Ed Tech

At Canyon Creek Elementary school in Farmington, Utah, Rachel Steenblik has been working with K-6 students for the past two years. Like most schools, the shift to remote learning at Canyon Creek was quick. But as an elementary special education teacher at a Microsoft Showcase School, Steenblik had access to tools, from Immersive Reader to Flipgrid, that she believes helped support all her students — regardless of need for accommodations.

That’s crucial to Steenblik, as she is focused on opportunities that give every student a chance to engage with learning material equally.

“If kids have access to the curriculum, they can show their full potential, which enables them to become full learners,” Steenblik said.

With the COVID-19 pandemic showing few signs of ebbing, millions of students are facing another semester of at least part of their school week online.

Educators, then, are keen on how lessons can be inclusive for all students, accessible from any point of entry. And there are steps they can take and questions that can be asked before adopting material to use in the classroom, even remotely, to help all students reach learning goals set for the coming year.

Presentation and design matter

For Steenblik, the work starts with adopting tools all students can use equally and don’t project accessibility or accommodation. Adopting technologies that appear to be designed for certain children is likely to turn some of her students away from using them, she said.

“My kids would rather go without the tools than stand out,” she said. “So if I teach them these tools, and they’re the only ones using them, they stick out like a sore thumb. They don’t want to be different. So my thing is let’s use these with all students — and the teacher should be using them and implementing them in the classroom, too — so not just kids who need them use them, but everyone. Because it makes tasks easier for all of them.”

Katherine McAlvage, assistant director of course development and training at Oregon State University’s Ecampus in Corvallis, Oregon, suggests educators actually start by thinking of how students will need to access material they’re using before they send it out. As part of a four-person team with the ECampus, McAlvage is not only helping educators at the university adapt to remote teaching, she is also in close contact with local school districts in the area to support their efforts as well, she said.

She encourages educators to design lessons around keyboards rather than a mouse, for example, to be cognizant of students who have physical accessibility needs. Another tip — one of five suggestions from a quick reference guide the university hosts online — is to use heading styles when writing out lessons, as screen readers will delineate headers such as a new chapter title or topic aloud.

Advocate for representation in materials

Mary Rice wants to assure educators that transforming an entire year of lesson plans overnight is a bit unrealistic. Instead, the assistant professor of literacy at the University of New Mexico believes educators and curriculum instructors should make this journey one step at a time.

She encourages educators to start by examining new material they want to adopt every year through four distinct lenses, including making sure they’re meeting legal standards, which technology can help to address. But teachers should also consider whether the content they’re adopting is engaging enough that students will want to interact. Third, they should read through to see if online programs are transparent about the data being collected on users, and, finally, check that the material itself is inclusive in terms of its content.

“I’ve been through thousands of pieces of online learning material,” Rice said. “A lot is of girls watching boys do science. No one is overweight, ever. Or they never depict someone with a learning disability. It’s terrible. Young people wouldn’t want to engage with that, because they’re not represented, or represented well.”

Provide students with choices

One way to give students more pathways into lessons is to actually create multiple options that all lead to the same learning goal, said McAlvage. That process also gives students more choices to demonstrate their own learning by allowing them to pick from options that perhaps engage them more, or options that feel more accessible to them.

“Really look closely at the instructional content itself and the assignments,” McAlvage said. Giving students choice, she said, improves not only accessibility but also students' motivation and commitment to learning. "One challenge we see in remote environment is self-regulation," she added, saying students may not want to sit for hours doing worksheets or watching videos. "Maybe they could choose to watch a video or read an article or a story, and have options on how to complete that assignment. You’re creating choice.”

In one way, McAlvage believes remote learning may actually end up benefiting select students, particularly if educators create multiple choices and avenues, with some that dovetail to the particular learning style that allows individual pupils to excel.

She notes, for example, that when students are in a classroom, there can be a timing issue. A teacher will give a lesson often at the start of class, and then students break apart into small groups or work on their own to complete that assignment. But some students may need more time to process the original information and may want to hear that lesson two or three times more to process it before they can move forward.

Online, today, that’s easily possible through a video that be watched multiple times, or a written lesson that can be read or read aloud more than once. And these are options educators can provide without ripping apart their curriculum or even changing what they want students to learn overall.

“We’re not saying throw out learning goals and objectives,” McAlvage said, adding that the goal is still to tie together teachers' objectives with the materials. “But there are lots of different ways to get students to that ultimate goal objective, and giving them multiple ways to get there is going to support their learning.”

