So many of us are in the same boat at the moment, schools have closed around the world and we are faced with the prospect of online teaching for the foreseeable future. Some of us will be well prepared, having used digital tools in our teaching for a while, some will be feeling totally lost and desperate, but most of us will be somewhere in the middle. Maybe we’ve tried out a few things that may or may not have worked, but where to go from here.

Incidentally, this is the problem our students face daily. There is so much information out there, so many possibilities and good ideas. The trick is to find the ones that work FOR YOU. In order to do that you need to concentrate on resources that you’ve used before or are similar to the way you currently do things. This is NOT the time for re-inventing yourself or the way you teach. Find tools that fit in with what you already do.

For example if you like your students to produce projects with text and pictures stuck onto cardboard, now is the time to explore getting them to create slide presentations with media and text in Google Slides or a website in Google Sites.

If you already use videos in your class, give your students the links and then convene a Google Meet to discuss the video or give them questions based on the video to answer as they watch.

If you stick to what you know in terms of the pedagogy, then you just need to figure out the practicalities of the software to make it work.

You can do this!

So what’s this online teaching thing?