Learning in 2145

I like Alex Beard very much! And especially the way he looks at education as “work in progress”, his humility and sense of humor when he makes us think about the future of learning.

His last tryptic – a radio series on knowing, teaching and learning – won’t defraud Alex’s fans. Alex is a former teacher, a recognized specialist. But on top of it, he is a believer! He believes in meeting people, talking to them, He believes in the art of conversation. He is not the first one. Back in the fourth century Saint Augustine defined education as “a process of posing problems and seeking answers through conversation”. No doubt Alex will refuse such legacy but any way…

What will happen in 2145? Learners of all age will come together and help one another. A more solidarian and intergenerational education with a mix of AI will enable us to know, love and care each other better. His optimistic and rigorous investigation is released in times of COVID-19 where we need more than ever reasons for hope.

I met Alex for the first time in Sevilla (Spain) where he presented an article on the future of education. He compared education to bricolage and made me thought about the role of technology in our future education system.In the words of Seymour Papert, “bricolage is a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing, playing around”.

Alex works at Teach for All and knows better than anyone that teachers are used to “working at a height above the ground” and look like high wire artists walking a tightrope in their attempt to catch their students’ attention. They set up their scaffolds in the classrooms for an academic year, just the time they are given to fix or improve education. Scaffolding is not only another word for teaching. It is also a way of teaching, Psychologist and social constructivist, Lev Vygotsky, refers to  scaffolding as  designing activities that support the students as they are led through the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD).  A learner can finalize the acquisition of a given skill through interaction with a teacher or a skilled peer.

Listening to Alex piece on Teaching, I was wondering: are teachers ready to take risks to change their practices and innovate in the classroom? Intuition often says no and research evidences seem to confirm that individuals choosing to teach are significantly more risk averse. A lot has been written about teachers’ motivation. How can we envisage teachers’ role in and outside the classroom to “develop love of learning”?

©BBC

While listening to the piece on Learning where Alex designs a continuous learning space and time, I remembered the painter Barnett Newmann who wrote once that “only time can be felt in private. Space is common property. Only time is personal, a private experience”. I believe the same can be said for learning space – a common property where learners meet and experience together – and learning time – where each learner lives a private and intimate experience.

Alex Beard makes us think extensively about education changes taking place with climate change. Even if we rightly believe that education is part of the answer on climate change, we may question the efficiency of teaching in this matter. Ivan Illich criticized the “illusion on which the school system rests (assuming) that most learning is the result of teaching”. For him, “most learning happens casually”. Margaret Mead argued that fighting back the dangers facing our planet should begin by understanding “the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices”. Is it the responsibility of schools and teachers? Protecting nature can’t be reduced to an educative challenge. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, once argued that “protecting nature is a right of the environment in regard to man”. Enforcing this right is maybe first a matter for lawyers and not for teachers.

We wish to believe, as Alex does, that changes will take place “naturally”. Bumping into someone can in fact take place anywhere. Learning is no longer or not only about technology. Learning has to do with the way we occupy the space, with the way we live together, we engage into conversation together.

However 20 years ago, Seymour Papert argued that: “children will (no longer) sit quietly in school and listen to a teacher give them predigested knowledge. They will revolt.” Revolt may be the necessary step for changes to happen.

My friend Roger Hart, author of “Children’s Participation”, a masterpiece on environmental education, used to quote Simon Nicholson’s Theory of Loose Parts.  Nicholson writes:

“In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it”.

He adds that “it does not require much imagination to realise that most environments that do not work (i.e. do not work in terms of human interaction and involvement in the sense described) such as schools, playgrounds, hospitals, day-care centres, international airports, art galleries and museums do not do so because they do not meet the ‘loose part’ requirement; instead they are clean, static and impossible to play around with. What has happened is that adults – in the form of professional artists, architects, landscape architects and planners – have had all the fun playing with their own materials, concepts and planning alternatives (…) and thus has all the fun and creativity been stolen: children and adults and the community have been grossly cheated and the educational-cultural system makes sure that they hold the belief that this is ‘right’ ”.

Nicholson argues that “the dominant cultural elite tell us that the planning, design and building of any part of the environment is so difficult and so special that only the gifted few can properly solve environmental problems”.

The changes Alex is envisioning can’t be dissociated from a deeper change process with a political dimension that will enable local communities starting with children to take over direct responsibility on the decisions that matter for their future.

Roger Hart wrote: “Only through direct participation can children develop a genuine appreciation of democracy and a sense of their own competence and responsibility to participate.”

