One way or another, classes are going to resume this August, and Macon County teachers all over Macon County are preparing for the worst as case numbers for COVID-19 continue to suggest that at least part of the semester will be held from a distance.
In a recent survey conducted by Macon County Schools STEM coordinator Jennifer Love, teachers reported some trouble adjusting to remote learning on the fly in the spring spring. While 69.1 percent of respondents said that they were able to communicate with parents through phone calls and 62.1 percent through email, only 9.2 percent said they were able to communicate effectively through Google Classroom and just 3.3 percent through Zoom calls.
In the comments section, teachers also consistently brought up that lack of uniform resources and the high learning curve of new technologies prevented them from performing at their best.
“It was extremely difficult to deal with,” said eighth-grade teacher Kim Gurdak. “I’ve been teaching for 27 years, and I’ve always been more of a textbook type of person. Making this many changes this quickly was grueling.”
Macon County Schools administrators hope that the barriers of digital classrooms will be a minimal issue by August, but because some distance learning seems likely, they are devising several strategies to lessen the load. For example, when students aren’t at school, teachers will be allowed to come in to work and use computers and technical support available at the schools. Love expects that this will eliminate many of the class-stopping issues that posed problems earlier this year.
“Teachers will be asked to work from school rather than from home so that they can take advantage of school resources,” Love said. “We know that this issue is a moving target, so we want to be able to address it as a group.”
Furthermore, there will be more uniform standards for what resources classes use. Love said that all teachers will be running their classes through Google Classroom in the new school year because it performed the best for teachers across all grade levels in the early days of remote learning. Her hope is that reducing online interactions to one service will cut out the confusion for both teachers and families.
“Something we heard from a lot of teachers and families is that there were so many apps to download and it got really complicated,” Love said. “This is going to help us create more consistent standards.”
Teachers are already hard at work in professional development courses to learn the ins and outs of Google Classroom. A four-hour course being offered at Mountain View Intermediate School should have every teacher in the county ready to host and troubleshoot an online class by the first day of classes, and those who take it say that they already feel much more comfortable in a digital space now than they did when they were thrust into it in March.
“It answered a lot of questions and gave me a lot of ideas of what to do,” said seventh-grade teacher Nishelle Henson. “The hardest part last semester was just not being able to see our kids all the time. All of us having a tool for that will help a lot this time around.”
Denise Shields, a sixth-grade teacher with a master’s degree in instructional technology, has been teaching other teachers to use Google Classroom and has seen her colleagues make big strides in a short amount of time. While no one enjoys the uncertainty of what the new school year will look like, she is confident that Macon County Schools will be ready.
“We’ll do what we’ve been doing since March – adapt so that we can keep on doing what we’re passionate about,” Shields said.
The first day of school is currently set for Monday, August 17.