Brandon Learning Centre: British Education - process, preparation and practicalities

I am deeply impressed by the way in which schools are responding to our new world. Switching to on-line teaching is not an easy transition (try teaching an online class of students under the age of ten if you don't believe me!) but teachers are doing an amazing job of supporting their students.  I have a deep admiration for anyone who is trying to juggle homeschooling and working from home. One new development is the introduction of 'virtual open days' which allows parents to visit the school online, hear from the Heads and have interviews with admissions people. Of course, this is no substitute for seeing a school in action but it is better than nothing! Have a look at Cheltenham Ladies' video and join their open day : For anyone interested in a modern Catholic education, Downside is also doing a virtual open day on the 15th and 16th of May. Wycombe Abbey will be running a virtual Open Day on the 6th June; all the insight with none of the jetlag!

Brandon has been online for a while now! Here are some tips for teachers who are about to start sharing the online experience. Above all, don’t feel isolated, we are all in the same boat.  We use Zoom, Kahoots, Google Docs Pre-Quest (our own platform) and a whole range of other products to try to get the most out of our lessons. Be interactive – we found that just trying to teach in the same way didn’t really work so we have incorporated annotation, interactive whiteboard hangman as a warm-up, Kahoots and masses of quizzes into our lessons. We tried some of the fun gadgets (wishful thinking tropical backgrounds!) but the novelty factor wore off very quickly. Get physical – ask students to move for a few minutes during longer lessons. We have a series of go-to stretches for when classes start dozing off! Try new activities – we tried to think about how we could use technology to help some of our less confident students. As part of their interview skills class, we sent