I have been teaching online with the help of the site tehnikus.edu.rs, which I had built long before distance learning had started. The site was a supplement to regular classes and means a lot to students and me as a teacher because the concept I came up with is based on making students independent. I had no idea that at one point, the classes would take place only with the help of this site.
Working with a group or an entire class is a big challenge for an IT teacher. It happens that a large number of students raise their hand and ask the same question. The problem is that it is not enough for the teacher to explain something in words, but also to demonstrate it. If the teacher in such a situation goes from student to student to show everyone individually, we have a problem. Students wait a long time for an answer, the teacher is the one who shows the student and works instead of them and after that the student has no benefit from it because there are little chances that they remembered something while the teacher clicked instead of them. An effective solution to this problem is for the teacher to create instructions that the student will follow. This means that in the program (for example FastStone Capture) the teacher makes visual instructions outlining the steps, using text, screenshots - see the attached document "square". The students follow the instructions, work alone, make mistakes and correct themself.
The teacher now focuses on students who, despite the instructions, have difficulty sending the instructions, which is a significantly smaller number of students. Of course, the teacher uses the initial part of the lesson when the students are facing him to explain the theoretical part as well as the practical task for that lesson. It is best to combine the practical and theoretical part so that it is an intertwined whole in one class, which means that it does not separate the practical from the theoretical part because students lose motivation when they do not see the current application of what you are telling them. Also, the other extreme is mechanicalism, and that is when the student does practical tasks but does not delve into the task and does not see the whole of what he or she wants to achieve as well as the goal of the task that is necessary to emphasize at the beginning of the class.
The whole described concept proved to be excellent in distance learning when students work from their homes. Their own initiative is something very important by which the teacher improves their work, and that is to take steps, to have intuition, to be visionaries and make moves with which they lead and sow ideas that will bear fruit in the future. It is best to create and be free to improve your work even when you later see that students benefit greatly from it and that it gives results that you could not have predicted at first. In online teaching and teaching in general, it is very important to pay attention to the opinion of students and constantly incorporate that feedback into your content.
So I gave lessons and explanations through the tehnikus site, and we closed the feedback flow by students who were sending their papers and questions by email.
You can see an example of the material used in the classes here.