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The Austin Independent School District in Texas spent three years on a 1:1 initiative to get tech devices into the hands of every student in grades 8-12.

But on March 13, when the coronavirus pandemic forced its schools to shift from in-person classes to remote learning, it soon became apparent that wasn’t going to be enough.

“We didn’t know then what we know now. But we, I think rightly, saw this was going to be a longer-term problem rather than a shorter-term problem,” said Kevin Schwartz, the district’s technology officer for learning and systems.

Using district funds set aside for crises, Schwartz’s team quickly purchased 24,000 iPads and 6,000 Chromebooks, and also handed out 15,000 Chromebooks that were already in school buildings. Now, as the district prepares to continue remote schooling, all students — even preschoolers — will be equipped with a device.

One-to-one programs like Austin ISD’s — named for their aim to provide one device per student — have been growing in popularity in recent years, with advocates touting the strategy as a way to boost blended learning opportunities and help bridge the digital divide.

Since March, the trend “has been put on steroids,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN. And now, districts are grappling with a whole host of challenges — from supply shortages to cybersecurity concerns — that may impact them for years to come.

The impacts of rushing

In a CoSN survey conducted from November to January, 49% of the more than 500 responding school districts reported having 1:1 programs, according to the organization’s 2020 report on education technology.

These programs were most common at the middle- and high-school levels, with 69% and 66% of schools reporting each student had either a district-issued or personal device, respectively. And 43% of elementary schools had implemented 1:1, with an additional 30% establishing a goal to do so.

Schwartz said 1:1 has improved participation rates in online learning in Austin, and also improved families’ access to social-emotional supports, important news and information. But generally, these programs take time to implement properly.

“There’s a certain set of things that you really have to do” — things like teacher and student training and planning for sustainability, said Schwartz, who has led three districts through 1:1 implementation. “We used to allow about a year and a half to do those things in advance of ever getting a device in a kid’s hands.”

Now, districts don’t have that luxury.

Doug Levin, president of the consulting firm EdTech Strategies, said school districts are doing the best they can under uncertain circumstances. Districts are largely using rainy day funds or money from their states and the federal government for COVID-related K-12 relief efforts. But “where they’re able to cut corners, they cut corners,” he said.

Some are opting for free online tools without the best track records or purchasing refurbished devices with substandard specs.

“These would be devices that they wouldn’t be purchasing now unless they couldn’t get their hands on anything else," Levin said. "Those are more likely to break down, they’re more likely to experience trouble in an online learning environment so they might, for instance, have not enough memory."

The rush toward mobility has also brought up cybersecurity concerns. Levin has seen an uptick in denial of service attacks, in which a school system’s programs get flooded with malicious traffic, as well as Zoom bombing, where online trolls have joined virtual classes or school board meetings with the sole purpose of disrupting them.

“[Cybersecurity] has largely not been a priority, and so therefore, staff aren’t used to taking the extra steps — and it is extra steps — to protect their computers and protect access to systems,” Levin said. “Since the priority has been just getting access to tools and not sort of protecting them, that’s what we’ve gotten.”

Supply shortages

Some districts are finding it difficult to get devices at all.

Amid rampant shortages, the 94,000-student Denver Public Schools and others have also been impacted by a Chinese human rights scandal and had their devices seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

DPS spokeswoman Winna MacLaren said the district ordered 12,500 Lenovo devices that had been manufactured by one of 11 Chinese companies sanctioned in late July for being complicit in the forced labor and abuse of Muslim minority groups.

MacLaren said in an email the district will not do business with companies that “knowingly violate human rights or support forced labor.”

Yet the repercussions have dealt the district a huge blow.

“We anticipate thousands of DPS students, including a large portion of our youngest students, will be forced to start the school year remotely, without access to technology, if we are unable to secure devices. This will put our most vulnerable further behind,” she said.

Meanwhile, the district — which began a 1:1 program with a $10 million bond initiative in 2016 — is scouring schools, offices and warehouses for extra devices and asking alumni and other former students to mail in those they no longer need. Staff are also providing guidance for families who plan to purchase personal devices.

Bigger problems

For many school districts, the biggest challenge to 1:1 implementation is internet access.

Six percent of children ages 3 to 18 in 2018 had no internet access at home, and another 6% had it only through a smartphone, according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics. 

In Prince George’s County Public Schools in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., more than half of students are from low-income households and have limited access to resources, including broadband, said Gabrielle Brown, a district spokeswoman. 

“The pandemic has only exacerbated this issue for those families,” she said in an email. “Therefore, connecting with students and ensuring they have internet access has been a challenge.”

