What I Tried During Distance Learning: Questions I Still Have (Part 4, final)

I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.

• Part 1: Necessary Changes
• Part 2: The Classwork
• Part 3: Communicating with Students
• Part 4: Questions I Still Have (this post)

Helping students get familiar with "platforms"

• Whatever platforms I end up picking, there is a ton of fluency that students are going to need to develop, with respect to the platform itself.
• Tired: written instructions, possibly with screenshots
• Wired: video walkthroughs from the student perspectives
• Inspired: scavenger hunts
• Right away, I knew I was going to need to be able to provide screenshots of the student perspective when providing instructions that included navigation. I've also started including some kind of video instructions with many of my big assignments and updates, and putting those at the head of written instructions.
• I attended a Desmos PD last summer (pretty chill). One of the things they had us do on the first day (dedicated to the Desmos Calculator), was this scavenger hunt. It's just a list of challenges of increasing sophistication. The challenges are reasonable interesting puzzles on their own, and include a solution key. But they are an example of how to problematize fluency with a platform, making it a more authentic context for learning and exploration. I could make a scavenger hunt for Slides, Docs, Classroom, Gmail, Khan Academy, etc.
• I also would just be generally interested in getting familiar myself with more, different, effective platforms. Forward any reccs you have to me on Twitter @bearstmichael.

Choice boards

• There is a "board" (usually a slide), where there are a bunch of options for students to do different things. Often, they'll click on a link on that first page, which will take them to a document (or other slide) where it has the assignment or whatever.
• One of my more creative colleagues has a funny way of talking about
• Mustard: students must do everything in this section
• Mayo: students may do some items from this section, if they want
• Pickles: students pick which one (or more) of the items in this section they want to do
• Providing multiple options for students to pick from is generally a good move in any context. And for distance learning, it's especially powerful if the options are meaningful accommodations for students trying to manage learning from home, in the middle of a pandemic.
• What are some meaningful choices we can give kids? Record a video vs. write something vs. make a presentation? What do we need to do to make sure that students know how to use and explore the board, so they understand all the options available to them, at which point they can make an informed decision that actually feels like a real choice.
• Even though they're opting into these options, it's still possible for the variety of platforms, and their relative novelty, to be overwhelming for students. So we still want to be judicious with what platforms our options engage. Maybe some of our options can be "learn about this new platform"?

Google teacher training

• My district is big on the GSuite. I've never taught in any other district, so I don't know if it's universal. But it's probably pretty universal, right? Regardless, Google has a series of online PDs about how to use their stuff. I've heard the PD is decent. Especially if Google is a big part of my vision for an online class, it could be useful?

Student-student collaboration

• Student-student collaboration is probably the number one focus of my math class (importantly, above the math, even). It was a swift and certain casualty of my commitment to asynchronous learning. This has been the biggest impact on my pedagogy. Which sucks. Student-student connection is so incredibly good for improving the socioemotional experience of learning, while also significantly improving the academic rigor and relevance as well.
• In the online classes I've taken, the teachers have had us do forum posts, and then required us to respond to 2-3 other students' responses, as a part of the assignment. This was always more annoying than educational, and I think it's because it's such an inauthentic practice. It's not useful! Collaboration for its own sake has questionable value (I think). But what are the applications, what is the classwork, for which collaboration is an authentic support?
• I also don't just want to make every assignment a group assignment, because that's exhausting. I want students to be able to collaborate in groups, on work that is ultimately their own individual classwork.
• As far as digital collaboration, having students draw on AwwApp.com is pretty good, b/c they can draw with each other. It's a little awkward, but if you play around with it, even the free version is pretty effective. I understand that a best practice for synchronous collaboration is having students collaborate on Google Slides, instead of Docs. This adds a ton more flexibility, in terms of the kinds of objects they can interact with. It also avoids some of the awkwardness that comes with multiple people editing the same Google Doc.
• Unfortunately the drawing "scribble" tool in Slides is super inadequate, because it requires you to click the button after each stroke.
• There would also need to be a TON of support in teaching kids how to do all the cool things you can do with slides. You can get really creative with all the flexibility it allows, but that takes training. And I don't just mean changing font, size, and type. I'm talking images, GIFs, tables, shapes, hyperlinks, comments, etc. These tools push Slides into the realm of feasible math platforms.

Technology literacy

• Even as our students are born into a digital age, not all of them are as fluent as their teachers think. I've had to show multiple students how to compose an email. I have had to teach two different students how to minimize a window. Raise your hand if you have watch a student use caps lock to capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Even now, I still get emails from students where the whole body of the email is written in the subject line.
• None of these are intended to shame any kid or adult who does these things. It's meant to communicate the negligence we have demonstrated by assuming too much about our students' computer skills, and so failed to develop them.
• This doesn't even include the many many computer functionalities that can tremendously improve student capacity to work on computers. Pinning tabs. Keeping an organized Google Drive. Keyboard shortcuts for efficiency. Screenshots. What is the best way to do this? How do we roll this out over the course of the year, on a need-to-know basis, so as not to overwhelm?
• Surely some of these platforms are within the domain of all students' classes, right? Especially in the context of distance learning, Gmail and the whole GSuite have got to be worth explicitly teaching students how to use. Cross-disciplinary work is tough though. Maybe different content teams at schools take responsibility for using different common platforms extra, and including development on how to use them well? For example, all ELA teachers teach kids how to use emails. Science teachers teach Google Slides. Math teachers teach kids how to take pictures, screenshots, and edit them, and upload them on different platforms.

Building community

• One of my colleagues (who has really been leading the charge on creatively adapting to distance learning), would post a daily question designed to get kids logged into the Classroom, and responding to her and each other. She would post questions in Google Classroom, intentionally chosen to get kids to log into the classroom. This marginally boosted engagement on actually classwork--the question got kids in the door, so to speak. It also generally improved the flow of "student gets an email about a thing in Google Classroom --> then goes to Classroom to do it right then."
• Splitting up all your students into sections of 20-30 students is a constraint forced upon us by budgets and schedules. Is it still useful during virtual learning? Or is it better to have smaller "teams," where students are in groups of like 7-10? Maybe smaller groups are easier to build community? Maybe we can take advantage of things like group competitions and stuff to build community within smaller groups?
• What about competition in general? Personally, I'm a very competitive person, and it has pushed me very hard in my academics and extracurriculars. But it has also filled me with tons of stress and anxiety about school. I generally try to avoid it in the classroom at basically every opportunity. But I also know how competition with other groups does a lot to promote in-group cohesion. How can I engage that positive aspect, while disrupting the negative ones? I've got a pretty clear philosophy on where that belongs in a regular classroom....but how does that change since we're online, where motivating connection is more important than ever?
• How do I want to balance a student's desire for, and right to, privacy, while at the same time, trying to push them a little out of their comfort zone? I mean, next year I'm teaching 9th graders, in a 9-12. So this is going to be kids' first times in the whole school. They won't have many pre-existing friendships with other students, or relationships with teachers. What can we do then?

Thank you for reflecting with me! If you have any questions, comments, or thoughts related to this series "What I tried During Distance Learning," please feel free to @ me, or message me, on Twitter @bearstmichael