Nieuws · 30 March 2020
Online teaching in practice
A lesson described from a teacher's perspective
Amsterdam, Thursday, March 25, 2020
The students appear on screen one by one, fumble a bit to turn on the sound, and we can start. The two students who are stranded in other countries are also participating. Everyone is doing well. I ask if they are still moving a bit, because most of them are continuing to work, now from home, behind their computers. I am still hesitant to have them move in front of the camera. Maybe next lesson.
Everyone is used to it now: books are by the computer, homework is within reach. I already have a website, Word document, and PowerPoint ready on my computer.
Tonight we had the 3rd online lesson. I prepared questions with the vocabulary words, which we discuss partly as a class: do you think an online lesson runs smoothly? Yes, most think so. One student still finds it less social than in the classroom. So we just hope that we will meet each other physically again someday. I write the word meet in the chat because someone asks what it means. I see students writing the word down in their notebooks.
It's a pity that a connection occasionally drops, or someone is hard to understand if the bandwidth isn't high enough. Tonight I am also hard to hear myself when the whole neighborhood is watching the NOS for the press conference, but after that, it's fine again. When I email a student after the lesson who was hard to understand, she emails back that she was able to follow the lesson well. Fortunately.
People ask for a turn by waving, but usually it goes well naturally. After practicing a few vocabulary words together, they split into groups. I am left alone in the main room. I wait, feeling a bit lost. After a while, I hop from room to room, but sometimes students don't even notice I'm dropping by. I'm a bit of a voyeur. Sometimes I break up the rooms too quickly: we weren't finished at all, they say when we are back together. I apologize; it still takes some getting used to.
We take a break in between and some self-study time. When I show a PowerPoint centrally with grammar explanations, I can see how everyone is following along much better than in the classroom. I see how much time people need to process the information because I see all close-ups of faces on the right side of my screen. Instructive.
After the break, we return and start on role-plays, roles prepared during offline time. Dialogues are performed using certain mandatory words. Applause afterwards. In the chat, people write the mandatory words they heard. We close with a poem of comfort (including audio) from the special collection on Poetry International. Some recite the poem in a different way, less solemn, more cheerful, but with good stress. Everyone is happy to have seen each other and to be able to continue learning Dutch. We thank each other and wish each other good days. Until the next lesson!
Nina Meihof
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