Looking on the bright side, if you have started teaching your classes online, or setting work for your pupils online, this forced closure of many schools is a great opportunity to carry out some research. It may not be what an academic would call "rigorous". It will probably not be very large scale, and almost certainly not a randomised controlled trial (RCT), but in my opinion none of that matters very much. The purpose of the research would be to inform you of what seems to work best, in what context.

For example, if with one class you tried Zoom, and another Skype, and another Google Classroom, which of these provided the best results -- and how is the word "best" to be defined in this context in the first place?

There are many ed tech companies providing free resources at the moment. In many cases they are free for a limited period. If you're using these, it's a good idea to draw up a few criteria on which you can base any future purchasing decisions. Ultimately, the killer question is: would I be willing to pay good money for this product? If you're not sure, then that probably says it all. In that case you will want to know: can I save and continue to use what I obtained when the service was free? Can I export it (whatever "it" is) to a different format so that I can use anything I've created in a different program?

Another issue worth exploring I think is this: I have heard, anecdotally, that some pupils do all the work that their school sets for them, while others do none. What factors determine this? What are parental expectations in this respect? Are you keeping a record of who is doing the work, and who isn't? Not in order to punish pupils, but in order to find out if it actually makes much difference in the long run. And also, of course, because at some point you are going to have to resume working in a physical space, and it would be useful, to say the least, to know where to start.

Sadly, I think an important reason to document what you've tried, and how successful it was, is that you may be called to account at some point. What if your Principal demands to know, "How come your students' grades fell by 3% in the last year?" An obvious answer would be "Because there was a minor interruption to schooling caused by a global pandemic." But a better answer might be "Because for the first month I was using Zoom (say) but then things improved when we switched to Google Classroom."

Even if you don't think a conversation like that is likely, it is still potentially useful to make a note of the disruption to schooling and any false starts you made because, incredible as this may sound, you might forget.

A few months ago I was thinking about the years 2005 to 2006. In that period my productivity took a nosedive. I only half-heartedly explored an offer to publish a new edition of my book Managing ICT. I didn't complete the second edition of Coming of Age, a free ebook about making use of Web 2.0 applications in education. It's not at all like me to not finish things I start, so I turned to E.

"What happened in 2005-6? I seem to have stopped doing anything that I hadn't been commissioned to do by clients. I don't understand it."

"That's when your mum started to get dementia. Don't you remember?"

I should have remembered. The worry, the racing over to her place every night, dealing with social care services. It was relentless. (I wrote about it in The Long Goodbye.) I definitely should have remembered, but I didn't. If someone can forget something like that, is it not possible that you could forget "wasting" weeks trying out different services, and different ways of working?

For all these reasons, I definitely think documenting what you do is a good idea. It need not be too arduous: perhaps a spreadsheet with a few columns:

Service tried
Category
Date
Evaluation (1 to 5 stars)
Comments, if any.

A similar spreadsheet (or a different worksheet in the same one) for work completed might look like this:

Class
Work set
Date
Type
% of class that did it

By including a field called “Type”, you may be able to discern a patter over time. Perhaps exercises resulted in a very low response, while a reading assignment or a research assignment fared better. The “Date” field could be useful to help you see if the completion rate changed over time.

If you wished to solicit the opinions of colleagues or pupils, enlist the support of a Google Survey or two. You might even consider turning this into a project for pupils, if that would fit in with your curriculum.

Another option could be to blog about your journey, which I think could be fascinating for other educators to read. If you teach creative writing, why not encourage your pupils to write about it too, especially in the form of a blog or a class blog? They could include interviews, recorded video chats (with permission of course) and the results of any surveys you or they have carried out. (If you need a way to make sense of all that qualitative data, check out the book I reviewed: Find the theme in your data.)

Whichever way you look at it, keeping a log of what you're doing is a useful thing to do.

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