Brave New World: The Perks of Virtual Sex Ed

I trust that by now we’re all pretty familiar with the frustrations and drawbacks of online education, and we join with parents and students in hoping to be back in classrooms in person as soon as it’s safe to do so.  But the more virtual sex-ed classes we present, the more we’ve noticed certain unmistakable advantages to the remote model too—and we hope to be able to re-create some of these benefits in a post-pandemic future.

Zoom, chat boxes, Google forms, and other platforms we’ve integrated into our classes have specific benefits for students who may be uncomfortable or anxious about the topic we’re teaching.  Simply seeing and being seen by their peers while hearing about sexual content can be a source of stress for some youth, and the luxury of hiding windows or turning their camera off may allow them to calm down enough to pay attention. This is even more true for participating in class discussions—whether asking a question or adding a comment, the ability to message their teacher directly and get a response without their classmates knowing is a game-changer. 

We’ve been using a few different websites that allow for anonymous participation in different kinds of activities, and it’s pleasantly surprising to see how much engagement these get.  Mentimeter.com is one we use frequently (they didn’t pay us for this post, I swear) and the ability to display brainstorms, create wordclouds, and visualize data with it is fun and easy.  Nearpod.com is another platform that allows us to create game-ified quizzes, like matching pictures with definitions, and the whole class can participate simultaneously.  A student who might never raise their hand in front of their classmates can click on buttons in a quiz-game from the comfort of their own computer, knowing that no one but the teacher sees their responses.

The anonymous question box continues to be a staple of all our classes, but when it’s a google form instead of a shoebox full of index cards, the handwriting is a lot better.  We miss the colorful doodles, but mostly we’re glad that all our students know they can still ask us anything and get an honest answer.  And they still take the time to let us know that they liked the class, and thank us for talking about things they haven’t learned elsewhere, and those heartfelt little comments from children and teens are balm to our zoom-fatigued souls.