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School Online – Journal – Day 18

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment
Our classrooms have changed…..

It’s day 3 for our online classes, and there remain several classes who don’t yet have teachers assigned. We have no system to communicate to students and their families, so as their anxiety grows, so does my inbox.

My morning was spent teaching online: two classes of 38 students each, with a 10 minute break between the two-hour classes. Near the end my webcam failed, and so I was a disembodied voice to bring the class to conclusion.

There was a theme of similar “technology fails” throughout my afternoon correspondence. And this has me thinking about how this new “classroom” is so different from what most people think of when they think “school”.

Rather than hallways, where students wait to enter the class at the bell, we have “waiting rooms” for our MS Teams or Google Meet class. A login gets a student in easily, but there are students who have forgotten their passwords, and so they request to enter as a “guest”. Most are supposed to be there, and gaining entry allows them to join their classmates. But occasionally a student has shared the class link with a friend, and he or she enters anonymously and creates chaos. When the teacher shuts down the class, and reopens a new session without the intruder, that might be the end of it.  But, if the friend sends the new link, the “guest” arrives again.  A wise teacher refuses to allow them to enter. So the “guest” changes his name repeatedly to profane or racist words, which pop up as messages like “F…Y… is requesting to join”, or worse. Were this a student in a physical hallway we could address the behaviour, but on the Internet they act with impunity.

In the digital classroom we have tiny images of faces, or nothing at all if the cameras are off. We speak without seeing reactions, and can only trust that they are listening.  The students, by contrast, have no choice but to see our faces, up close. Or maybe they’re not watching or listening? But how would we know?

Rather than a show of hands, we ask them to “react” with a “thumbs up”, or “applause”. Not quite as revealing as a facial expression, but immediate and clear. If they aren’t paying attention we get no reaction at all.

The chat tool is a step above having everyone shout out an answer.  And they can carry on side conversations with each other in chat without disturbing anyone else.

Rather than working on chart paper on a table, they’re working in Google Docs or Slides. And if they each have a slide, we can see what they’re working on in real time.  Their “bubble” appears in the slide sorter, so it’s easy to see if a student is on the wrong page, or missing. At the end of the session everyone can move from slide to slide, together. The entire slide stack remains as a record, with 24/7 access by everyone in the class. (Unlike all the chart paper I would roll up and stack at the back of my classroom.)

While they’re working, they’re in breakout rooms.  They can speak as loudly as they wish, and with much more privacy than in a regular classroom. The teacher can pop in and out, sometimes without them noticing, but most times with camera and microphone on.

Bringing the entire group back together results in a cacophony, that ebbs quickly. Rather than a shouted “5 more minutes”, they will have seen a message pop up on their screen with that message. As a teacher, it is a relief not to have shout to get their attention.

What is missing from an online classroom is the chatter as they leave class at the conclusion.  It’s a rather abrupt ending, with almost no time needed to get to the next class. The casual conversation that provides a mental break between intensive work is not easy to recreate online. There is no “app” that can connect people without deliberate action, so it’s unlikely that new friendships will develop outside of class.

While teachers in physical classrooms might place independent work high on their priority lists, that now needs to change. Online we need to create deliberate opportunities for social connection; our classes are the only place they will meet new people and develop new relationships.

If we want to nurture our students’ mental wellness, we need to ensure that social-emotional learning is a priority. And we will need to learn and develop new classroom routines for our new digital classrooms.

Please share here what’s working for you. How are you making your classroom a place of connection as well as learning?

School Online – Journal – Day 17

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment
The calm of the morning in Sunny Slope

Finally, a day when I managed to get to the end of my inbox, and step away for a moment or two! I am hoping that this means that our teachers are settling in as well.

There is still confusion about our timetable, from both teachers and students. And our system doesn’t allow for two attendance entries on the same day, so the period 2 classes who meet again in period 4 are not tracked accurately.  The period 1 classes are working asynchronously in period 3, so we don’t record attendance then.

We are slowly matching up teachers on leave with their long-term occasional replacements, although the transfer of online LMS components is much slower.  And there are still a number of teachers to be hired, so interviews will be conducted tomorrow.

