Our school site says we might be open on Monday however looking at the
weather report this may be a bit unlikely (or will open just with very
few pupils). Now the three days of snow have meant that I have missed
about four hours of GCSE teaching and about five hours of A level
teaching. This is quite concerning as exams and coursework becomes
quite urgent.

So this blog is a bit of a thought exercise on how to deliver lessons
with pupils and teachers both stuck at home. The following ideas are
designed for my own school.

Two points to consider:

1 – we don’t currently have Moodle installed and we are unlikely to
install anything similar. I am not sold on moodle in any case partly
due to the second point below.
2 – I am looking for services or websites which teachers and students
can use which are not hosted or managed by the school. This is I think
a necessary strategy to ensure that in the case of extreme weather
lessons can continue without relying on the school.

So how to do it?

1 – firstly students need a central point to which they can go which
lists all the teachers in the school and what services those teachers
use. This is because I think some teachers may use more than one
website than other teachers. For example I could be using, Edmodo,
posterous and Twitter whilst another teacher could just be using
Posterous.
2 – secondly use free services like posterous or edmodo. Both I have
only recently come across and they work an absolute treat for
organising lessons and delivering content.

Certainly at the very minimum teachers could use edmodo to notify
students of what they ate doing on posterous. Posterous itself could
then contain the nuts and bolts of a lesson. With the ability to
rapidly upload content of just about any type teachers can rapidly
push out content to students.

The killer feature of posterous though is the ability to create ‘sub’
blogs to which students can submit their own work too. This would
allow teachers to pretty rapidly get work back from students and allow
those same students to comment on each others work.

Ultimately doing something like this to support lessons is quite
tricky and will run into teething problems. But if it has the support
of the school and the students it could very easily continue to
provide educational value to students during situations like school
closures due to snow.