A Student’s Perspective On Learning Online

My name is Lucy Cowland and I am 14 years old. Despite the fact I am only in Year 9 and not yet taking any GCSEs, online teaching has affected me massively although, I was extremely fortunate to have multiple lessons actually on a live call as opposed to just independent work.

Parental and Family involvement

Both of my parents worked at home during lockdown and had calls of their own to be on. Luckily, both my brother and I are at the age where we could manage our own schooling routine. Despite the fact we were all working at home every day, hours could go past where we wouldn’t even see each other, as we would be so wrapped up in our own work and screens. My brother and I are extremely fortunate to have our own laptops which allowed us to work independently during the school day and my parents both had laptops supplied by their work. Other students had to use phones are a laptop was not accessible. This made learning very difficult for them.

There were quite a few times where the Wifi would crash but it would often only be for short bursts. The times where the Wifi would cut out for long periods of time was also not ideal, but by hot spotting my phone to my laptop it meant that I could still join team calls and access the internet. Other students were not as lucky and again this effected their learning.

In the evenings, we all made the effort to sit down and eat together (something that didn’t often happen before lockdown), and during this time we would discuss how our day had been and the things we had been doing. My mum and I got into a routine every evening to go for a walk, even if it was just for 20 minutes. We both found this very beneficial and stress relieving. My friends and family were also very helpful in terms of relieving stress and I always tried to make the effort to check in on them. Some other families did suffer though.

Community

Something that I found extremely helpful during home learning, was having frequent contact with my friends. Whether this would be on snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp or messages, it was very useful to be able to check certain information (eg, the task we had been set or which textbook page to look at). I think this was because I preferred messaging my friends with simple queries as opposed to disrupting the lesson by asking my teacher, which I personally found quite embarrassing. However, I do think there is a fine line with what is acceptable and ultimately, we as students need to be cautious to not disrespect our teachers by using our phones during lessons for unrelated reasons.

I also found that during lockdown everyone became far more active in terms of going for walks. Where I live, we have multiple footpaths along the Thames which meant we would always socialise and see people, despite being in lockdown.

Unfettered Learning

On a few occasions, we were offered the opportunity to take our work in our own hands and potentially go beyond the curriculum. This mostly happened during independent lessons (where there is no live call) as despite the fact our teachers would often recommend websites we could get our research and data from, it was ultimately up to us in terms of the direction we wanted to take our project in. I really enjoyed these lessons as it gave me an opportunity to bring out my creative side and show my individuality. Our teachers would sometimes share the classes work with each other and it was very interesting to see how different a set of guidelines for a task can be interpreted.

Teachers

As a whole, I think most of my teachers found a very successful balance between independent learning and live learning. I found that if too many lessons a day were online my attention span would decrease drastically as when you work at home there are so many more distractions than at school. One thing I would mention is that if the technology wasn’t working perfectly or our teachers had a couple of interruptions from their children they were very apologetic, however given the circumstances my class completely understood and all agreed it wasn’t a big deal.

However, I still struggle with not being face to face with my teacher or peers in the classroom. This is because, if I am confused with the work we are set, I am unable to gauge their responses.

Improving concentration

At times, I struggled to maintain concentration during each lesson. This would sometimes lead to falling behind on work. However, by the end of the day I just wanted get out of my room and sit somewhere else! I am definitely more of a morning person than an evening so a couple of times a week I would wake up 30 minutes early to catch up on notes etc. Our school also changed our timetable during home learning which meant we had a 10 minute break between lessons. This gave me time to submit work to assignments, grab a snack or go to the toilet which I found helped improve my concentration.

Conclusion

Since we went back to school there are many differences to pre-pandemic: corridors are one way, we wear masks, we do regular testing, we are in a year bubbles and do social distancing. Covid is never far from our thoughts.