Week 11 – June 1 to June 5:
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
Recap of Week 10
Am I getting used to so many kids not engaging? Nope, I’m not. Just this past Friday, as has been the case on Fridays, only seven students checked Classcraft to see what I posted. And of those seven only three or four did any work. The whole week wasn’t nearly that bad and I am still getting 27 to 28 kids show up to my weekly Science Zoom meetings but I have seen fewer kids checking in daily and even fewer turning in work weekly, much less daily. I am also not getting very many parents responding or checking in as we finished week 10 of distance learning. When I asked parents a few weeks ago to message me to find out if their kids were all caught up, only one did so. One out of 66 families. At least many of my students’ parents are checking my weekly Bloomz updates and reading the blog posts I share on Bloomz!
I continue to select a Classcraft Random Event for each of my three classes every day, Monday through Friday, to give students something a bit fun to look forward to. Often, as with the above Random Event, students get to use their Classcraft powers to help their fellow classmates. Every time someone in class takes damage, Healers are the ones who can restore their health points and the few healers in each class that check in get to use their powers and earn extra XP (XP can also be earned by completing assignments). I still have a few students who check in and use their powers but have yet to submit an assignment! That actually makes me smile, here they are checking Classcraft and using their powers but not turning in any work. That means that they like “playing” Classcraft enough to bother checking in regularly but they don’t take the time to actually engage with the assignments. I don’t know if they are telling their parents that they checked Science and did something, which is misleading at best, or if they are working on one of the major projects and aren’t done yet. Yeah, wishful thinking that they are working and aren’t done yet. It’s probably as simple as they are using their powers and that’s it.
I continue to meet with my Minecraft eSports Club twice a week to check in on them and play a bit. I continue to monitor all Science assignments and since so few kids are turning in work, I also have time to peak in on their Classcraft assignments that are connected to our Google Classrooms. If there is a document attached to a Google Classroom assignment, I can open that document and see my students’ work in progress! I can even check the history to see when they did anything that they did. I’ve left a bunch of students some comments so when they get back to work on their document they’ll see that I’ve been there! We still have weekly grade level team meetings, IEP meetings every now and then, and twice a month staff meetings. Then there are the courses we are taking online to better navigate these online learning waters. I mentioned the Shifting Schools – Implementing Distance Learning on last week’s post, the course a group of us Chimacum Teachers are taking and that is going well. I am also a WEA Trainer for my state and we’ve been offering online courses for educators. I just finished a round our Professional Growth Plan (PGP) sessions to help teachers complete and submit a PGP for 25 clock hours! Teachers can complete four PGP’s in four years (one per year) on whatever they are working on and get enough clock hours/units to renew their WA state certificate every five years! In addition, I’m working with a fellow educator developing a new WEA course on STEM in Sports! It’s exciting to get to stretch myself professionally, learn more, and get to work with my students on their learning. BTW, here’s another video showing how to make your own Bitmoji Google Slides in case you’ve enjoyed the last video I shared. I’ve been enjoying making those!
My To Do List for next year keeps growing too:
- The BIG #1 thing to do with any face time we get is to hit the ground running on making relationships and strong connections! One way is to have regular, weekly or even twice weekly class meetings. We used to do that when we were a middle school and had a strong advisory program. We don’t know how long we’ll have with our new students and making relationships is what will carry us through whatever distance learning we’ll have to do. Icebreakers, get-to-know-yous, team games/challenges such as the Marshmallow Challenge are all things I can do. If we have fewer students in class, as in the case of half our students in the AM and the other half in the PM, or half one day and the other half the other day, we can do activities that are better with small groups such as team-building games like low ropes course lawn activities. (Added May 28, 2020.)
