community – Terry Whitmell, PhD

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.

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!

Day 5 for both our “bricks and mortar” schools, and our new Online School!

In person, our teachers are welcoming Cohort B of Grade 9 students, combining COVID training with our traditional welcome to secondary school. I can’t imagine what it’s like for our teens, heading off to “high school” in such a time.

Online, we are still awaiting creation of our timetable for almost 9000 students. Did you know that software developers have never considered this eventuality? So, there have had to be a lot of last-minute software tweaks, and many tasks have had to be “redone”.

Since we have no solid timetable, we haven’t yet been able to assign our teachers, so they are out there in limbo. As an administrative team we are working to define our jobs. We need to support our students and our staff, and ensure that the needs are met by a team of Principals and Vice Principals, some of whom are working part-time.

So what are the roles of Principal and Vice Principal? We are thinking that the Vice Principals might take responsibility for a group of students, probably according to the placement of their last name in the alphabet. Our Principals primary work could be to support teachers and liaise with parents. So they may be grouped according to subject areas, in order to create smaller communities.

However, some of these departments will be very large. We estimate courses for students in a year to be 7.5. and teachers each lead 6 classes of anywhere from 22 to 31 students. So our 9000 students will require somewhere between 450 and 550 teachers. Tomorrow night is the deadline for students to opt to join our Online School, so our number of teachers may grow as well. For English alone we are looking at 50 to 60 teachers.

It is hoped that teachers will know their assignments as of the weekend, and will have Monday and Tuesday to prepare before classes formally begin on Wednesday. But since this is still a tentative plan, the communication is awaiting confirmation, and our teachers’ anxiety is growing.

My role as a Principal will be to allay their fears, find out what my teachers require, and figure out how to get it to them as soon as possible. They will be learning to use an LMS (Learning Management System), refine their use of Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, collaborate with others who are teaching the same course (many of whom they will never have met), and then connect with their students (whose anxiety is likely similar, as they sit at home!)

Since we still have two more days this week, and there may not be much news, I’ll take the next couple of blog posts to consider how I might support my teachers and students, beginning next week.

How will I build community with my teachers?

How will I support teachers to utilize research-based, student-focused instruction and assessment strategies?

How will I support the Mental Health of my teachers, and their students?

	Cassandra Troughton on Alternative Education
	This Week in Ontario… on Advocacy
	Arlene on Crocheting and Math
	Dolores E Fierro on Crocheting and Math
	Karen Brettman on Crocheting and Math

Tag: community

School Online – Journal – Day 14