Our community school guidance counsellors don’t have the ability to manage our waitlists, so that’s a challenge that will have to addressed soon, in order to get students into the last available seats in our very full classes.

But I am hearing as many successes as failures today.  Hurrah!

Let’s see if I am as successful tomorrow when I will be teaching two classes back to back for two hours each, with only a 10-minute break.  My classes are large: 37 in one, 38 in the other.  And so I’m giving them lots of time to work in smaller groups, sharing information in a Google Slides stack.  The first group I met last week, and the second are a new group to me as their instructor was asked to take on another class. So they will have missed our icebreaker, community-building activity.  I wonder how this will make a difference in how we work together.

One of my university students went to the other section of our course on Monday, and stayed. And now she wants to be excused from our class tomorrow.  While it makes some sense, with only nine classes and lots of group work, she really needs to be with our group.  It was tough to say “no” to her.

Tomorrow is a Day 2 for our secondary school, and we’ll see how many teachers and students end up together in the correct space when our periods 1 and 2 flip.  I really hope that everyone is re-reading their Staff Handbook, and reminding their students of the schedule.  It’s not quite the same as standing in the hallway, waiting for your class to arrive.  If you’re in Google Meet, or MS Teams, and no one shows up……..

I think it’s going to take teachers some time to get used to the sequence of classes: Synchronous, Synchronous, Synchronous, Asynchronous in a repeating pattern over two days.  Once they get in the rhythm, I think it’s going to work well.  Having a “work period” is a common practice in F2F classrooms, and this builds it into the cycle.

I’ll be interested to hear how our teachers are feeling in a week or two!  Let me know how you are doing, in a reply to this post.

School Online – Journal – Day 16

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

Today was the first day of school for our students. As they were online, we really don’t have a good idea of how many showed up.  Since our student information system hasn’t yet been modified for our schedule, we have only paper records with each teacher. So I think they showed up, but I have no data.

I do know a significant number of our teachers began the day without timetables, and will only now have the information available to connect with their students. And their students will have been waiting at home for their teachers to reach out. I hope that has happened.

Our teachers have the choice of Brightspace or Google Classroom, and MS Teams or Google Meet. Many will have had little experience with either, so I would imagine today has been very stressful for them.  Their Brightspace shells are generated each night from our student information system, so they would not have been available today as we matched teachers to classes. Some will have accessed class lists, contacted students by email, and met them online. Others will have found themselves without the necessary information to do so.

Tomorrow will go smoother, as will each day from now on.

Our work will then shift to our families, and addressing timetables that don’t match choices.  We are also going to learn a great deal about “fit” between students, teachers, and technology.

Behind the scenes our team is calling occasional teachers, offering them positions, and then completing the paperwork to have them signed on.  All this has to happen before they can be added to the student information system and be assigned classes.

So what did I do as a Principal? Lots of emails. From 5:00 a.m. this morning, until I signed off at 6:30, with a two-hour break in the middle to teach. The teaching was fun; helping a new friend learn how to sew with a sewing machine.  And the return to a chair, not so much fun.

One challenge for us, responding to questions, is that our class records are under the name of the original teacher, while classes may be instructed by a long-term occasional teacher. We must match the teacher on leave with the LTO teacher, in order to provide our LTO teachers with course and student records.

Our teachers are all working from home, so we are limited to phone and email communication. It’s never as easy problem-solving when we can’t meet face-to-face. And I can only imagine their frustration waiting a response that could have been almost four hours in some cases today.

I never did get to and “empty inbox” between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., but in the final half hour I did it! I then put an “out of office” message on, promising to respond in the morning, and enjoyed a meal, an episode of “Maigret”, and hopefully a soak in our hot-tub after I finish writing this.

I know that we have wonderful teachers, and they are doing their very best.   I hope they find joy in their classes, knowing that they are creating a brand-new world for their students. And I hope that I can ease their way on this journey.

