Stories of Practice

Engaging our primary learners is especially challenging in this model, but Josie Champagne is finding success with some tools and practices that encourage collaboration and keep things seamless as schools transition back and forth between hybrid and remote learning.

• Josie meets with all her students every day. Remote students join her in-person kids in the afternoon for Google Meet, and together, the class pursues a different learning theme each day of the week: Money Monday, Take a Trip with a Book Tuesday, and so on.

• To protect student privacy, learners are unable to see each other's work in Seesaw, and this creates a new barrier to celebrating student work. Mrs. Champagne gets around this by using Seesaw's blog feature, which allows her to share student work selectively to a wider audience. Kids can then see and appreciate each other's work.

• Josie has found that creating or finding Google Slides presentations for her Lucy Calkins lessons has paid off when the school has had to transition to remote learning. In that format, the lessons are easy to share in a Meet, and since kids were already used to that approach, the disruption to learning was lessened when students were participating from home.

• Drafting during writing workshop and now in the publication phase, her young writers are using the Book Creator app to publish their work. Accessing the app on their iPads has helped them illustrate their pieces with the drawing tools, and the shared library in Book Creator allows kids to see and appreciate each other's work.

• Josie makes regular use of the Explain Everything app, which, when projected, turns her iPad into an interactive white board. She hands the stylus to excited students, who are eager to share their work on the screen. When teaching lessons, she uses the app on her iPad, and the subscription version of Explain Everything allows her to load the whiteboard on her laptop, which she projects on the screen for in-person kids to see. She then joins her Meet from both devices and is able to share the whiteboard with both groups simultaneously while enjoying the mobility the iPad affords. She is free to move about the room as she teaches because the white board goes with her.

As a subject matter, art is necessarily hands-on, so hybrid and remote learning require some additional digital tools of this year's visual arts classes.

• Laura relies heavily on her document camera. Since in-person students can no longer huddle around a table while she teaches and models, the device enables her to demonstrate techniques for her in-school learners. Using Sphere Lite or Sphere 2, she can also share the projected image with her at-home students. Though she also sometimes uses her iPad and stand as a document camera, the extra reach on the document camera's neck provides more work room when she needs it.

• Remote-only students don't have the opportunity for in-person check-ins with Laura to share their work for feedback. Since laptop cameras provide inconsistent results when taking pictures of papers and artwork, scanning features on native mobile apps have helped kids submit their work. The Notes app on iOS and the Google Drive app on Android offer solid scanning features without having to download a separate app.

• Like all teachers, Laura is experimenting to find solutions as needs arise. For example, she is currently planning to use present a Sphere 2 window in Google Meet to give her at-home kids an opportunity to see both her and the feed from the document camera. This method will also allow her to record the Sphere 2 window in Loom, making it possible for kids who weren't in class to access the lesson later.

Alyssa Littlefield, who fully embraces educational technology by nature, has found that this school year's hurdles have encouraged a continually reflective mindset in which she thinks about her instruction "more functionally, not just creatively." While the logistics that accompany having half her students at home and half with her in person introduce new variables, Ms. Littlefield says that she and students have been able to adapt: "We're generally making it happen, and that's exciting."

• Socratic seminars are a regular part of Alyssa's literature-based classes. The hybrid model presents obvious challenges to the flow of this approach that relies on human interaction to help students draw meaning from texts. To create stronger connections between at-home and in-person students during class discussions, Alyssa and some of her colleagues in the English department ask the in-person students to join the Google Meet with the kids at home. With cameras on, kids can read each other's social cues more easily, which makes the discussion feel less stilted. To improve the process further, ELA teachers are also using conference microphones placed near the center of the room to amplify classroom voices for the kids at home.

• To encourage her writers to be more purposeful, thoughtful editors of their own work, Alyssa asked them to record themselves reading their own papers as video comments in Kami. She says this "opportunity to see them think" gave her valuable insight into their individual processes.