After listening to Alex Beard, it is certainly time to read again the Convention of the Rights of the Child and its articles 12 and 13 and be convinced that a political framework for change already exists. We just need to use it!

I hope Alex will give us soon a new piece on “Revolt in education”! Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Kailash Satyarthi could then be invited:

“Each one of us has the potential to bring about change if we channel our energies and our anger at injustices in the right way. Even a small spark can dispel darkness in a room. And each of us represents a small but critical spark if we act on the problems we see rather than just witness them”.

Global citizens in times of COVID-19: the ultimate challenge for schools

“La peste che il tribunale della sanità aveva temuto che potesse entrar con le bande alemanne nel milanese, c’era entrata davvero, come è noto; ed è noto parimente che non si fermò qui, ma invase e spopolò una buona parte d’Italia.”

“The plague that the Health Tribunal had feared might enter the Milan area with the German troops really did enter, as is well known. Just as it is well known that the plague did not stop there, but went on to invade and depopulate a good part of Italy.”

 Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi, Capitolo XXXI) has been widely used these days to better understand our reaction to pandemics. Similarities with the 1630 Great Plague of Milan have been analysed by Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize in Literature, in a recent opinion published in The New York Times. Pamuk insists on humanity’s tendency to create rumours and spread false information as an unprompted response to pandemics. The most common rumours during plague outbreaks were about who had brought the disease in, and where it had come from.

La peste di Firenze del 1348 in un’incisione di Luigi Sabatelli

Do we have the ability nowadays to resist rumours, misinformation and stigma and to fight back the tendency to lock ourselves down into our fears and prejudices?

All those interested in the educational dimension of the pandemic will read with great delight the open letter written to his students by Domenico Squillace, principal of Liceo Scientifico Alessandro Volta, a secondary school in Milan. Squillace urges his students to preserve the most precious asset we possess: our social fabric, our humanity.

Pamuk doesn’t say anything else when he argues about our ability to share reliable information and build a common knowledge that “begets a sense of solidarity” between people and “encourages mutual understanding”. Pamuk sees hope for a better world to emerge after this pandemic, if we can “embrace and nourish the feelings of humility and solidarity engendered by the current moment.”

This optimistic statement echoes Martha Nussbaum’s work in her book Not for profit about global citizenship. For her, the global problems we need to solve question our capacity to come together and cooperate in ways we have not before.

When schools reopen, it will be up to them (and to us!) to develop new strategies to make students global citizens.

If we don’t succeed, then, in the words of the Milanese principal: “La peste avrà vinto davvero”: “The plague really will have won.”

Educating global citizens may well be schools’ ultimate challenge in times of COVID-19!

School is the answer

After a month of lock down due to the Covid-19 crisis, most schools remain closed in most countries with 1,5 billion students out of school.

Universal school closure has obviously an impact on studies and learning achievements. Most of the debate turns around the day of reopening and when and how national evaluations will be done. But school closure has a tremendous immediate effect on health and education inequalities and reveals how important is the school network for public good.

We are suddenly reminded that school is the answer to many social issues. The following bullet points should help us think about the current situation

- Schools means daily basic care

Main reason for school to remain open or reopen is to provide children and parents with basic care: food, attention while parents work. The NY Times reported that out of the 10,521 public schools in California, only one – remained open to give assistance and care to children of families who work the citrus and walnut groves. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/coronavirus-california-school.html.  30 million students in the US qualify for free or reduced cost school lunches; they are 1,3 M. in the UK. In France according to UNICEF, more than 3 M. children live below the poverty line.

- Homeless children suffer most from the closure

According to a UCL research group, “young children under 5 years living in temporary accommodation rarely have the ability to self-isolate and adhere to social distancing, with previous extreme inequalities and inequities in accessing health care becoming exacerbated”. For instance more than 125.000 children were homeless and in temporary accommodation increased in England in 2019.

- School closures deepen education inequalities

According to a research published by the university of Leuwen, the summer holiday in most American schools is estimated to contribute to a loss in academic achievement equivalent to one month of education for children with low socioeconomic status.

- School closures will exacerbate the epidemic of childhood obesity

A research published in the United States reminds us that children experience most unhealthy weight gain primarily when they are out of school (normally during the summer months).

© WFP/Volana Rarivoson

- Digital innovation was not ready at all in school

Teachers are struggling to find alternative ways of teaching. According to a recent survey made by Synlab with french teachers, 70% of respondents use mainly emails and phones for organizing and offering work to students.

