THE LESSONS
In terms of the academic side, the timetable worked a little differently.
Whereas at school we would have 40-minute lessons and a variety of subjects throughout the day, remotely we had a three-hour morning session and a three-hour afternoon session.
Every lesson was different but most commonly the lesson is split into different sections of individual research or work, going away to watch videos or read articles, group discussions through the different channels within the team and whole class discussions on the main call.
Participating in class and asking questions is one thing I found to be more challenging in the online environment because when a question was asked by the teacher to the class, everyone wants to speak at once and so it becomes hard to know when to speak. But generally, I found I was still able to get involved and add something to the discussions taking place.
For my A Levels I am taking English Literature, Drama and Art. In Art, all of the work was done via practical tasks. We were given a certain amount of time to carry out each task before presenting what we had done when returning to the lesson.
In English, there were a lot of group discussions before presenting to the rest of the class what we had researched and discussed as well as a lot of independent research.
Drama ended up being similar to what we were doing in the classroom before. We read a play and discussed the history of Ancient Greece for context.
THE TECHNOLOGY
Some of the technology we were using made it easy to transition to remote learning. The use of OneNote I found to be hugely successful. It made accessing work and knowing the structure of lessons easy to navigate.
Also, still having House Call and weekly Year group catchups within House over Teams was crucial in keeping in contact with everyone and keeping a sense of normality.
