Teaching Through a School Closure

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

One morning the staff at my school got a message saying that we would be talking about a possible school closure at the next staff meeting. When I met another teacher on my way in one morning, he asked what I thought about it. "Think we'll close?" he asked.

"Nah," I replied.

Our meeting about what might happen on a Wednesday.

On Thursday night when I was watching the evening news, I saw that public schools were going to close. I checked Slack. We were closing.

On Friday kids were sent to assemblies while teachers planned and prepared. 

After a week of teaching online during an emergency school closure, these are my thoughts.

The Tech

During the first two days, students had a lot of technical issues. I was a little suprised, but I guess I shouldn't have been.

At school students use Chromebooks and at home ...

 

Notice how I lumped PCs, Macs, and "laptops" together. Not the best way to collect data, but I found out what I suspected; students were all over the place in terms of their tech experiences. I even think that before this a lot of them were using a parent phone for access - not ideal.

So after this what do we do?

I think that we should look at going 1:1 Chromebooks in grades 3 & 4. It would definitely help cut down on issues if students had the same thing at school and at home.

Technical issues can sink lessons so when we get back I am going to continue some parts of this program, and next year I think teachers should move a little bit more to having resources available online.

Also this week there were intermittent Google outages.

To those schools that have not shut down yet - do a test. Check to see if your students can handle what you give them. I wouldn't start using any new platforms during a time like this. But, it depends on the students.


Organization

Keeping organized has been tough.

Knowing my students, I have had to be extra careful with how I write my directions and checklists. Still, I have undergone several iterations to get to where I am on the Sunday night entering the second week of the closure.

Each assignment has the date, assignment number, and I give it to my students in a checklist as well as on Seesaw. One of the tasks students need to do at the end of the day is to fill out the checklist.

Balance

I have been thinking a lot about how much I am assigning the students.

I wrote that sentence a few days ago while I was brainstorming. Today showed me that students have too much. For the first time since moving to an online solution, some of the students who usually finish tasks quickly were lagging.




The Future

A question asked by Don Wetrick on the StartEd Up Podcast was, "[sic] Will these school closures be a catalyst for schools to do more learning online?" I hope so.

This week has shown me that there are students who can work more independently. They can navigate the tasks, ask questions when they have issues, and solve their own problems. But they are the ones who do that in the classroom as well.

Then there are students who I would like to meet with. I have students not following directions and not completing assignments.

I think we could have a group of students who either works from home and comes in a few times a week, or a group of students similar to Studio 5. 



This has not been an ideal week of online teaching; it has been more of a quick fix for an emergency school closure.