Week 6 – April 27 to May 1:
School Closure Planning
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Week 5 Recap:
Every week I hope to reach more kids than the previous week. Just like Week 4, between Zoom meetings, posting stuff for students, responding to student questions, checking student work and providing feedback, connecting with colleagues and answering their questions, and responding to parent questions I am keeping quite busy. It’s like being on call 24/7 because I will respond to a parent or student just about any time because I know not everyone has the same schedule schools have. Plus it’s usually something I can answer rather quickly because if it will take more than a few minutes, I’ll wait until the next morning for evening messages. But as I mentioned in an earlier school closure post, even though I’m working all day, every day, I’m still not feeling very effective because I’m only helping a small number of people each day.
During Week 4, I only had five kids show up to the first of my weekly Science Zoom Meetings, and last week, Week 5, I had 14 kids show up. Still, I’m not getting nearly as many as my teaching team, the LA/SS and Math Zoom meetings! I can’t help but think either I’m picking a terrible time for people or I’m just not as popular!! My poor ego! LOL I will be changing the day and time because our elementary school came up with a whole school schedule and my meetings were going to happen during staff meeting time. So we’ll see how it goes this week, especially since I have a guest presenter from the North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC). So if I get more students, my ego will still be hurt until I can get them when I’m presenting on my own because I will think they just came for the guest presenter! ?
Since I only got 14 out of 66 students, I recorded my Zoom meeting and posted it on YouTube for those who missed it! I even had an interactive Pear Deck presentation to engage kids! Luckily, I set the Pear Deck presentation to student-paced mode so those who missed it can still go through the presentation whenever they can (I posted the student-paced Pear Deck as an assignment on Classcraft so they can get XP and gold if they do it!). Here’s the Zoom Meeting in case my students find this post:
So after five full weeks of being out of school, I still have only communicated with 32 of 66 students via the messaging feature of Classcraft. Seven more have checked in on Classcraft and used their avatar powers but have not responded to any of my messages nor done any work whatsoever.
I now have 25 out of 66 who have responded to the Check-In Flipgrid assignment while the Pear Deck Check-In assignment is still stuck at 30.
I am now up to 12 students who have contacted me that they finished the Hydro Dynamics Challenge and seven have turned in their Public Service Announcement! Gimkit and Kahoot are still stuck at 14 and 16 and nine have completed the COVID-19 Escape Room.
I also met with my eSports club members, well those who were available, and they decided to keep playing competitive games on the CompMC server to get more practice for the next tournament. I encouraged them to get on the CompMC server whenever they had time during the day but didn’t keep track of who played when.
And after starting a new unit last week, seven students completed the Climate Change Intro assignments as we prepare to start the Climate Change unit this week!
Plans for Week 6:
Even though only seven of my 66 students have completed the intro to my Climate Change unit I’m still going to push the actual Climate Change video series I recorded for them to get them ready for the NOSC guest presentation which will be on the topic of benthic macroinvertebrates in our neighborhood creek, Chimacum Creek!
I will be continuing to work on making contact with 30 families whose children have either only checked Classcraft yet not engaged with me, my messages, or the work, who have not done anything, even checked Classcraft, or have told me they were working and yet turned nothing in after five weeks. I hope to provide support where and/or as needed to get kids connecting with me. It’s not really about the content, even though I think it’s very important and cool, but more importantly, it’s staying connected to me, school, and their peers through the different Classcraft discussion forums I have for them to communicate and especially the Flipgrid. I wonder what they’re doing and hope that they are doing okay. At least if they are communicating with me I can feel like I’m helping. Not hearing from most of my kids is the hardest part of this online teaching. It’s not like we all agreed to learn remotely, so I can’t tell why they aren’t connecting.
With regards to eSports, I found a new Minecraft Competition so I’ll meet with my team and see if anyone is interested in participating in that one. That one is a build competition so it would be a change from the player vs player directly type of games they’ve been playing.