Tomorrow I will be up bright and early, hoping to allay concerns and support our teachers.  I could not have imagined the school we have, when I began teaching in 1983. Had we a pandemic then our students would be alone at home, with only mailed packages and a phone as our tools.  Now we have the Internet, multimedia tools, and the ability to bring a class of 31 together online to interact.  What a world!

School Online – Journal – Day 15

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

So, this post will be short.  Not because of lack of material to write about, but because I am exhausted after almost 14 continuous hours online. The logarithmic curves in my quilt reflect my past couple of weeks.  Today was where the curve accelerated “north”.

This morning I checked in with my email, to see that my invitation to have teachers share their names and courses had resulted in more than just entries in our database.  I became the point person, in the absence of any other contact, for each of our teachers, many of whom did not yet know what they will be teaching tomorrow.

I worked my way through my inbox, set up an “out of office” message that I thought would explain why I would be absent for several hours, and then headed online for my morning of teaching.

Unfortunately there were TWO “out of office” options, and when I turned it on, it reverted to my “Retirement” message.  Not what I had intended.

So, after a staff meeting, then three hours with my Foundations III class, I returned to 91 emails in my inbox.

I loaded up the current data I had on teacher timetables, and began to work my way through my messages in order of receipt.  Most of the time I was confirming that there were not yet courses in teacher timetables.  Other times I was communicating to them their courses and their time in the schedule. And much of the time I was hoping to reassure, without any solid information about when their concerns would be resolved.

I took a 15-minute break for dinner (my wonderful husband prepared his speciality – I won’t tell you what it is), and returned to my computer.  When I finally stood up at 8:00 tonight I had managed to respond to 309 emails, and sent an additional 40 to our course teams, connecting teachers with others who will be teaching the same courses.

Thank goodness for Grade 9 Typing!  Mr. Watson at Kincardine District High School, with his manual typewriters, is responsible for much of my career success.

I only left my seat at 8:00 pm because I could no longer access our student information system, and my inbox had ceased to grow.

I know that those who are inputing teacher names are putting in much longer hours than I. It must be so frustrating to work so hard, and know that the task exceeds the possible time.

So, I will check in with my email and our student information system when I awake in the morning. I will connect with as many as possible before our scheduled class start at 8:30 a.m.

And I hope I sleep tonight, and that our teachers can as well!

School Online – Journal – Day 14

~ Terry Whitmell ~ 9 Comments

It’s Sunday, and I’m thinking about how I would prepare for Tuesday, if I were one of our Online School teachers. 

I have now experienced an online “first day of classes” three times in my own teaching.  My classes were all with pre-service teachers, so they were students who were a little older than ours, but I think the general principles still apply.

Connect Ahead

  • Create a student email list, and send a welcome message. Be sure to use BCC for privacy.
  • Post a welcome announcement in your course.
  • Have the students reply to your announcement, or within a discussion
    • This semester I used my Spotify account to create a collaborative playlist.  I could then “share” the code within my announcement so that they could add to the playlist and play the music from there. I asked them to reply to the announcement, to explain their choice of “first day” music. I modelled this by adding “Dynamite” by BTS, and explaining that I loved the beat and their dancing.
  • Remind students that they cannot use their speakers, so they will need earbuds or earphones in order to avoid echo for everyone else.
  • Connect with the other teachers of your course.  In our Online School there may be more than 10 teachers for a single course in each of our Quadmesters. Dividing up the work, and then sharing, will be a lifesaver!

Build Your LMS Framework

  • Prepare your online materials so that they make sense to you, and so that you can explain them to your students.
  • Provide a summary page, or pages, so that students can easily find their upcoming assignments, or task lists.
  • Create PDF versions of important information, so that students can access them offline.
  • Hide most of your online content so that your students can only see the key information they will need. Don’t overwhelm! Most LMSs allow you to set dates so you don’t need to remember to publish every day.
  • KISS – Keep it Simple…..

