One of the key components of a good lesson start, in ideal circumstances, is to be able to quickly explore and diagnose student recall of previous learning. In a school where we don’t expect students to bring laptops to lessons, we could perhaps use paper multiple choice quizzes, but the time and resource implications in completing and marking those is high!

With our virtual classroom, though, a number of options exist for us to create MCQs for the start of lessons in the right moments. Teaching Physical Geography, these have been able to focus on diagnostic understanding of process and technical terminology, and very rapidly build confidence in our use of the vocabulary and knowledge. 

I made the choice to build these on our virtual learning environment (Firefly) rather than via our online platform of Teams/Forms. While these are excellent platforms, the sustainability of our VLE means that I feel the time and workload involved means I want to try and future proof this as much as possible. I use assessment pages, where students have one attempt to complete, and have created multi choice questions which self mark. The only downside of this is that they are very bespoke to us – we can’t share them or import them from others’ work!

Where relevant (I don’t do it in all my lessons), students join a lesson with a link made available. Within the first five minutes, they have been able to answer the 10-15 MCQs, and have their responses marked. I can keep the marks if I want, particularly if there are any concerns, and keep this low stakes process really quick and hassle free. 

Students have really enjoyed being able to get this done with the minimum of fuss, and it’s been hugely powerful at helping them check where they are in this remote scenario. Moving forward, all of these quizzes are retained on our VLE for the future, and I’m hoping to be able to set them as pre learning activities for lessons next year and beyond too!

At about this time of their GCSE course, my Year 10 students start their first encounter with fieldwork. As part of their work on Economic Activity and Energy, the course asks us to explore people’s views on the use of renewable energy. In their groups, students would ordinarily design some questionnaires around a table on paper, type them up and photocopy them, and get a few respondents each, to analyse. With relatively few ICT facilities at the moment, and a culture where students don’t normally bring their own devices, we’d have to work really hard to do data analysis, typing up, and presenting and evaluating our results. 

This time, it’s been different. We’ve presented the ideas and discussion of the theory as part of our live lessons, before using breakout rooms to get groups creating ideas and working together to draft a document. This has been converted to a questionnaire on Forms, which has been distributed by email, parent bulletin, and social media to gain as many results as possible. I have been able to see a quick overview of key results because of Forms’ fabulous output ability, and steer group analysis in the direction of results I think might be of interest. We’ve been able to use everyone working on their own devices, sharing a common spreadsheet to do the exported Excel analysis, and speeding up this process!

Students have engaged effectively with this new model of work, and we’ve been able to get significantly more data (nearly a hundred responses within a few days) and have students analyse responses much more quickly. Rather than codifying and inputting their data, they are starting analysis immediately, and showing more confidence in interrogating the question, rather than hard work of processing!

We have also managed to get some expert input, which normally would be very hard to arrange, and have been able to hear from a renewable energy expert who gave broader overviews, and then took individual questions from the students. 

There have been some challenges. We have an interesting level of technical competence, as I think everyone is discovering, and this is sharply brought in to focus when you start using specific tools like Excel and chart plotting. Some students are really competent, others need walk through from the basics!

We have yet to take in the student write ups, so we will see how all of this has actually been understood and engaged with in due course, but this has been a really positive shift in the virtual classroom.