I Am One of Thousands!

This past Friday afternoon, I received an email from the superintendent informing us that all activities, meetings, trips, and such have been cancelled till the end of March.

I received another e-mail informing us since the universities are closing, we needed to set up computers and such so students who came home could continue their classes once they were set up online.

About an hour after I left school, I received another e-mail informing us the decision had been made to cancel school until March 30th for students but all classified and certified personnel had to report on March 23rd to prepare classes to go online.

Fortunately, I teach math so that is not going to be a difficult process as there are lots of resources I can use in class. I think I can create hyperdocs with links to sites students can use to learn the material if I am not directly teaching.

However, I do teach a French class and that is going to be a bit more difficult as this is the first time I’m teaching this subject and I’m not as familiar with resources.

In addition, I am one half of the school technology team and I know I’m going to get questions from many of the elementary teachers, the music teacher, and some of those who are not familiar with technology. I have to be prepared to answer their questions.

The biggest problems I foresee with taking all the classes on line range from is there enough internet bandwidth in the village, to students having enough personal internet for the month to allow it, to families having enough mobile devices or computers for all the children to get on.

The students here cannot pop over to the library to use their computers because we don’t have a public library in town. The only library in town is in the school which is closed at the moment. Furthermore, the internet and phone services are unreliable and cannot be counted on to work every minute of every day.

As of this writing, Alaska has had only one confirmed case but that was the pilot of a foreign cargo plane who contacted health authorities upon landing. Other than that, there are no reported cases. The governor and others are doing this as a preventative measure.

So now you know, I am one of tens of thousands of teachers who are going to have to turn in person classes into online classes. I know I’ll be reading, checking out resources and putting together some ideas before Monday, March 23rd. Have a great day.