Discussion for 16th November

As an online tutor I can see lots of advantages to online learning. Pupils are more relaxed in their own surroundings and this helps especially if they are anxious. Parents are able to sit in and watch what the pupils are doing and this helps with them supporting pupils at home. Online is a face to face method of teaching and you are much more aware of pupils body language and can spot when they feel confident and when they don't much easier than sometimes in the classroom.

Disadvantages are not being able to sometimes just pull out a resource that you know you have used with a child in class or when teaching in person and having to think differently about how to approach a topic so it will work online. I do love online teaching and find it really rewarding. I feel like I have built really strong relationships with my pupils and love seeing their confidence grow as we work together.

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages. I think it can depend on the age and the personality of the child too. I have a six year old who is great and another who is not. Generally I think it can be a bit tricky for some of the younger ones as they need to have a parent around to help navigate. They can close the screen, or click on something when they don't mean to. I personally don't particularly like the fact that the parent is probably lurking in the background somewhere, listening in, but that can't be helped. From a teaching point of view, the preparation is certainly longer - so much of what we do is 'in our head' and we can pack our resources or reach out for them in a couple of minutes. We can change our plan if we need to with greater ease. There is not as quite as much flexibility with games. Plenty can be made and played online but it's amazing how many children don't play real board games at home and so really enjoy them in a face to face session.

Having said that, there is so much we can do online with a bit (a lot) of preparation and the right technical equipment. We can have our 'bank' of materials and topics ; and when that's in place we can switch our approach to give a different example or find a different way in if we need to, just as we would in person. Certainly, pictorially, there is no difference, arguably I have more ready online pictorially that I can just click on, change .annotate, move around, to illustrate something.

With maths I think the child having their own set of basic equipment makes a huge difference, and when that's in place, we can mirror exactly what we do in a face-to-face lesson really well, then when we add it in the technology and online manipulatives it becomes really interesting for the child as we can switch from one to the other making it really varied in pace.

I find that online, with their own base 10, rods and counters, the child actually does slightly more with the equipment themselves, earlier.

Online feels like a very safe space for some maths learners too, and I think they feel slightly less exposed. For maths anxious learners it's a bonus and I feel that many are almost more comfortable in that "third space".

The flexibility on timing is great from a teaching perspective and for the pupil (if they travel) it is less tiring too.

During the first lockdown I felt children, once they got over the novelty, the children (primary) were eventually sick of being online, on Zoom etc as they were staring at screens for several hours a day for school and homework. However, they still seem to enjoy working with an online whiteboard a lot. I can't imagine trying to teach maths online without an interactive whiteboard and again, in many ways it feels less dry when we move to the abstract.

I like both.

I am a tutor so only teach one to one and small group tuition rather than a whole class of students. I am sure that teaching a whole class online is a completely different experience.

A lot of my students suffer from lack of confidence. When I moved to online, they all expressed that they preferred online as they didn’t feel so under pressure. As the students are so used to using computers for work and play, it really didn’t phase them at all. Once I learnt to look for subtle signs on my students faces, I know whether they are understanding whether they say they are or not and, being online, means that it is much easier to notice these than sitting beside a student.

Another aspect of being online, using an interactive whiteboard, means that we can write and erase anything immediately. This means that we can write everything we think down and then discuss our thoughts.

My older students use the notes and workings on the whiteboard as revision and guides to look back over the week and month and therefore can focus on what we are looking at and then review after rather than on concentrating on writing notes during the session.

Due to not being able to see what the students are writing on paper, my students have to use a lot more exact mathematical language to explain their thinking and understanding. Through this articulation, rather than assuming knowledge and understanding, I have found many misconceptions that my students have, despite their answers being correct. I would never have picked these up with face to face tuition as I would be focused on what they were writing, see that it was correct and move on, rather than asking these very specific questions.

I believe that most topics can be taught just as well online and many of my students have their own manipulatives in their homes so that aspect is very similar to face to face. Also, with the pandemic, there are now many more websites that have great manipulatives that are easy for the students to use - before, I was making my own! However, this week, I was teaching how to find missing sides from compound shapes to an 8 year old. A simple demonstration using bitpaper (an interactive whiteboard) was all I needed for the student to understand it immediately. www.facebook.com/watch/?v=754710522060905