Virginia Society for Technology in Education
In the first of two March 2021 editions of the VSTE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Webinar, Amy Jackson discusses how to maintain calm, transparency, and control during times of technological difficulties. Amy currently works for a small school district in Central Virginia and is the co-chair of the VSTE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee.
The webinar is hosted by Charles Randolph.
Our next edition will be on Wednesday, March 17 at 12:30.
In the February 2021 edition of the VSTE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Webinar, Charlotte Morris talks about how educators can include diversity and equity principles in their learning content. Charlotte is an instructional designer of graduate courses in the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University.
The webinar is hosted by Charles Randolph.
Tomorrow, February 24, at 12:30 pm the VSTE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee will host a webinar on incorporating Diversity and Equity principles in your learning content. One of our mentors, Charolette Morris, will facilitate this webinar.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
Charlotte Morris is an Instructional Designer with the College of Professional Studies at The George Washington University. Join us at 12:30 tomorrow as she shares insight into how to incorporate Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) principles in your learning content.
If you would like to attend this webinar, email vstedei@vste.org to receive a link to the Zoom room.
As teachers have adjusted to virtual and hybrid learning one of the tools that has risen to the surface has been Google Jamboard. Jamboard is an interactive whiteboard application that, like most Google products, is collaborative. Our principal, Leeane Turnbull-Palette, began using Jamboards in conjunction with inclusive opener prompts to begin staff meetings and many in our staff, at Salem High School in Virginia Beach, loved the collaborative nature and ease of use. One of the biggest highlights of the tool is that you can use an image as the background making any whiteboard a graphic organizer.
Jamboard has been a versatile tool for inclusive openings, collaborative groups, intentional closings, and advisory activities. It allows teachers to set up prompts, embed graphic organizers into the background, and gives teachers options on how they are going to have students respond. For inclusive openings, the teacher may post a prompt and all students can answer that prompt simultaneously regardless of where they are. As the class moves into classwork, the teacher can assign 1 page of a Jamboard to each of the 5 groups with a graphic organizer embedded onto the slide. Jamboards will allow for up to 20 pages per Jamboard which allows for a lot of versatility, not to mention all of the students' work for the day is neatly on one Jamboard for easy grading.
Recently when using Jamboard for a professional development course, teachers were asked to note on a Jamboard what new tools or strategies they implemented during the first term of virtual learning during the pandemic that was a game-changer. They each noted their tool or strategy and signed their name to their sticky note on the Jamboard. Next, the teachers were asked to think about what they’d like to change to make the next term run a bit more smoothly for them or their students.
On the next Jamboard slide the teachers were asked to write on a sticky note what tool or strategy they wanted to try for the second term to help with their challenge, again they were asked to sign their name. In conclusion, teachers were asked to “ask the experts”, their colleagues who may have already used that tool of strategies for tips and points on where to get started. The Jamboard was their take away with tons of tools and methods that had worked for their peers as well as a point of contact to reach out to.
Another great example of how teachers are using Jamboard is how the catering teacher, Chef Voloudakis, is integrating them into class and creating a culture of collaboration and inclusion in her virtual classroom. Teaching a cooking class virtual was quite a challenge in the beginning. She uses Jamboards in a variety of ways. One way is to share thoughts and options on different foods. During Thanksgiving, students were able to share recipes, traditions, even photographs of dishes they help create with their families for the holiday meal. Another way they are using them is a brainstorming sounding board while discussing dishing as alternative ingredients. Lastly, Jamboards have become the classroom’s virtual bulletin board where students and Chef V can post pictures and video demonstrations of how to create a dish as well as the final products.
This pandemic has been a challenge for everyone. However, teachers are thinking outside of the box, sharing ideas, using new tools, and creating new classroom experiences that may not look like they did in the past, but are equally as rich and meaningful.
Written by Jennifer Blais. Jennifer is an Instructional Technology Specialist at Green Run High School and Salem High School in Virginia Beach. You can follow her on Twitter @MsJenBlais.
As an educator, have you ever stopped to wonder what it’s like on the other side of the screen? What is like to be in the shoes of a student in the year 2020-2021? We did and it changed our entire perspective on virtual learning.
In the Fall of 2020, I and three of my JMU colleagues were student teachers placed at the same school in Virginia and much like everyone else we were uncertain what this year was going to hold. As schools began their journey into the intrepid waters of the unknown, piloting this new ship we call digital remote learning, it wasn’t long before the flood of communications, worries, and frustrations threatened to sink it: inboxes were full, phones were constantly ringing, systems were crashing, and everyone was beyond exhausted, trying their hardest to press on despite the storm of challenges caused by the pandemic.
I sat in a team meeting one day brainstorming how to chart a more effective and less choppy educational course, when the principal stated longingly, “I just wish I knew what it was like to be a student.” As the words struck deep into my heart as a Duke, I thought to myself, “I can do that... I could be a student for a day. I can be the change that I want to see... ”
The next thing I knew, I was rounding up my colleagues and we sat down to develop a strategy with the administration. Each of us was assigned a student schedule in a grade level different from the one we were placed in as student teachers. We borrowed Chromebooks from the library to simulate student technology, selected a specific calendar day that would have been indicative of a normal day’s worth of work for students, and then dedicated time to complete all the work and write out our findings. Before we began, we also noted that our findings were limited by the fact that we were collegiate educated students with reading and digital literacy skills that far surpassed the average student. As we got started, I was suspecting that our results would support the trends we saw as teachers: students were not reading instructions carefully or were just not motivated to do assignments.
You would think that four graduate students would have no problem completing one day’s worth of online instruction, but to be completely honest, it was brutal. While it only took us four hours to complete all the assignments, we were completely drained from the amount of reading, clicking, navigating, and just overall effort we had to put in behind our tiny laptop screens.
Allow me to emphasize that we were completely competent graduate students, who knew how to do all the work, and had zero learning challenges, but by the end of the day even our heads were splitting at the seams. Imagine how much more difficult it is for our diverse students? In our carpool the following day one of my colleagues remarked, “I am so glad that I get to be a teacher again today and not a student.”
We published our findings and suggestions in an informal research report and distributed it to the local school division, but perhaps the biggest take away from our experience was that it is necessary not only to empathize with our students but to also understand their experience by entering into it.
A lot has changed since the beginning of the school year and as routines and norms are established, the waters of education are becoming less murky. Students’ experiences are constantly fluctuating though between hybrid and remote models and so the question is just as relevant as ever—What is like to be in the shoes of a student? I challenge you to find out. It might rock your boat and change your whole perspective on digital learning like it did for me.
Written by Austin Evans. Austin is currently a graduate student at James Madison University finishing his Masters in the Arts of Teaching with a concentration on Middle Education. He worked with Ann Allred, Nicole Popule, and Allison Wellener to conduct the “A Day in the Life of A Student” research project at North Fork Middle School in Shenandoah County.
