I’m not a great MS Teams fan (in most respects for education Google Classroom is better, if not cheaper). But this week it’s taught me something about myself and the way I teach.

One of my students has impaired hearing and uses hearing aids. In class this works ok. Between...
...my deep-ish voice, the hearing aids, lip reading and the friend on the next desk helping, we get by fine.

Remote is a different kettle of fish.

So we turn on the captioning.

Now the captioning is good. Try it yourself.

But to start with it was only correctly catching...
...around 50-60% of what I was saying. I was looking at it thinking “I said what?”.

So I slowed down. I took more care of my pronunciation and enunciation. Which took it up to about 95%.

Which will clearly help the one student.

But it will help many others as well. We have...
...a not insignificant percentage of EAL students. You wouldn’t always notice this speaking to the children, but I would assume if they regularly speak a second language at home then it’s going to help if what they hear from me is clearer. At least clear enough for a voice...
...to text translator to understand.

So from now on I intend to speak slower, and think more regularly about how I am speaking.

So I thank you for that MS Teams.

Now can you sort out the rest of the dogs breakfast you tout as a remote learning environment.
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