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Coronavirus: every cloud has a silver lining

I am an optimist by nature. And I do believe that the Coronavirus cloud has a very positive silver lining.

Now that our schools are closed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, teachers need to provide online instruction. Both those who have been coming to my classes and those who have read the POPPIES blog know how I favour Flipped Learning.

I’d say that Virtual Flipped Learning is essential for online instruction.

However, online instruction cannot be just any kind of instruction, as we can see in this extract from “El País”:

En la habitación, el niño dice: “¿Qué me toca ahora? ¡Ah me toca patio!”. También se escucha: “Tengo 40 mensajes con una exposición oral, un trabajo de plástica, un examen de competencias básicas. No puedo ver a mis amigos y me siento solo”. Se carcajea. “Bueno tampoco hay que dramatizar. Tampoco es tan malo. Puedo jugar más a las máquinas. En el cole nos han dado un tocho de hojas y piensan que lo vamos a hacer así como así, como si lo supiéramos todo”.

It is obvious that, if we want to teach efficiently, this cannot consist of asking or giving students loads of things to do at home without any kind of instruction, guidance or plan.

If we want to overcome the Coronavirus, not only in terms of physical health but also mental and cognitive health, we need to plan and develop approaches and methods that are efficient, help students and help parents help their kids under teachers’ guidance.

Some of the tools we recommend at the POPPIES Foundation Plus

In the Introductory Course at the Full POPPIES Foundation Plus we went through some apps we recommend for teachers. Particularly if they are planning to -partially or fully- Flip their English class.

If you want to give your students explanations on grammar, text structure, vocabulary, etc.

I find Loom a highly user-friendly app to record whatever you have on your screen. It may be a word document, a pdf… you name it. If you check my Q&A page you will see how I use Loom. Loom has a special offer for educators because of the coronavirus.

If you want to give your students videos to watch or websites with questions:

Then, I’d say that EdPuzzle is a very good option for Videos. It can be used with Google Classroom, with Moodle, etc.

And Insert Learning is brilliant for websites, I think. You can also combine it with EdPuzzle.

And then, of course, one of my favourites: SymbalooEDU. It was Meritxell Viñas at TotemGuard who discovered SymbalooEDU for me, among many other resources.

She has published this post on platforms and other resources to help you. She’s much more technically-oriented than me!

Also, the people at Flipped Learning Global have put together RTOL7. I’ll do the course myself, but if you do, we can exchange ideas…

And, finally for today, from Edutopia: During Coronavirus, a Teacher Describes the Scramble to Go Digital

Hope you find all this useful. I’ll get back soon. In the meantime…

Keep safe, keep well, stay at home. And here’s my thanks to whoever rang our bell today -wearing a mask and gloves and keeping a safe distance- and left this beautiful orchid