How Do I Handle This E-Learning Thing?
Now that we’re stuck at home and trying to offer support and continued learning opportunities for our students, I keep hearing the question “What do I do when I can’t assign work for kids but I still want to keep them learning?” I’ve been communicating with Instructional Technology contacts from other districts and reading the tech blogs that I subscribe to, and I’m seeing a common thread about how we offer that support to students: start slow, and keep it simple. In an attempt to keep the number of emails at a minimum, I figured using this newsletter would be the best route to take.
As a district, we have been communicating with parents about resources that are available to students, but I want to make sure teachers are equally well resourced. I will use this newsletter to share ways that you can use technology tools to continue to work with your students in whatever way seems the most useful for your class . This could be continuing to offer enrichment opportunities, keeping in contact with your students to continue building relationships and offering support, or trying to build your virtual classroom to be used both now and in the future when we’re all back at school.
I also want to share a document that the Ed-Tech department has been working on for the past four years full of online resources. I will be highlighting some of these resources over the next couple of weeks and will continue to do so after the school closings have been lifted. I will work with the building tech-coaches on continuing to research and share best practices from other ed-tech specialists, but I’d love to hear from you about things that you’re trying with your students that are working, even if it’s only with a few students - every success deserves to be celebrated!
First, some general rules for working with students in an online environment, especially if you and your students don’t already have experience working together in this way.
I’m going to start with a distillation of the best ideas from ed-tech blogger Alice Keeler’s recent post, As someone who has been doing this digital learning thing for 10+ years: @thomasson_engl @guster4lovers. Another good blog post that has mirrors these ideas is “Don't worry about making things perfect…” by education blogger Rebecca Barrett-Fox; rather than getting things perfect, it’s more important that you’re trying to meet the needs of your students at this point.
- This one is important “You can't have the same expectations for students in the digital realm. They also will have younger siblings to watch and maybe sick family members and food to procure. Their whole schedules are disrupted, just like yours. If I'm dealing with anxiety, how much more intense is it going to be for a teenager who feels every emotion turned up to 100?”
- Limit the amount of time that you’re “on” with your online presence. It can be stressful trying to do everything at once, so set some office hours during the week and check in occasionally on student work; otherwise, focus on settling in yourself.
- Having said that, try to keep some sort of schedule, even if it’s not an everyday schedule, with your students. If you are asking students to submit assignments, even voluntarily, try to have a consistent due date, perhaps by midnight on Sunday.
- “Don't try to do 300 new tech platforms/programs.” Start with something that you and your students are comfortable with and slowly grow your tool list.
For your first assignment, if you haven’t already, create some sort of online classroom (Google Classroom, Schoology, or your classroom website to name a few) where you can post enrichment projects, assignments, videos, etc. and where students can turn things in or ask questions. If you’ve already got this taken care of, keep calm and carry on.
Remember, as Andrew Thomasson said in his post “Give students the space and grace you would want your admins and district office staff and government officials to give to you. The Golden Rule is always important, but especially now.”
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