PGCPS had no formal 1:1 initiative in place before the pandemic, and very few students actually took school-provided devices home, Brown said.

The district allocated $2 million from its budget in April, received grants and donations from the business community, and partnered with Comcast and Verizon to provide internet connectivity for families in need, as well as an expected 130,000 devices for students.

Krueger said districts are making “Herculean efforts” toward 1:1 for the upcoming school year, yet devices are only one piece of the puzzle.

“The connectivity is the hardest thing to solve,” he said, because it often comes with monthly payments for families and pricey short-term solutions schools are using to help mitigate the issue in the current crisis, rather than the one-time cost of a Chromebook.

CoSN has advocated for Congress to invest more money in the issue and help create a more equitable environment for kids to learn — especially now. A CoSN survey in May showed 87% of respondents were concerned about off-campus internet connectivity as an “urgent problem that must be solved."

There’s no going back, Krueger said; computers have become the new textbook, as far as what people will expect from schools, and there will always be natural disasters, snow days or sickness that will keep kids from physically attending school.

“I think increasingly parents and the public and teachers and students ... will all expect that things will be delivered digitally and that there will be a device," he added, "and I hope that our country comes to realize the importance of robust internet.”

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While the annual National Principals Conference, hosted by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), wasn't able to take place as usual this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, its headline session still took place in a virtual environment. Topics ran the gamut from reopening schools and equity issues to budget woes and teacher attrition.  

During a Wednesday afternoon Zoom webinar hosted by Education Week Associate Editor Christina Samuels, experts gathered to discuss the state of American education. The panelists were:

• Melissa Provenzano, an Oklahoma state representative and a former teacher and administrator
• Kathryn Procope, head of school at Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science in Washington, D.C.
• Doug Williams, superintendent of Sunnyvale Independent School District in Texas
• Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers 

Equity in the spotlight

Samuels began by asking panelists how equity is being considered as schools are reopening and what it means for them in light of issues created by the coronavirus pandemic.

Procope, a 2020 NASSP Digital Principal of the Year, said there has to be a focus on alleviating what she refers to as "digital poverty," noting she has seen situations where parents had to sell a home device because they needed food. But access to a device is also now a requirement in a remote learning environment.

“If it’s difficult in an urban setting, I can’t even imagine what it looks like in a rural setting,” she said, adding if you can get broadband in a fast food restaurant, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be available throughout neighborhoods.

Provenzano said districts were relegated to sending home worksheets for the significant percentage of Oklahoma kids who didn’t have devices. Efforts to rectify that problem look different across the state, though urban areas have been more successful.

“In our rural areas, we don’t have the broadband access in our state yet,” Provenzano said. They’re working toward it, she added, “but we need it now."

Another equity divide is also forming between parents who can afford to stay home with their kids and those who can’t afford to leave them home alone for distance learning.

Distance learning equity, Williams said, has to go beyond just making sure students have devices and connectivity. “It’s incumbent on our lawmakers to make sure we have resources there to put devices in kids hands … but it also has to be about addressing individual students’ needs.”

Fall remains a concern

As conversation shifted to preparation for fall, Williams noted his 2,000-student district is offering three learning models: full virtual, in-person all-day, and a blended learning approach where students come in the morning and are home in the afternoon, or vice-versa.

These models were designed to keep class sizes small and provide social distancing. One principal told him, for example, his largest class size is 16 students.

The district sent a registration form to parents, and by the time the Aug. 19 deadline to decide on a model rolled around, some had changed their minds three times, indicating how much they’re struggling with these decisions.

Provenzano is seeing a mix of models across the multiple districts she represents. Tulsa Public Schools is going with distance learning the first nine weeks of the academic year, while a neighboring district is going fully in-person.

"It’s been fascinating because they all have different reopening plans," she said while adding the population when they’re not in school "cross-pollinates."

Procope said her D.C. charter school is making sure they have a contact point for children, as they’re reopening all-virtual and some students’ parents have to go back to work.

How did reopening become political? 

Provenzano credited a lack of decisive leadership and inconsistent messaging from local, state and federal levels of government for complicating matters. Conflicting guidelines on masks, social distancing and other safety measures, and the politicization thereof, have created confusion and polarization.

Williams added it’s a shame kids are being used as political pawns, and said Sunnyvale looked at data in its decision-making for the return to school instead.

Among measures in place: A mask policy that will be strictly enforced for in-person students. “We are looking at maybe some exceptions for our elementary kids,” he added, citing plexiglass shields as one tool being installed for those grades.

