As teachers prepare to return to school, there are many ways in which we want to help students get over the past six months.

Rightly, much of the academic focus is on how to erase the negative effects of school closures, and baseline assessments will help to determine where children are academically and curricula will be adapted to fill in gaps.

However, there has been one positive that has come from the period of online teaching - teachers and students have had a crash course in educational technology and digital literacy.

As such, coming back into school is the perfect time to capitalise on the skills students and teachers have developed.

Building on our online learning skills

All stakeholders in education have had to interact with new technologies or ways of working. Take some of the momentum forward and look for ways to introduce ever more ICT into the classroom.

Not only will this help to build interest, give students confidence and help to keep skills sharp, but it will also create routines and expertise, should schools need to partially close again.

Having a digital safety net could also help any students who are absent to interact with classmates.

Of course, many teachers already used several digital tools and platforms. Students, as well, went into online learning with a certain base-level proficiency.

However, the amount of enforced professional development and student upskilling over the past few months is unprecedented. It is important to build on this upon return to the classroom.

Sharing new-found ICT knowledge

Staff should be given the space to reflect upon what worked and to consolidate their new skills in learning communities.

Students can also benefit from sharing their new-found knowledge with each other.

Having students reflect on what they have learned will help teachers to re-evaluate any ICT provision and tailor it to the more digitally savvy cohort arriving in school in September.

Teachers and students alike need to hone and practise their skills. Technology can be introduced at several points in the learning process: pre-learning, instruction, synthesis, practice, production or assessment.

Over the period for online learning, many teachers will have explored using technology during each of these moments. It is worthwhile considering where you can continue with these aspects in face-to-face teaching.

How we can continue to learn

Could you continue with a flipped-learning model for some subjects or lessons?

Could in-class work still have an online collaborative component? Maybe students can work on shared documents or use a platform such as Padlet to create a piece that represents their learning journey.

Could peer assessment be fostered via comments on a class blog?

Perhaps for presentations, you can give students more freedom as to the media they use to present their work.

Technology can also be used for housekeeping and classroom administration: behaviour management, homework, posting notices, celebrating achievements.

Maybe you want to keep using quizzing apps for assessment for learning - all of these will keep students’ (and teachers’) skills sharp.

All of the skills mentioned are practical, but there are higher-order skills to be developed, too.

Fundamental life skills

Critical thinking, analysis, evaluating the credibility of a source - these concepts underpin digital literacy, though they may not be taught explicitly.  

Most likely, your students have learned how to access new programs and applications.

They will have intuitively made connections between functions of these platforms - now is the time to pull back the curtain on the design decisions and purpose of the platforms.

What are the similarities?  How can these tools be used? Who is the intended audience? What need to do these tools fulfil? What are the features that we notice?  What improvements would you suggest to this program? 

Interrogating the functions of programs will help students to understand that these programs are tools, that we can choose the right tool for the job and that many of our skills are transferrable.

Keep everyone together

One consideration with the continued online provision is the need to ensure that we don’t exacerbate the digital divide.

The last thing we want to do, as educators, is further penalise any students who may have felt slightly out of the loop during online schooling.

Making sure that much of the teaching is integrated into school time will help.

A thoughtful approach to digital literacy when school resumes will provide at least one silver lining to the cloud of online learning.

Jennie Devine is the leader of an international school in Italy. She has taught internationally for 18 years