The past six months have been constantly evolving around the Covid19 pandemic. Six months for me, of performing almost all daily activities online. Meetings with family and friends, with colleagues, with students. Certainly it has not been ideal, but at the same time it has taught me a lot of lessons. I should probably focus more on those I’ve learnt in relation to my teaching and learning activities for now, but I will come back in few months’ time, to reflect upon the whole year (stay tuned )

As a teacher I must admit I enjoyed a lot the distance teaching; although it was challenging due to the stressful pandemic environment, some technical difficulties and all the extra time that I had to spend to prepare the lectures, I definitely learnt a lot about myself and my performance, as well as about students’ needs and psychologies. Of course, a major personal advancement was that I learnt to use more video software and new teaching platforms. I am not sure if students shared the same views though; some need the more personal interaction in a classroom to adhere to the information, but some others prefer to study on their own and write their notes at their own pace, when listening to recordings or watching videos; if I were a student, I would 100% belong to the latter group.

But…as I am a strong advocate of self-improvement and continuous personal development, I decided to take the Open Networked Learning course, with the hope that it will improve my online teaching and learning skills. Having reached the end of the second week, I have connected and met many different personalities from all over the world. It’s so interesting to hear other peoples’ views and experiences from the online teaching world!  What’s even cooler is that I have created my own blog (yayy!) and started using a couple of – new to me – networking platforms. Let’s see… I hope I will be able to employ some of these, and use them with my students within the next few weeks, to enhance my transmission of knowledge. I’ll keep you posted!