Procope said decision-making for her school came down to what’s safest for teachers and students. Even with plexiglass, masks, "NASA-level" disinfecting and other protocols, she noted some parents are still not ready for in-person return. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has autonomy in charter decisions, was also focused on what would keep everyone safe, she said, leading to the all-virtual decision.

A trying year for communities of color

Citing the pronounced impact of coronavirus on communities of color, Samuels asked panelists what they’ve seen in regard to parents of color being more averse to a return to school.

Provenano said Tulsa Public Schools did a parent survey that, while not broken down by demographics, found significant concern. “The level of risk is different from family to family,” she said.

Samuels noted how well students have adjusted to these changes in some ways. Her 2nd-grader, for example, quickly got used to wearing a mask despite the discomfort. “Kids will follow our lead if we give them a lead to follow,” she said.

Procope said her school community has really struggled, as 96% of students are from Black families, and many have lost grandparents and other relatives to coronavirus. Social-emotional learning will be key, she said, because students are going to need those supports.

On that note, Samuels transitioned the conversation to the educational impact of the summer's racial justice demonstrations, fueled by the police-involved deaths of Black Americans. 

Williams said his district reached out to the community and formed a diversity and inclusion team. Its first order of business? Identifying the needs of the community.

“In relation to this, you have to really peel it back and know this: Schools are about teaching kids, and I think we have a responsibility to teach kids and really work with kids on inclusivity…[and] on awareness,” he said.

With the curriculum regulated by a state board, he said there also needs to be some frank conversation on what’s being taught in social studies classes.

“I was a social studies major and I did not know about the Tulsa Massacre until a couple months ago,” Williams said. "That fact hammered home to me that we need to do some analysis about what’s being taught," he said, adding school leaders can't hide behind the difficulty of having these conversations. 

Procope said the Tulsa Massacre wasn’t taught when she was in school, either. Her parents had to teach her about it.

But it's not enough to teach students something in school if they're hearing something entirely different at home, she said. Parents and the community must also be included in "honest" and "brutal" conversations about antiracism, what educators are thinking, and what’s being told to children.

Provenzano added that up until two years ago, the Tulsa Massacre was still called a “riot,” further highlighting the need for these discussions.

Budget nightmares, educator attrition on the horizon

Williams said schools may not see the true impact of COVID-19 on budgets until the 2021-22 academic year. “There’s going to be an impact, and I think we’re going to see a dramatic cut in funding from the state,” he said.

Texas received $1.2 billion in federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds and distributed it to districts, Williams said, but it also cut the funding amounts district foundations were set to receive. He compared it to the idea of employers cutting $1,200 from salaries if they found out employees were receiving $1,200 in stimulus funds.

“We have to advocate” about the impact cuts will have on kids and education, he said, adding it's creating tough conversations in districts "we should not have to have" on cutting teaching units, increasing class sizes and more.

“This is about the children. Funding shouldn’t be political,” Procope said, suggesting educators take it to congressional leaders on Capitol Hill. 

The conversation shifted to virus-related teacher and principal attrition as Weingarten joined the webinar. She shared a story about a Florida teacher who began crying during testimony in a hearing to block a state order on in-person instruction. The teacher said they're resigning tomorrow because they take care of their mother and don’t want to put her in a situation where they may bring coronavirus home and kill her.

“That’s the kind of anguish I’m hearing,” Weingarten said. “Because it’s been so mishandled at the federal level in the United States, you have no good solutions anywhere. I think what you’re going to see … is far more people retiring, resigning, taking leaves at the very same time kids actually need experienced people who understand how to deal with a stressful situation.”

Getting substitute teachers will be difficult, and new teachers are dealing with three crises at the same time — recession, pandemic and civil unrest.

Provenzano added 17% of Oklahoma's teacher population is eligible to retire. Many previously decided to stay onboard three more years because of a teacher raise negotiated during demonstrations in 2018.

Williams highlighted attrition concerns as another area where advocacy is needed, stating what’s best for students is quality teachers and expressing concern for what this will look like if it isn’t addressed soon. While ground was gained in Texas on raises and other issues, he said, "if we're not very, very active coming out, we're going to lose the ground we had."

Article top image credit: Roger Riddell/Education Dive/K-12 Dive, data from Zoom screenshot

Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar knows one of the first things parents and educators may want to do when a student is cyberbullied is get them offline. Yet the first step, according to Seigfried-Spellar, an associate professor with Purdue University’s Department of Computer and Information Technology, should be to just acknowledge how hard it was for the student to report bullying in the first place.