- Help kids, especially those who are used to being told what to do, discover or uncover their passions. The reason for this? To give kids choice. True choice. Many teachers are used to giving kids choice over the order in which they complete assignments, the way they learn the material, and the way they show their learning. Teachers even give kids choice about where they sit in the classroom and with whom they work but what if we went even further and offered kids the choice to learn WHAT they want? Kids are doing what they want while they are at home, without teachers telling them what to do, so what if we could accept that as evidence of learning? Choice is necessary and I hope we get another year WITHOUT standardized testing, WITHOUT grades, and let’s add WITHOUT required curriculum at least while kids are learning from home. I want the at-home learning to be more like HOMESCHOOL, or better yet UNSCHOOL, and less like At-Home-School. I might just assign Genius Hour projects to my students during any and all at-home learning if we’re all quarantined. (Added May 31, 2020.) Think Blended-Learning and add Flipped Classroom elements! (See my Blended and Flipped the New Norm post.)
- For me specifically, make sure they know to check Classcraft Messages, whole-class announcements and personal messages EVERY DAY! And that they engage with the random events to have some fun checking in every day.
- Teach kids how to make a schedule to have a routine going. I will share examples.
- Teach them the use of the Discussion Forum so they can help each other and keep in touch. For some kids this is the ONLY way they can message their classmates. It is critical that they understand that checking back to read responses is how they can get answers to their questions, especially from their classmates. It wasn’t effective to wait around in class with your hand up when the person next to you might know the answer (ask three before me!), so it’s not effective in distance learning to wait for me and only me to answer their questions when someone else in the class could already know the answer.
- Know that Classcraft works hand-in-hand with Google Classroom so Science has a Google Classroom Class, too. I had some complaints that I should be using Google Classroom and yet I was and had been all year.
- Teach kids how to access their school Google Email accounts for communication purposes as well as for dealing with other educators and specialists.
- Teach kids how to use their Google Calendar, especially with Google Classroom assignment deadlines. This will be especially helpful for those kids who benefit from structure.
- Teach, model, and have students practice using a shared FAQ document. Along those lines, help students learn how to peer edit Google Docs using the Suggest feature and commenting. (Added May 26, 2020)
- This one is a minor one but I still want to show kids how they can play games AND learn some Science with the many Legends of Learning games. I’ve had a great playlist with some wonderful Science games open for these past 10 weeks and can’t get kids to play them aside from two or three! And the two or three that played some of the games from my playlist said the games were fun AND taught them something!! So I figure if I show them how fun it could be at school then they’ll be more likely to play when they are quarantined again. And even better we are going to create Office 365 accounts for all elementary students so they can play Minecraft Education Edition! Game-Based Learning (GBL) is highly motivating! (Added May 28, 2020)
- Teach kids how to respond to each other on Flipgrid! I want to encourage its use way more than what I got this year. (Added May 28, 2020)
- When in class, face-to-face, I need to have kids doing the things that they will NOT be able to do from home such as all of our Lego Mindstorms EV3 STEM Robotics 101 lessons and any and all of our fish trapping and water quality testing!! That is going to require as much face-to-face time as we can possibly have. Doing all 12 of these will require that I give up quite a bit of the curriculum that I hold so dear. I know it’s not about my curriculum, it’s about my kids, but I choose my curriculum based on what kids enjoy learning and doing, which is why I hate letting any of it go.
Plan for Week 11
My plan is the same as my plan for last week except that now it’s JUNE and we have three weeks of school left. I’m not mentioning how long we have left but I know other teachers do and I know this time of year is challenging under normal conditions because kids want to be out (of school and outside!). Three weeks is long enough in my mind for kids to keep working but I’m not sure kids see it that way, especially with so many already tuned out, so I’m working to keep them engaging! It’s stressful. All of this is stressful. I’m on call checking and monitoring and tweaking and recording all day, every day and I’m only reaching a few kids. I’ve said that before but it still needs to be said. That is the reality of a forced distance learning model. We teachers are working more than ever and reaching only a fraction of kids. The fraction of kids who are working are worth every minute and that is why we miss the majority of kids that we are not reaching. Because they are ALL worth every minute we are spending making sure they have learning and connecting opportunities. And most of all, we just want to know that they are hopefully okay.
We’ll see how this week goes. Every week I hope to get more kids working than the week before.