Practice with your Synchronous Tools

  • Run a practice class with family and friends.
  • Set up your computer facing a window, or with a good light from behind your screen. Otherwise you look like a dark blob, and students cannot see your facial expressions.
  • Get comfortable earbuds or earphones, and possibly ones with a mic built in. (If you use your speakers they will feed into your microphone and create an echo that will distract your students.)
  • If you are using a tool that permits breakout rooms, practice moving students into groups manually, as well as using random allocation.
  • Consider the layout of the screen for your various purposes: seeing student faces, monitoring their chat, checking attendance, sharing your screen. If you can create multiple layouts it will make it easier as you move from direct instruction to collaborative work.

Plan to Build Community

  • Plan to co-create class norms:
    • Who has camera on?
    • How do we speak without interrupting?
    • What do we do if we need to step away?
  • Plan to create opportunities for students to connect with you and with each other:
    • Use the “reactions” to get quick responses from students, much as you would F2F: thumbs up, agree, etc.
    • Create simple polls to gather information, or come to a class decision.
    • Encourage use of the chat, both with everyone and person-to-person.
  • Create multiple channels:
    • Live in Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, Adobe Connect, etc.
    • Discussions in your LMS
    • Email distribution lists
    • Backchannel: WhatsApp, maybe even text?
      • You need a way for students to let you know if they get kicked out of your live sessions, or if their technology is not working.
      • You also need to discuss class norms regarding their use of backchannels, particularly regarding side conversations that might be hurtful or destructive.
  • Design activities that provide students with a “home” group, but let them interact with others as well. They need to get to know each other, and that takes time.
  • When presenting or when sharing a video, put a chat window beside it so that they can discuss what they are seeing and hearing, can ask questions, and you can interact with them.

Share

  • Create a Google Drive, and have students work collaboratively within documents or slides.
    • Create a slide deck with one slide per group. While they are in breakouts, working in the slide, you can easily see who is “there” and can monitor what they are writing.  Then groups can present from the deck, and everyone can move from slide to slide themselves while listening. The deck then becomes notes for the students to refer to later.
    • Create individual docs for each group, in the same fashion as described for the slide deck.
    • NOTE:  Do not assign too many individuals to a single doc or slide. The movements of the others in the group will be distracting, and may cause significant lag.
  • Have students create an online portfolio, shared with you, in which they will present evidence of learning. This will assist you with materials management, and make determination of final marks easier than if you are depending on your own system to track all your students and their work.
  • Use threaded discussions rather than individual emails for your students to ask, and for you to respond to student questions between classes. That way you are creating a FAQ as you go, and students can refer back to them as needed. 

Mentor a Pre-Service Teacher

  • What? More work for me? Actually, no. Our pre-service teachers were ready to head out to their practicum placements at the end of March Break, and that didn’t happen.  So, they are being permitted to work directly with teachers, planning for and designing course materials. They don’t need the paperwork necessary to work directly with students; they’ll be doing that in their official placements this semester. However, many of them need additional hours, and they are available to work collaboratively with you as you plan and prepare.
  • If you are an OCT, and would appreciate the assistance of a pre-service teacher who has extensive experience with online tools (they are in their second semester of online learning themselves), please contact me and I will play “matchmaker”. Our teacher-candidates will be qualified Intermediate/Senior teachers in English, History, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, General Science, and Health and Physical Education when they graduate in December, so they are well-prepared to assist you.

These are just a few of my ideas. Please suggest yours, or ask me questions in a reply to this blog. Together we are stronger!

School Online – Journal – Day 13

~ Terry Whitmell ~ 4 Comments

Day 13? Saturday? For our timetable team this is now Day 9 without a break, and there will be a Day 10, and maybe a Day 11.

When I was offered this position it was described as a part-time role, along with five other part-time Principals and four full-time Vice Principals, under the leadership of a coordinating Principal. We had about 8000 students, and anticipated a staff of teachers drawn from our existing schools.

The first part is still true, but we are over 11,000 students now, and our staff includes more than 150 LTO, or Long-Term Occasional teachers, each of whom must be hired and the paperwork completed in order for them to begin teaching on Tuesday. So this was the task for most of our team today: figuring out how to complete the paperwork, and have it signed by the LTO teacher, then returned so that the approval signatures could be added for them to be hired. As part of the wellness initiative at our board is a recognition that we need our weekends, so we have a “no email” policy. This has made the task for our VP team much more complicated. They will likely be at it through Sunday into Monday.

