Online teaching: You either hate it or love it

There have been two things that trigger me the most:

1: Not every student and educator has all the resources to facilitate distance learning/teaching.

2: Most educators are under the pressure and have been working very hard to offer a high-quality distance learning/teaching experience.

1. Edmodo: it’s an online classroom/moodle where you can assign, and mark assignment and create classroom folders, announcements. I love Edmodo as it saves me a lot of time for admin work, and I don’t have to open heaps of window tasks at the same time. All in one classroom.

What I don’t like about it is Edmodo on iPad or iPhone is still a little bit buggy and slow.

2. Notion: My favorite and my new addiction. All of your work will be in one place. I create my lesson plan here, mange all the files and reading lists. I’ve been using the default lesson plan template of Notion for my class. The template is adopted from Harvard Business School’s Elements of Effective Class Preparation, so it is transparent and well-organised.

3. Google Doc: One of the drawbacks of online teaching is that monitoring students is limited. It’s hard to know what they are doing behind the screen when the classroom no longer has four walls. As much as I worry about my students’ thoughts about my background and my laptop screen, I respect the privacy my students want to have with their surroundings and their learning environment. So to tackle this problem, I often invite my student to a google doc and observe them doing their exercises. (Ask students to share their screen via zoom) is also another useful way too.

So long post short, this crisis allows me to accept the fact that I only use 10% of the internet. Instead of accepting distance teaching is not effective, in a brighter picture, I see that technology is a transformational opportunity for my students and me to make the most of their experience on the digital platform. And instead of letting my students accept online learning is no serious business, it is important for them to see and to cultivate them that blended learning can mean even better outcomes at an affordable cost. It’s also crucial to aware that the ability to communicate with computer is taking a key role in many jobs application.

trigger: bực, khó chịu
educator: giáo viên
facilitate: tạo điều kiện, thuận tiện
empathy: sự đồng cảm, thấu hiểu
critical: quan trọng
heap: nhiều, một chồng
buggy: bị lỗi
transparent: rõ ràng, minh bạch
adopt: lấy từ, thông qua
drawback: hạn chế