Teaching Through a Screen: Tools, Resilience, and the People Who Keep You Going

Nobody planned for this.

When schools across the UAE shifted to distance learning at the start of March 2026, it was not a scheduled pilot or a strategic decision made in a comfortable boardroom. It happened within hours of Iranian missile and drone strikes hitting the country. By 2 March, every school and university in the UAE was online. By 9 March, an early spring break had been called. By the time that break ended on 22 March, the decision had been made to extend distance learning for another two weeks, with weekly reviews to follow.

For older students, this is their second experience of remote learning at scale. For many teachers in Dubai and across the UAE, there is a difficult familiarity to it. But this time the context is different. This is not a pandemic. There are missile intercepts overhead. Some colleagues have already left and will not be coming back.

I am still here, still teaching, and this post is about how: the tools, the pedagogy, and the human infrastructure that holds everything together when the ground feels uncertain.

The Foundation Layer: Getting Remote Lessons Right

Every remote lesson starts the same way. A link, a camera, and the quiet hope that students have actually shown up. Online teaching at scale is not new for this region, but the context makes every familiar step feel different.

Google Meet remains the backbone of live distance learning for most schools, and there is no romance in saying that. The foundation does not need to be exciting. It needs to work. For students connecting from across Dubai and, in some cases, from outside the country entirely, stability and familiarity matter more than innovation right now.

What sits on top of that foundation is where the real teaching happens.

I have used Blooket more in the past three weeks than in the previous year. It has earned its place in the remote toolkit not because it is clever but because it solves a real problem: engagement through a screen is a fundamentally different challenge to engagement in a room. When students are sitting in front of you, you can read the room, catch a drifting mind, bring someone back with a look. Online, especially during a period of genuine anxiety, that is much harder. Blooket does not replace those skills, but it creates a shared context in which students are active, present, and doing something together. Gamification gets a bad press in serious pedagogical circles. In a remote context, with students who are also managing fear, it is often the difference between a lesson that connects and one that disappears into the void.

The Craft Layer: Tools That Reward Intentionality

Beyond the baseline, there is a set of tools that require a teacher to think differently about what a lesson can look like.

Excalidraw is one of them. A collaborative digital whiteboard with a deliberately rough aesthetic, it is built for thinking out loud. I use it in most of my remote lessons now. It allows the kind of live visual explanation that a physical board provides, with one important difference: students see the idea being constructed rather than arriving at a finished product. There is something genuinely powerful about watching a concept take shape in real time. It keeps attention in a way that a static slide rarely does.

Wayground takes a different approach entirely. Rather than replacing the classroom experience, it reimagines the virtual space as something students actually want to move through. For retrieval practice and quizzing specifically, being able to track whether students are applying knowledge within a virtual environment changes the feel of the activity. Retrieval practice is one of the most evidence-supported strategies in education. Having a tool that embeds it in a shared space, rather than a sterile form or a quiz widget, matters when you are trying to maintain routine and normality in circumstances that are anything but normal.

The Builder Layer: When You Want to Know What Is Possible

Here is where the story shifts.

A lot of EdTech writing frames teacher-built tools as necessity: the existing tools were not good enough, so something had to be made. That is not quite the right framing here. The motivation for building has been something different: control, and genuine curiosity about what the AI tools available right now are actually capable of in an educational context.

Using Claude Code, I have built a set of interactive HTML lessons from scratch. They do not rely on a third-party platform, do not sit behind a paywall, and behave exactly as I intended because every decision in them was made with a specific pedagogical purpose in mind. For students working through complex science content remotely, the ability to interact with a concept rather than simply read about it is meaningful. These are not gimmicks. They are lessons I built for my students. If you are curious about what this kind of building looks like in practice, the Think with AI course on this platform explores it in depth.

The more ambitious project has been a custom assessment tool I built in Google AI Studio, powered by Gemini 3.1. Think of it in the same category as Formative, but rebuilt with a clearer sense of purpose. The tool accepts longer text answers, images and videos from students. Questions can be AI-generated based on the specific content being studied. Responses are auto-marked with a level of accuracy that holds up under real classroom conditions. The multimodal capability alone changes what remote assessment can look like: students are not limited to typed responses to text-based prompts.

I did not build it because existing platforms are inadequate. I built it to understand what current AI is genuinely capable of, and to own the outcome. That distinction matters. Teachers who wait for EdTech companies to catch up with what is now possible will be waiting for a while. Teachers who are willing to get into the tools and build, even messily, even imperfectly, are already working in a different register entirely. I explored this idea in more detail in Vibe Working: What Educators Need to Know.

