Recently I have been wrestling with my conscience: should I continue to write my usual kind of blog posts, which often assume that teachers reading it are physically in school or some other educational setting, or not? This is what I was alluding to in Covid-19: Fiddling while Rome burns? To continue as though nothing has happened seems at best irrelevant, and at worse insensitive. However, although I will be (and have been) writing Covid-19-related posts, I also think it’s important to continue writing the usual stuff too. Here are my reasons why.

1. As far as I am aware, not every school in the world has physically closed. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to behave as if every school is now online.

2. Hard as it is to envisage now, there will be a time after Covid-19, or at least a time when a vaccine and, later, a cure is available. I think it’s important to continue to build up a body of work for people to use when things are back to normal, or at least as near to normal as they can be, in order to provide useful information once the crisis has been brought under control.

3. I think it’s important to, as far as possible, remain as upbeat as circumstances allow. To focus exclusively on Covid-19 would become rather depressing.

4. Many people are writing about useful tools for working online. I don’t wish to write about them because (a) I don’t know all the tools myself; (b) I think there are enough other people writing about them without my adding to the deluge of information. Someone who seems to be doing a good job of filtering the more useful posts on the subject is Stephen Downes. Sign up to his OLDaily newsletter or trawl through his posts. He has also set up a Google doc to which people can contribute links to resources in various categories.

Keep well, keep safe, and keep washing your hands.