NO SCHOOL: Thanksgiving Recess
Grade 6 teacher
Eagle Point Elementary School
“They say it ‘takes a village to raise a child,’ well it takes a community of people to teach in the virtual environment! Sue McCoy and I teach sixth grade at Eagle Point Elementary School. We have found ourselves going back to that proverb as we transition from the physical to the virtual teaching environment. We work together on our Google Meet sessions with the special education and ENL teachers, to interact with the students and guide them during this new experience.
“While I am teaching ELA, Sue is checking the chats and engaging in conversations with the students. During this process we have realized the classroom relationships we had with our students needed to be adjusted to a virtual learning environment that led us to introduce norms and procedures, especially the appropriate ‘netiquette’ that will best provide engaging lessons to more than 40 students. Fortunately, we had been using Google Classroom throughout the school year so our students were already familiar with the format and utilization of the platform.
“We are also introducing Nearpod, Flipgrid and Brainpop to provide interesting and engaging material to students. We have had success with our Google Meets and are very proud of our nearly 90% daily attendance! The struggle has been working with students to follow through and complete the assignments without the continuous guidance there would be in a typical classroom setting. We have been able to work students through assignments in a Meet by allowing them to share their screens and ‘walk’ them through the process. We have noticed that some students are feeling overwhelmed with balancing their responsibilities of home and school, and managing their time in this new atmosphere, so we introduced them to Google Calendar and are guiding the students in planning their assignments.
“We are all ‘building the bike while learning to ride it,’ but thankfully our students love helping us throughout the process. We’d like to thank our City School District of Albany ‘village’ for being so supportive as we navigate our journey into the virtual classroom.”
