Moving to online workbooks - Scotland

Prior to the pandemic, we taught entirely in physical classrooms and used paper booklets which learners would work through at their own pace. Some worked more quickly than others and it could be hard for them and me to keep track of progress but regular face-to-face contact and 1-1 interaction made this possible. During the pandemic, it wasn’t possible to work in this way anymore because teaching moved online and the physical booklets weren’t provided to the students.

I used the class notebook function in Microsoft Teams to reimagine the paper booklet. Each week had a page with some exercises to attempt related to a specific topic and I was able to add multimedia resources to support learning such as youtube videos or videos our teaching team had created. I used the announcements/notification function in Teams to post reminders to the group on a weekly basis about the material. Learners were able to upload photographs of their work to the class notebook to produce a record of what they had done and I was able to offer feedback based on this. Photographs worked well for maths/numeracy as many basic document editors such as word do not cope well with mathematical symbols/syntax.

I am continuing to use the class notebook function even now that teaching has returned to physical classrooms. This gives a way to integrate multimedia resources into learning more easily and creates a way for learners to go back and recap in their own time. The messaging function in Teams also allows me to connect with the class and issue reminders in a less formal way than email.

We used to have a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in the college – Moodle. But we used this as more of a bank of resources and less interactively than how we are now using Teams.

We used a portfolio method of assessment during the pandemic rather than examinations. The class notebook was a great way to gather the evidence needed for this. I could see the benefit of this approach for the learners and they seemed to get a deeper understanding from it. We hope that we can continue to assess in this way going forward subject to approval from the qualification awarding body.