The barrier between "teacher" and "builder" is thinner than most people realise. The tools available in 2026 make that possible in a way they simply did not five years ago.

The Human Layer: Teacher Wellbeing and Your Troop

None of the above matters as much as this section. Not remotely.

Distance learning under normal circumstances places a quiet kind of pressure on teachers. The lesson ends, the screen closes, and the social connective tissue of a school day is gone. No corridor conversations. No staffroom. No one walking past your door. It is easy to underestimate how much that costs until it is taken away.

Distance learning during a conflict is something else entirely. The isolation is heavier. The stakes feel higher. And there are teachers right now in this region who are managing anxiety, uncertainty and grief alongside everything else that comes with doing the job properly. Teacher wellbeing and teacher mental health are not side conversations here. They are the conversation.

Professor Steve Peters, in The Chimp Paradox, explains that our inner Chimp has a deep, primitive drive to belong to a troop. In the wild, a chimpanzee without a group is exposed and vulnerable, and our psychological architecture works in the same way. Without a troop, the Chimp experiences genuine distress. This is not a metaphor for finding your professional network. The troop Peters describes is specific and personal: a small group of friends, in the truest sense, whose values align with yours and who provide the psychological safety that makes functioning possible. People who will be honest with you. Who absorb the difficult days. Who do not require you to perform being fine when you are not.

Peters is also clear on something that is particularly relevant right now: troops are not fixed. Members move in and out. In the context of Dubai and the wider UAE, where colleagues have already departed and the expat community is navigating the question of whether to stay, this carries real weight. Some people who were in your troop six months ago are no longer here. Trying to hold on to people who have moved out of the troop causes its own kind of pain. Knowing who is genuinely in yours right now, and investing in those people, matters more than the history of the group or its size.

There are British teachers right now who are, in the words of one Dubai headteacher reported in The Guardian, "deeply traumatised and really struggling to cope." That is not weakness. That is a normal human response to an abnormal situation. What makes the difference, in my experience and in what I am hearing across the network, is not resilience training or wellbeing sessions, though those have their place. It is having two or three people who you can be completely honest with. Who message you. Who check in without being asked. Who you would call at an awkward hour if you needed to.

Schools that are assuming their teachers are fine because the technology is working are making a mistake. A teacher can be delivering excellent remote lessons, using every tool at their disposal, and still be quietly falling apart behind a screen that nobody else can see into. The tools matter. The pedagogy matters. But none of it is sustainable without the human infrastructure underneath it. If you are looking for a space where educators support each other through exactly this kind of moment, The Den is where that happens on this platform.

What Good Distance Learning Actually Needs

The situation in the UAE right now is not an edge case or an outlier. It is a live test of whether schools and teachers can deliver continuity of learning under genuine pressure, and for the most part, the answer has been yes. That is worth acknowledging.

But the full picture includes the teachers who have left. The colleagues who are abroad and have not come back. The staff managing their own fear while helping students manage theirs. The exam season approaching with IB, GCSE and A Level timetables that have not moved. That is the real context in which this work is happening.

If this post has a framework, it is this:

• Get the foundation right. Use stable, familiar remote teaching tools that students already know. Reliability beats novelty.
• Layer in intentional craft. Choose tools that reward deliberate teaching, not just content delivery. Excalidraw and Wayground are examples, not the only answers.
• Build when you can. The gap between teacher and builder is smaller than it has ever been. If existing platforms do not serve your students well enough, the tools to make your own are now accessible.
• Protect the human layer. Know who is in your troop. Invest in those people. Everything else depends on it.

And then make sure you know who is in your troop. Not who you wish was in it, or who used to be. Who actually is, right now.

That is what keeps me going. I suspect it is what keeps you going too.

Tools Mentioned in This Post

• Google Meet -- Video conferencing backbone for live lessons. Stable, familiar, works across devices.
• Blooket -- Gamified quizzing platform that drives engagement through shared, competitive activities.
• Excalidraw -- Collaborative whiteboard with a hand-drawn aesthetic. Ideal for live visual explanation and co-construction.
• Wayground -- Virtual environment for retrieval practice and quizzing. Embeds evidence-based strategies in a space students want to explore.
• Claude Code -- AI coding tool used to build custom interactive HTML lessons from scratch.
• Google AI Studio -- Platform for building custom AI-powered tools, used here to create a multimodal assessment tool with Gemini 3.1.