- “Not everything is straightforward”

Videoconference doesn’t solve it all. Only 12% of teachers have set up a virtual classroom. Many teachers are sending the exercises via WhatsApp to families who have no other connection than the mobile. Dozens of municipalities in Navarra and the Basc country (Spain) are implementing systems to deliver door-to-door homework on paper to students who do not have the means to follow online teaching. Singapore has suspended the classroom use of Zoom, a videoconferencing tool with easy-to-use functions that have made it easy for trolls to hijack meetings and harass students

- Connecting with children is a key problem

According to a teacher quoted in the Spanish daily El País, Antonio Solano, director of the Bovalar de Castellón high school, “One of the ones that worries me the most is a boy I have in class, who was working well and whom we have been calling with no results. And I think: but where will he be, what will he be doing?”. In France, 17% of teachers have failed to connect with families, mainly in high schools where the rate rises to almost 40%.

The problem didn’t start with the Covid-19. 263 million children were out-of-school worldwide in the most recent data (2014) published by UNESCO.

- The digital divide widens education inequalities

Remote learning is a fantasy for those who cannot afford internet access”. 10% of Americans — nearly 33 million people — are living without internet, according to a Pew Research study.

 - Parents’ dependency creates more inequalities

Homework is now the rule but most disadvantaged children don’t do “homework”. The homework gap refers to the barriers students face at school when they don’t have access to a high-speed internet connection at home. We are reminded that inequality starts much before school starts. A research team from the University of Michigan showed that disadvantaged children start kindergarten with significantly lower cognitive skills than their more advantaged counterparts. These same disadvantaged children are then placed in low-resource schools, magnifying the initial inequality.

 - Children violence remains

Lockdown due to Covid-19 has emphasized the reality of violence suffered by children. This is unfortunately not new. Globally, it is estimated that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years, have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect in the past year.

 - School closures didn’t occur only with the Covid-19 crisis

UNICEF reminded a year ago that more than 1.9 million children had been forced out of school in West and Central Africa due to an upsurge in attacks and threats of violence.

The distance class: less is more

The teacher was the physical referent of the class, the permanent facilitator, the moderator.

She divided her time between the school where she taught, participated in meetings with her colleagues, received parents and her home where she prepared his lessons, corrected homework.

And then overnight, all schools closed. Everyone has to teach and learn distance and has to do it now! No magician imagined being able to make the school disappear overnight.

We certainly have the technical means to do so. We can give a distance learning course by videoconference to students staying at home. We can use a virtual class which reproduces the functioning of the class with a shared screen and a chat tool for the pupils.

But none of these solutions has been thought of as a replacement for physical school. In fact, nothing was as ready as we thought. Nothing has ever been thought of on a large scale so that children no longer have to go to school.

The teaching paradigm changed within hours.

The “distance class”

“Teaching is a two way thing!”This is exactly the challenge we face. In a few days we need to invent the distance class – and this is not about distance learning as we understood it.

The distance class starts with the relationship between a teacher and his class – the only guarantee of the quality of learning -. This relationship should be maintained at a distance with a quality equivalent or close to that which existed in the physical space of the classroom.

How to continue teaching “as before”? How to do it without a physical place common to the teacher and his students but with the same protagonists? How to respond to an exceptional situation with the same quality? With what skills, what training, what goals?

All these questions are raised and a mobilized, competent teaching staff must urgently invent a new concept: distance class.

What has changed?

Physical space has disappeared; Students have become invisible; Heads of schools have become invisible; Parents have become more visible; Time has lengthened: the day no longer has clear boundaries between work and leisure.

What remains as before

The teacher is the only one in charge of his class; Classroom assistance is mandatory; All children have the right to be in class; A class has a schedule; Class hours allow children to acquire knowledge and skills by following a well established curriculum

Distance class? Yes but how?

It is reassuring to hold on to what we do best.

The teacher prepares her lesson with care, following on the one hand the school curriculum and on the other hand adapting her teaching to the characteristics of the class group. The lessons are scheduled during the day depending on their difficulty and the attention required from the students; a class will alternate between “difficult” subjects and more “fun” activities to give a rhythm that suits the greatest number of students in the class.

The teacher follows the work of his students in a way as personalized as possible; the teacher questions the students, answers their questions as individually as possible, getting closer to those who need it.

How long should a distance class last?

Can we keep the 50-minute lessons or should we offer shorter durations … supplemented by home work? Those who experience extreme teleworking these days know the fatigue generated and the concentration required by repetitive videoconferences, more or less organized and with very variable durations.

