“I think what helped me most is the to-do list given by Classroom, so that I could structure and see when what subject was due.”
“MACH DIR EINEN ZEITPLAN, ich hab mir keinen gemacht und es war katastrophal.”
Press and politicians keep stressing the failure of remote learning, the need for summer schools and the fact that 2020 and 2021 should be considered ‘lost years’. Interesting though, that both Class of 2020 and Class of 2021 graduated with better ‘Abitur’ results than the years before them. The Berlin average for this and last year was 2,3 (the years before 2,4). This year NMS even made it to the first place of all ISS schools (Integrierte Sekundarschulen) in Berlin, with an average of 1,68! It seems that online learning has its good sides after all, and should politicians simply ensure that all schools have a solid IT-infrastructure and a reliable learning platform, which allows real collaborative and personalized learning.
To find out how remote learning has been experienced at NMS, we conducted surveys in May 2020 and in 2021, among students from grades 3 - 13. The students could choose their preferred language. 596 students completed the most recent survey, which represents more than 50% of the entire student body. We thank our amazing student body for their detailed feedback and hope that we can all benefit from these results.
Your input and comments show that all students and teachers have continuously used the NMS learning platform Workspace. The new feature of breakout rooms allowed for learning and teaching in smaller groups, which turned out to be highly effective. The best things during remote learning were sleeping in and the lack of grades. But also having more freedom to choose what to work on when and having more time for individual interests. Compared to the first lockdown in 2020, more than twice the number of students used their school account to work together online (90%). Even after the lockdown, 65% of students continued to collaborate online. Many students reported they learned to organize themselves, improved their digital skills, focus, independent learning, self-management, online presentation and collaboration. Some teachers need to collaborate better in future, to make sure the students don’t have too much work on their digital or hybrid plate, but generally it seemed that also teachers greatly improved their digital skills.