Where do you prefer to work online - in Teams, Google Classroom, Show My Homework (Satchel) or somewhere wilder still?

And what does that favourite online platform reveal about our personality? Maybe nothing, but then again...maybe everything. 

1. The Show My Homework Traditionalist

Cautious and conservative, the Show My Homework Traditionalist resists all pressure from school to add a second online teaching platform to their repertoire.

They would much prefer just to set and assess homework, as with the world pre-lockdown.

They are vaguely aware that Show My Homework offers a broad and colourful range of other teaching opportunities (and has re-named itself “Satchel” for this very reason), but have no interest at all in ever using them.

2. The Show My Homework Moderate

The moderate is a patient, open-minded colleague who sees some good in everyone and everything.

This teacher still basically regards the platform as their online teaching “home” but is gradually coming to terms with spending some of their day on that second school platform, where live online teaching happens.

3. The Show My Homework Radical 

A rebellious and restless type, the Radical now spends little if any time on the SMH platform.

For this colleague, the grass is always going to be greener somewhere else. Long before their school invested in an additional online platform, they had already leapt over the track to it, secretly taking their class with them - a bit like Julie Andrews and the escaping von Trapp family in the Sound of Music.

4. Google Classroom Disciple

Many of the above Radicals escaped and have settled for life in the Google Classroom community. This soon became their natural home - a place more suited to these outgoing, ambitious and more experimental types.

They are happy to progress through life and Google Classroom through trial and error, prepared to experience a few knocks and shocks along that learning curve.

5. Google Classroom Newcomer

While the teaching rewards in Google Classroom are rich and various, there are perils for many newcomers.

Many newcomers will have aged ten years during lockdown, following a series of mishaps while learning how to perform when “live” and when marking online here.

More than one has complained to me of spending hours labouring under the illusion that they were attaching written feedback to students’ work.

It turned out that the teachers’ words were just vanishing into thin air - much like being in a real classroom, in fact.

6. Moodlers and Kerboodlers

A few teachers “discover themselves” by joining some cult platform community like the Moodlers.

Others might end up amongst the even more exotic Kerboodlers- lovely, alternative types from what I hear, though maybe talk to your parents first before bringing one home.

7. Microsoft Teamers

“Microsoft team” people, in my experience, generally regard themselves as just a little more cultured and sophisticated than their “noisy neighbours” in Google Classroom.

Their preference for Teams has nothing to do with technology or teaching; it’s more a lifestyle thing.

Besides, being a member of a “Team” sounds so much more grown-up than operating in a “Classroom”.

It’s the little differences, you know.

8. Full-on Zoomers

Teachers who most prefer to operate on Zoom plainly love to be going “live” as much as possible. They are generally wholesome, outgoing types who are completely comfortable in their own skin.

Many of us are rather dismayed by this.

We see Zoom as something completely separate from school. We think of it as a vehicle to be used just for quizzes and drinks with friends, or for a weekly means of arranging a family get-together at the moment.

We like to keep one version of our online life entirely separate from the other - which these days, whatever platform you use, it’s increasingly hard to do.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire