Prepare & Ignore

Not much summer left. Part of me is trying to ignore the fact that we have this new and unknown back-to-school ahead of us. Part of me is also trying to prepare.

I've kept up with some PD this summer by taking three courses. Teaching Remotely: A Practical Guide, Integrating Climate Change into the Classroom, and a Strategies for Science, Technology, and Engineering workshop. Teachers never stop learning!!

The Teaching Remotely course from The Friday Institute offered some great insights and resources. The main theme in almost all of the teacher discussion posts was "How am I going to create and develop authentic relationships with a new group of students?" We knew each other in the spring of 2020 which made the transition to distance learning easier in my experience. Starting to build a relationship virtually will be very different.

There are many other issues to consider: How to support the social and emotional needs of my students? How to best provide feedback and assess their learning? How to support students with special needs? How to teach effectively and be culturally responsive in this medium? I know all these things can be done and be done well, but we have to work to get there.

Something I will continue to use is my Digital Dashboard. This is a Google doc (the 2019-20 version will be replaced soon) where I post brief class agendas, links to resources used, and list homework/assessments. I feel this is a great way to make my classroom more accessible to families since they might not be able to get as much information from Google Classroom summaries.

And as an avid collector of resources, here you go. "Education under COVID" (I think I will be creating Wakelet collections for our science units more often now, it's free and easy). It feels like a hot mess right now as I figure out the best way to organize it. This is part of me preparing. I still have some time to do ignoring.