The distance class cannot be a perfect copy of the physical class. The teacher and student’s ability to concentrate is not the same. They need breaths, moments of escape.

Less is more

Today with digital, you have to learn to do less, better, shorter.

The teacher must be convinced of his ability to easily create lessons for the distance class without duplicating those he had for the traditional class. Simple advice: Do as usual! Prepare your lesson before giving it on a virtual platform! This advice seems trivial. It’s not that much.

Each online lesson should last a maximum of 30 minutes. To the teacher, the motivating and explanatory work to be done in class: “the teacher is the guide”. To the students that want to go deeper, complementary work to be done “at home.”

Our recommendation

4 lessons per day;

4 x 30 minutes;

2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon for example.

Between each lesson, a break to refresh, “disconnect”, review what we have just seen.

So do only during the lesson what you feel you can do in 30 minutes.

Go straight to the point. Choose.

A lesson is “a minimum” but containing the essentials: clearly stated objectives, basic points well summarized, some dynamic activities. The rest, everything else, can be the subject of an additional email or a file shared on the school’s digital workspace.

There are simple guidelines to do the preparatory work: create a simple word document, divide the sheet into 5 blocks; one 10-minute block (reserved for teaching content) and four 5-minute blocks.

- Assign activity to each block of 5 minutes to be done in class;

- Select for each activity an introductory element (image, video, text, sound file).

- Keep the word document and these items in a folder on your computer.

- When you have to create the lesson on a virtual platform, use this folder.

BLOCKS

DURATION

Block 1

5 minutes  – a video

Block 2

10 minutes – the core of the lesson

Block 3

5 minutes – an exercise

Block 4

5 minutes – a quizz

Block 5

5 minutes – an assessment poll and next steps

Interactive and synchronous teaching

We have no other choice than the distance class? So let’s also make it interactive. Let’s address the challenge of synchronous education where everyone – teacher and students – connect at the same time, as in real class.

Synchronous teaching requires tools. That’s a good news! There are plenty!

Learning does not consist in seeing your students in full screen. Imagine a teacher 50 centimeters away from each of his students, feeling their breath, blowing in their face!

Learning is first and foremost the art of distance, the art of knowing how to use pedagogical supports wisely and to animate the discussion on subjects that require a specific approach and address challenging issues!

In a visioconference, the teacher scrolls through a powerpoint presentation – prepared in advance – by moving from one slide to another according to the time allotted for the lesson. It is therefore an imported pedagogy.

The particularity of a lesson on the contrary is that it is part of a dynamic process. Students need to know more at the end than at the beginning. They all go from point a to point b. We must therefore ensure that this progression takes place.

Assessment

Both individual and collective assessment is essential. The online class cannot afford to lose students on the way, to leave out those who do not understand quickly enough.

A simple online survey with a single question allows us to move forward in a coordinated way: “Did we understand what we have just learned? Yes or no?”

Depending on the answer, the teacher will decide whether to go back on what he thought he had acquired and whether he should do it during this lesson or the next.

For online assessment, there are tools – questionnaires – of all kinds that allow you to test remotely with more or less simple questions if the lesson meets the objectives set for learning.

Some tips

- Avoid reinventing content

- Do not confuse your learners with an overambitious use of third party tools and services

- Use a regular pattern of communication to help establish a sense of community

- Maintain student attention during content delivery

- Extend the life of a lesson beyond its final assessment

- Set clear and measurable learning outcomes

- Use carefully positioned quizzes to pause your learners and prompt reflection

- Use additional platforms to support your teaching where the central plaform’s functionality falls short

- Encourage learners to engage in authentic tasks

- Direct social dynamics by highlighting selected contributions

- Develop your students as autonomous learners by asking them to continue the work at home

-Use a provocative question to wake up the class and extend a live debate after class in a discussion forum

(adapted from MOOC Design Patterns Project, Warburton and Mor, 2015)

How do you get students involved online?

For those who practice videoconferencing, you have noticed the difficulty in speaking and the difficulty in enforcing a speaking order. Priority is given to whoever speaks, it is he or she that we see on the screen.

What happen if we “leave the microphone open” for each student to raise questions aloud at any time? Kind of like letting everyone in a class speak when they want to. How many times have teachers complained about these talkative classes!

The big question that we all ask ourselves then becomes: can we participate without necessarily (speaking)? This is the gamble of the educational moment that we are going through: not to fall into the ease of speaking to say nothing but to insist on “doing and sharing it”.

