the teachers to revise their syllabus for e-learning?

At HIS, we take pride in being what I call a learning organization. As a learning organization, our teachers embrace this challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow in different ways in order to deliver the best instruction that they can during this time. It is exciting to see teachers work together to learn and grow and make e-learning work for our students at HIS. The level of the dedication that our teachers have is humbling and encouraging.

How are your students handling the current situation?

Actually, I think that students are handling this situation better than all of us. We are serving a “wired generation” of learners who are often times more comfortable with technology than we are. The students at HIS are highly engaged and they are completing assignments and continuing to do their very best at this time.

We look forward to putting this outbreak behind us, but until that time, we are dedicated to providing the very best learning through our newly developed HIS e-learning platform.

 

At this time HIS hasn’t announced an official return date for their students and faculty but the school will continue to educate and inspire its students through e-learning for as long as it takes.

Photos: AISB School- Hope International, nebraskapta.org, skillmile.com, transferoflearning.com, gofluent.com