There is also the issue of having enough LTO teachers to fill the positions.  One of our neighbouring boards was in the news today, indicating that they did not have enough teachers to fill their virtual school.  We are in the same boat, since teachers often work for both our boards.  We just haven’t made the news…. yet.

I spent this morning completing the task of timetabling 137 of our students into their first two quadmesters.  The process of searching for each student, entering the screen to input courses, and searching for each course, and entering it was not a speedy one.  When done, I then was provided with the list of teachers, and began to organize their assignments within my spreadsheet. The challenge at this stage is that only ONE person can be working in the timetable at a time when changing the database, so we plan in a spreadsheet, and then one person types while the other person reads and proofreads. Given how long it took me to input four courses for 137 students, I can’t imagine how inputting six teacher names for six courses each will take!

And did I mention that each of us is working from our own space, remotely? So in between the work are the phone calls and emails that have had to take the place of a simple conversation from one desk to another. We can’t just be in the middle of a problem-solving session with one person, and invite another person in the room to join. We must phone them, send them the document via email so that they know what we are talking about, and then move our conversation to Teams in order to engage them in the process. So everything takes just a little bit longer, and has the potential for miscommunication when we take the shortcut of using only phone or only email.

Given this, I am amazed at the work that is getting done.

So, back to yesterday’s work. We didn’t have enough teachers allocated for the classes in the group I was inputing. Long-story-short: approval to hire five more was given, and now our VPs will have to cycle back, and begin the hiring process at the start for these five. I gave a “heads-up” to the coordinator at the board that we were going to need to put in place a plan to communicate with the students, should we not have a teacher in place by Tuesday. And that we would need to plan to prepare the teachers we do have, and possibly supply teachers, to work online.

Our contract teachers who are part of our Online School have had the experience of teaching online since schools closed in March.  They come to these positions having experienced “Emergency Remote Teaching”. While they do not yet now their specific course assignments, they have had the past two weeks to prepare for teaching online this year.

Our LTO teachers have not had this time to prepare. They also only know the subject area, not the specific courses they will be teaching.  And they are, for the most part, inexperienced, new teachers.

Professional learning was not in the job description for our administrative positions, but I think it is going to be a key part of mine moving forward. I am going to give it some thought, and tomorrow’s blog post will be my personal advice for our Online School teachers.

If you are going to meet your new classes online on Tuesday, and are interested in how I would prepare, please return to this blog tomorrow.  I invite you to reply to this blog post, and let me know what you MOST need to know, and I’ll do my best to respond.

School Online – Journal – Day 12

~ Terry Whitmell ~ 2 Comments

Today was a whirlwind.  Our guidance counsellors in all of our “bricks and mortar” schools were given the list of “conflicts” and began to resolve them to ensure that all students had timetables.  Our communication team had announced that the timetables would be sent to students today, so there was a hard deadline.

I was given the task of ensuring that the details of each teacher’s request was noted next to their name in the master list. I wrote their course preferences, and then indicated if the department or subject into which they had been placed differed from what we had learned from them via last week’s survey.  I believe the subject designations were decided near the beginning of the process, based upon qualifications and input from their schools.  I also believe that teachers were also informed of these department placements at that time, so there shouldn’t be too many surprises.

However, with student timetables a priority, the entry of teachers next to courses didn’t begin until near the end of the day, and is ongoing as I write.

To complicate matters, Principals were given discretion to transfer students to the Online School, where remaining in F2F settings put them at risk. These additional, more than 200 students, made it a challenge for conflicts to be resolved, and resulted in many students without complete timetables. I know that this has created stress for counsellors, who always do the best for their students, and will head home today without resolution.

And, as of the end of this day, there were still LTO positions which had not been filled. So, the suggestion that more teachers be added to the school has merit, but will be difficult to achieve.  I believe there will be many conversations over the weekend, with our leaders working to resolve this dilemma.