Shouldn’t we in the course of the class favor “soft” interaction modes – one by one in private exchange – or deferred modes – meet again after class for a telephone exchange of a few minutes.

The important thing during the online class is for the teacher to be able to “map” his class: who follows, who does not follow, who does, who does not.

Two solutions open:

- being able to “see” the students’ screens live and intervene immediately if necessary for those of them who need it, even if it means contacting them personally by telephone, for example;

- being able to include participation in activities to be carried out in class: instead of carrying out a powerpoint, the teacher focuses on the student’s ability to bring documents, find a video, express an idea. Then the teacher has to have the means to share the student’s production with the whole class.

Another innovative possibility, group work!

Cooperative or collaborative work – group work – is all about shared tasks, accomplishing something together, solving problems using collective intelligence.

These goals are as difficult or as easy to achieve from a distance as in the classroom. There are simple applications that allow you to bring students together, assign them tasks, track their work. In short, there are tools that make us work together.

It all seems strange, singular or provocative; but in an online course, you have to create a new pact of confidence with students who no longer rely on visual or sound control.

Does this work?

We are used to blaming technology for all the problems of the classroom at a distance. The famous bugs multiply, the screen suddenly blackens, the page loses its configuration on the screen, what works on a computer does not work on a tablet, the connection is interrupted …

So what? Who said technology replaces teachers?

All problems related to technology have solutions. The distance class is first and foremost a lesson of humility both for teachers and for those who have seen themselves too quickly as digital magicians.

La classe à distance

L’enseignant partageait son temps entre l’école où il faisait classe, participait aux réunions avec ses collègues, recevait les parents et son domicile où il préparait ses cours, corrigeait les devoirs. Et puis du jour au lendemain, il n’y a plus d’écoles ouvertes. Tout le monde doit se mettre au “télétravail”. Télétravail, quel drôle de nom pour un enseignant! Aucune des solutions digitales existantes n’a été pensé en remplacement de l’école physique. Aucun magicien n’a imaginé pouvoir faire disparaître l’école du jour au lendemain. Rien n’a jamais été pensé à grande échelle pour que les enfants n’aient plus à aller à l’école.

Il nous faut donc en quelques jours inventer la classe à distance – et non plus l’enseignement à distance.

La question est de savoir si la relation entre un enseignant et sa classe – seule garante de la qualité de l’apprentissage – peut se maintenir à distance avec une qualité équivalente ou proche de celle qui existait dans l’espace physique de la salle de classe. Toutes ces questions se posent à un corps enseignant mobilisé, compétent mais qui doit inventer dans l’urgence un nouveau concept: la classe à distance.

Ce qui demeure du temps d’avant

La leçon à distance ne peut être une copie parfaite de la leçon réelle. La capacité de concentration de l’enseignant et de l’élève n’est pas la même. Il leur faut des respirations, des moments d’évasion.

Aujourd’hui avec le numérique, il faut apprendre à faire moins, mieux, plus court.

La leçon

Chaque leçon en ligne doit durer 30 minutes au maximum. Au professeur, le travail d’amorçage, de défrichage à réaliser en classe: “le professeur donne l’envie”. Aux élèves l’approfondissement, le travail complémentaire fait “à la maison.”

4 leçons par jour; 4 x 30 minutes; 2 le matin et 2 l’après-midi par exemple. Entre chaque leçon, une pause pour se rafraîchir, “déconnecter”, réviser ce que l’on vient de voir.

Ne faites donc lors de la leçon que ce que vous vous sentez capables de faire en 30 minutes. Allez au plus juste. Choisissez.

Un conseil simple: Faites comme d’habitude! Préparez votre leçon avant de la donner sur une plateforme virtuelle! Ce conseil semble trivial. Il ne l’est pas autant que ça.

Il faut retrouver le cours dans sa simplicité d’avant. Un cours “a minima” mais comportant l’essentiel: les objectifs clairement énoncés, les points fondamentaux bien résumés, quelques activités dynamiques. Le reste, tout le reste, peut faire l’objet d’un mail complémentaire ou d’un fichier partagé sur l’espace numérique de travail.

Pour ce faire ouvrez un simple document word, divisez la feuille en 5 blocs; un bloc de 10 minutes (réservé au contenu de l’enseignement) et 4 blocs de 5 minutes. Attribuer à chaque bloc de 5 minutes une activité à faire en classe et sélectionner pour chaque activité un élément introductif (image, vidéo, texte, fichier son).

