Example 1.
The
lectures were arranged using video conferencing tool (Microsoft Teams). I
shared my screen to show examples and how-to-do-this with my computer. This
communication was pretty much “one-way”, the students did ask or comment only
few times. In addition to my short lecture there was assignment for students to
submit using Teams. In that class I arranged my lectures in the same time I
would do in normal school conditions, three times a week. Some of the lectures
I recorded and shared to students using Microsoft Stream -cloud.
Example 2. The course material was
already in the Internet-service (www.opinaika.fi, in Finnish only) so I created
usernames for students. The course material included theory with examples and
brief automatically checked assignments. Cool thing was that the system allowed
me to monitor when and how student had accomplished each assignment. On Fridays
I quickly checked how many points had each student achieved and give some
feedback personally. I was available for students to explain unclear points
with video conference tools or Teams-messages.
In
addition to automatically checked small assignments I will grade in detail 40
exam-type assignments per student so this will be a lot more work compared to
traditional exam. In this course I pilot to grade with no official controlled
test.
Students
working varies; some studied very regularly and some very loosely. Few students
are causing worry because of very passive or minuscule communication and lack
of submitted assignments. The course is in progress as I am writing this.
Example 3. The
course started before corona-restrictions. The final exam was arranged as
remote-exam; the assignments appeared on a fixed time to the password-protected
www-site and there was three hours for students to submit the answers. Student
could take a photo of their hand-written answers and send that to me or upload
to the restricted www-site. Of course, I pondered upon the possibility of
cheat. This time the results were pretty much as I would bet based on each
student’s schoolwork in normal times. But if the corona-situation goes worse in
future and we continue remote school in September, I will use more controlled
remote-exam. One way is to start exam so that I can monitor each student’s
webcam to check they are alone and continue to monitor their computer’s desktop
(student shares her/him screen to me).
None of
the known methods is waterproof, I think.
Technical stuff
Video-conferencing
software Teams worked very well in one-way communication from teacher to all
students, and well in creating/submitting math assignments. Out student had
licences to Office 365, but it took a while before everything was working. In
small group conversations does Teams work very well. Teacher must create
“channels” to subdivide whole class into smaller groups. Another option for
arranging the remote classes with video conferencing was Zoom-software. Zoom
seemed to be more agile with greater number of participants but it lacked assignment-tools,
composition of course material.
As math
writing tool I used mostly Word -equation editor. I also have possibility to
connect a document camera to PC and share the screen to show my hand-written
math. I did try a Bamboo digital pen too but ended up writing math mostly with
keyboard.
Touko Arhosalo, mathematics teacher, Iitin lukio, Finland