Having completed the teacher preference summaries, I was then given the task of timetabling all of our developmentally delayed students into their programs. There are more than 100 students, and each timetable entry takes me from 5 to 10 minutes, so this will be a task that stretches out over my weekend. Yes, this could have been done by each of the schools, but we weren’t ready to begin the task until the end of the school day. And our counsellors have had a busy enough week, and a busier Friday, without having to stay late. We missed the student timetable email deadline, so I have until Monday afternoon to have all of them in place.

I am anticipating hearing from many of our colleagues, concerned that they don’t yet know what they are teaching.  With the hiring of LTO teachers incomplete at this time, I know that a close review will be necessary to ensure that we have teachers matched with classes for Tuesday. So I have no idea when we will be able to share specifics with our teachers.

It is my hope that our Online School teachers will plan their first day as a community building day.  The students will need to learn both the synchronous (MS Teams or Google Meet) software, and the asynchronous learning management system (D2L Brightspace or Google Classroom). The students will be from schools throughout our school board, so few of them will ever have met.  And getting to know new people online is not going to be as simple as it is face-to-face.

One advantage of the Online School is the sheer number of sections of each course.  The odds are that most teachers will have two classes of the same course, and will be working on a course team with several others.  With so many hands, there should be light work.

It will be unusual for some of our teachers to have the support of a colleague, and getting to know each other will be as challenging as it is for the students to get to know each other. I know that there have been Facebook and WhatsApp groups formed, and I hope that this will continue. Our teachers will be stronger together.

So, it’s back to the two computers I have running: one with my spreadsheet of students and their courses, and another with our student information system. I will be thinking of my two colleagues who are now on day seven of timetable building, without a break. They likely have at least two more days ahead of them. We should thank them for their dedication; without them we would have no chance of opening school next Tuesday!

School Online – Journal – Day 11

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

It’s Thursday, and I know that our teachers’ anxiety is growing. We will see students next Tuesday, and no one in our Online School has yet been told what they are teaching.

This afternoon a virtual meeting took place with the guidance counsellors from all of our “bricks and mortar” schools.  They’re getting ready to resolve all the “conflicts”.  That means the timetable is done!  Well, at least for the students.

The next task, and not a trivial one, is to match up teachers with classes.  We sent out a survey a week ago, and I coded all the results. So, we have lists of who is qualified for what, and what they prefer.  They could just assign teachers based upon our OCT records, but this will be better.  However, it’s not going to be faster.

What is it they say? Go slow to go fast?

They’ll likely use the strategy that we use each year when staffing: fill the most difficult first, and leave the easier ones to the end. In this case they will likely start with single courses, and end with those where there are 40 to 50 classes.  And then when it doesn’t work, backtrack and re-do.

Who knows how long this will take? No one has ever done this before, so it’s almost impossible to predict.

In the meantime I’m doing some “action research”, and figuring out how teachers will do daily attendance with their various flavours of computer hardware.  Our Student Information System was designed to run on PCs, and its interface requires Java. There is a workaround for Macs that involves clicking on a series of options, ending up at our attendance interface (though some people have not been successful making it work with their older Macs).  No one has tested it on Chromebooks yet, so I am awaiting emails back from the two teachers who volunteered to try it out.

Today I had another taste of what our teachers will experience next week when taught my Ontario Tech University Education Law class online.  I had 36 students out of 38 attend, and we were working in Adobe Connect for two hours. I needed two screens to juggle between our interface, shared Google docs, and our Canvas course. Perhaps my students will be able to manage better than I, although the one student who connected via phone was likely unable to see all that they needed to see. We also learned how important it is to have a headset or earbuds.  One student with speakers on created a dramatic echo when I was speaking, so they had to mute almost 100% of the time.

The same challenges are being faced by our “bricks and mortar” school teachers when they are working synchronously in the last period of the day. And to make it even more of a challenge, our Internet dropped in the last 10 minutes of the period. Not a great way to end a long day.

But, tomorrow is Friday! Actually every day this week has felt like Friday, without the reward of a weekend.