Gardez le document word et ces éléments dans un fichier sur votre ordinateur. Quand vous aurez à créer la leçon sur une plateforme virtuelle, utilisez ce fichier. Ne vous rajoutez pas de contraintes en allant sélectionner sur des bases de données infinies des contenus que vous découvrez.

Comment utiliser la visioconférence ?

L’apprentissage ne consiste pas à voir en plein écran ses élèves. Imaginez un enseignant se trouvant à 50 centimètres de distance de chacun de ses élèves, respirant leur haleine, leur soufflant en pleine figure.

L’apprentissage c’est d’abord l’art de la distance, l’art de savoir utiliser à bon escient des supports pédagogiques et animer la discussion sur des sujets que l’on découvre, des points précis, des points qui font problème!

La particularité d’une leçon c’est qu’elle est donc inscrite dans une dynamique d’apprentissage. Il faut en savoir plus à la fin qu’au début. Nous allons d’un point a vers un point b. Il faut donc s’assurer que cette progression a bien lieu.

Deux éléments sont fondamentaux pour garantir la progression dans le temps court d’une leçon en ligne.

Tout d’abord, comme nous l’avons vu,  la leçon elle-même doit aller à l’essentiel, filtrer le superflu, avancer par bonds en laissant de côté les détails que chacun pourra approfondir hors ligne en consultant son manuel.

Ensuite l’évaluation tant individuelle que collective est essentielle. La classe en ligne ne peut pas se permettre de perdre des élèves en route, de laisser de côté ceux qui ne comprennent pas assez vite.

© Shutterstock

Comment faire participer les élèves en ligne?

Les fonctions de visio (et audio) conférence permettent bien à l’enseignant de parler et donner la parole. Mais la parole n’est utile que pour faciliter l’interaction au sein de la classe. C’est tout le pari du moment éducatif que nous traversons: ne pas tomber dans la facilité du parler pour ne rien dire mais insister sur “le faire et le partager”.

Imaginons “laisser le micro ouvert” pour chaque élève et laisser chacun réagir, s’interroger à voix haute à tout bout de champ. Le premier risque est que cette participation sans contrôle deviennent vite source de nuisances sonores. Combien de fois les enseignants ne se sont-ils plaints de ces classes bavardes! Le deuxième risque est de se voir déborder par les questions dans le temps réduit de la classe, rallongeant sans fin le cours. Le troisième risque est de voir se creuser encore les inégalités entre ceux capables de réagir instantanément et les autres.

Comment donc créer de la participation réelle, respectueuse et aussi silencieuse que possible?

Deux solutions s’ouvrent:

- pouvoir inclure la participation dans les activités à réaliser en classe: au lieu de dérouler un powerpoint, l’enseignant mise sur la capacité de l’élève à apporter des documents, trouver une vidéo, exprimer une idée. Il faut alors que l’enseignant dispose du moyen de partager la production de l’élève avec toute la classe.

- pouvoir “voir” les écrans des élèves en direct et intervenir tout de suite en cas de besoin pour ceux d’entre eux qui en ont besoin, quitte à les contacter ensuite personnellement par téléphone par exemple;

Dans la classe à distance, une fonction d’écrans partagés permettrait à l’enseignant de voir les écrans de tous les élèves (lui ou elle seule les verrait), d’interagir avec chaque élève depuis leur écran en toute discrétion, en toute “intimité”.

Autre possibilité innovante, le travail de groupe!

Le travail coopératif ou collaboratif – le travail en groupe – est d’abord affaire de tâches partagées, d’accomplir quelque chose ensemble, de résoudre des problèmes en faisant appel à l’intelligence collective.

Ces objectifs sont aussi difficiles ou aussi faciles à atteindre à distance que dans la salle de classes. Il existe des applications simples qui permettent de réunir les élèves, de leur assigner des tâches, de suivre leur travail. Bref, il existe des outils qui nous font travailler ensemble.

Une leçon d’humilité

On a coutume de mettre sur le compte de la technologie, tous les problèmes de la classe à distance. Les fameux bugs se multiplient, l’écran se noircit brutalement, la page perd sa configuration sur l’écran, ce qui marche sur un ordinateur ne marche pas sur une tablette, la connexion s’interrompt…

Et alors? Qui a dit que la technologie se substituait à l’enseignant ?

Tous les problèmes liés à la technologie ont des solutions. La classe à distance est d’abord une belle leçon d’humilité tant pour les enseignants que pour ceux qui se sont vus trop vite comme les magiciens du numérique.