Recently I was reading an article that had a comment section. In the comments was one from a J. Ryan Nielson from Brigham Young University in Idaho. The part of the comment that struck me was “…Teaching will improve simply because we are studying it.”

During the Pandemic and more particularly the schools’ shut down, all educators and management teams have had to analyse the way they teach, how children learn and the effectiveness of all the tried and tested methods. Traditional face-to-face teaching methods were impossible to fall back on and a number of teachers had to go into the uncomfortable space of learning their way around a new media.

A vast number of teachers excitedly learnt new skills and were awed by their ability to navigate the various video conferencing platforms available. It opened such exciting possibilities for engagement with learners from the ability to give them multimedia learning resources to being able to track their individual learning experience daily.

Some educators were lucky to work in schools with an Education Head who was willing to invest in online resources and learning platforms which profoundly added to the experience of online/ blended learning.

Take 2Simple’s Purple Mash for instance. Many schools, in the race against time and budget at the beginning of the shutdown, tried out the platform’s free trial. With the free trial came full access to their platform as well as all the support normally afforded a paid account. These schools would potentially have stuck with their regular platforms and traditional ways of teaching. There were those schools that had already been using Purple Mash as an ICT curriculum and an intro to coding who out of necessity started using it across the curriculum to add richness and diversity to all the learning areas.

All of this because a need opened up and the world started paying attention to how we teach. Teachers got better simply because they had to.

The lessons that we have all picked up through this time will surely stay with us because it has made us better teachers in some cases and more satisfied learners in others. Teachers more able to cope with the demands of teaching a digital generation, and more satisfied learners accountable for their learning experience. We have seen through the last weeks that learners, and their parents, are comfortable with a digital medium and that it was a natural progression born out of unnatural times that forced the sector to embrace the change needed.

If you would like to hear more about the vast potential Purple Mash holds to digitalise your entire curriculum, please enquire HERE