I hope that our teachers are able to find some relaxing time, where they are able to distract themselves from the concerns of the week. It promises to be sunny, in the mid teens, so I’m hoping that everyone will get out, get moving, and enjoy this beautiful Autumn weather.

School Online – Journal – Day 10

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

This morning I met via MS Teams with my Principal colleagues, in our monthly association meeting. The meeting was structured around questions we had for our Associate Directors, System Leads, and others with central responsibilities. Many of the concerns will also be relevant for us when our students begin online next week, so it was time well-spent.

Cohort B arrived today, for their “bonus” Period 1 day.  They will also be in attendance tomorrow, with an identical schedule as today, and then will return on Friday for their Period 2 class. They were new, but the teachers are pros by now, and the day went very smoothly.

The issue of transfers to the online school is a contentious one, with both technical and ethical roadblocks. The deadline was last Thursday, but there are many families who missed the deadline and are now appealing to school staff, Principals and even Superintendents. Not only is this an issue for the timetable, it could potentially impact all of our schools when reorganization takes place for the next Quadmester.

One of the challenges today is the list of 74 vacancies that have yet to be filled.  These are long-term-occasional positions for those on leaves of various types. We are “cold calling” in seniority order, and inviting these teachers to join our school. However, the list that we have does not indicate who among them are already committed to similar positions in our bricks and mortar schools.  Several have taken this as an opportunity to change their assignment for the year, neglecting to recognize that they are obligated to fulfil the duties of the position they originally accepted.  So, some of our Principal colleagues are understandably upset when these teachers inform them that they’re switching jobs.  Thankfully there is a consistent message that this is not possible, and they must honour their agreements.

Our numbers are now more than 10,000, and so the timetabling process involves lengthy “simulations”, and is moving slowly as a result.  One glitch today was where there were 10 classes of the same subject in the same period, but the program was putting twice the number of students in five classes, and leaving the other five empty.  No idea why the program might do this, but thankful that there are software developers able to jump in and remedy the situation.

I am anxious to hear which group will become my “school”. We will be dividing into subject-based groupings, so that we can better support the teachers for whom we are responsible. And I am looking forward to being able to respond to emails about teaching assignments with more information than “we’ll be able to let you know once the timetables are built”.

In the meantime, I hope our teachers are working their way through the Brightspace training materials, reflecting on changes they might wish to make to their courses, and anticipating a year of learning and growth.  I hope that the opportunity to work on course teams that could be as large as 10 to 15 teachers will result in stronger connections, better courses, and improved student achievement.

School Online – Journal – Day 9

~ Terry Whitmell ~ Leave a comment

Today our Period 2, Cohort A students were in attendance.  Because they had attended yesterday, in their Period 1 class, the morning went very smoothly.

The afternoon remained in limbo for many teachers as they awaited assignments for the “Continuous Distance Learning Support”. These assignments are to two or three other classes, to respond to concerns regarding asynchronous learning when the classroom teacher is instructing synchronously or face-to-face. This structure ensures that when the student are learning from home in the afternoons, or on the other days of the week when they do not attend F2F, they are able access support.

Hardware and network access continued to present challenges.  Traditional classrooms are configured with fixed hardware: a desktop computer, ethernet connection, speakers, projector, and document camera, all tied together with a myriad of wires. So making these tools portable, and to integrate them into the asynchronous tools in D2L or Google Classroom, and into the synchronous tools of MS Teams or Google Meet, has required creativity. They are learning about new tools such as VideoMirror, and Screencastify, and sharing their new-found learning with their colleagues.

The students have been amazing! With classes capped at 15, and F2F sessions of 150 minutes, our teachers are able to connect better with their students, and respond to their needs. They enter and exit from a the door closest to their classroom.  When they arrive, their teachers are there to greet them, remind them of the mask and hand sanitizer requirements, and ensure that they are spaced appropriately as they proceed to class.

I am looking forward to my Day 3 in a “bricks and mortar” school, and learning more about this hybrid model of learning. I will return to work on the Online School once the timetable is built at the end of the week, our teachers receive their assignments, and I am able to begin to lead our more than 400 teachers.