“Kids are afraid of being victims of cyberbullying and also afraid of how parents and teachers will react,” Seigfried-Spellar said. “They’re afraid to have their tech taken away from them.”

A majority of adults can’t imagine not being online amid the coronavirus pandemic. In the U.S. alone, 53% of adults said the internet has been essential to their lives since COVID-19 hit, according to Pew Research Center data from April. Students are increasingly online, as well, not only engaging with their friends but also taking classes.

While social distancing may have lessened physical bullying that happened between classes, in hallways or after school, it likely hasn't done the same to cyberbullying. In fact, an April 2020 report published by L1ght, an AI-driven startup that helps detect and filter abusive and toxic content online, found hate speech between children and teens on social media and in chat forums increased 70% since students transitioned to distance learning.

In the coronavirus era, when every one of a student’s friends is probably online, along with many of their classes in the fall, it’s impractical to have children off devices. But there are steps educators and families can take to help students — both those doing the bullying and those who are the victims — navigate the digital world more safely and thoughtfully.

Turn cameras off 

Seigfried-Spellar noted while digital tools are likely crucial in an online learning environment, educators can make choices to tailor what they’re using to what they need. For example, while many educators have made use of videoconferencing tools, every feature doesn’t have to be employed, she said.

She points specifically to chat functions. Teachers may want or need to be visible for a demonstration or lesson, but students don’t always have to be on camera. That scenario could create a situation that lends itself to bullying, for example, if a student forgets their camera is on, does something embarrassing, and another classmate screenshots that moment and later shares it to embarrass the student among their peers.

“Teachers need to know how technology is being used, and maybe disable it to minimize bullying,” she said.

Encourage social connections online

On the flip side, being online can be extremely helpful for learners who feel incredibly isolated right now. In fact, online communities can be positive spaces for them, said Linda Charmaraman, senior research scientist and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab for the Wellesley Centers for Women in Massachusetts.

Charmaraman has done research on young people's use of social media and the internet. She’s seen them use online spaces as places of support, particularly for those who have had an illness, are navigating LGBTQ+ identities, or are dealing with experiences they find isolating, like the pandemic shutdowns and restrictions.

Over half of the middle-schoolers in one study reported giving and receiving social and emotional support online, especially about issues related to school, friends, relationships, family and worries, she said, adding, “The key is to teach healthy online behavior that leads to healthy communities.”

Charmaraman and her team have followed 770 middle-school students since the spring of 2019. She went back to a subsample of that group in June 2020 to see how they’ve fared since the outbreak of the coronavirus, wanting to compare their online usage and behavior to pre-COVID-19. Her team found that while students are using social media more frequently, they’re also using it constructively, putting things online with more positive intentions.

“Compared to fall 2019, students this spring were more likely to post with the intention to make others feel good, respond when online friends shared good and bad news, and raise awareness of a social issue they cared about,” she said.

Stephanie Fredrick, associate director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the University of Buffalo’s Graduate School of Education, also believes online spaces can help foster positive engagement among students, teachers and staff, and that's happen since the COVID-19 outbreak.

These can include teachers, administrators and school staff providing daily virtual check-ins with students, hosting events and problem-solving to figure out how to turn important school events, like prom and graduation, into an online environment, she said.

Create safe practices and digital citizenship

Still, Fredrick believes educators should stay abreast of the latest resources and information that focus on digital media and cyberbullying, so they know what to look for in terms of concerns, and even have prevention strategies place. That can include adding digital citizenship skills into the curriculum, which she added can help children learn how to be “safe and respectful online,” she said.

She’s particularly keen on tools offered by Common Sense Education, which offers a free K-12 digital citizenship curriculum broken down by grade that can be modified for an all-online environment. She also points to the Cyberbullying Research Center which provides free digital citizenship activities for educators, plus cyberbullying prevention tips and even intervention suggestions for teachers and staff.

Seigfried-Spellars said educators can help students by teaching them they have choices in every decision they make as they connect and communicate with each other, both in-person and online. Whether that’s thinking before they send a text or feeling empowered to take action if they see someone bullying, these skills can make a difference in helping them stand up against cyberbullies or prevent cyberbullying from happening.

“Building digital citizenship into schools can help kids learn how to use the internet, and how to be a good citizen,” she said. “They can learn you have an opportunity to do something in a positive way or a negative way, in every single thing you do.”

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Less than a month after schools across the country transitioned to online learning in the spring, the internet went wild with posts that students would have to repeat their current grade levels in the fall.

The idea wasn’t popular with parents — or educators — who were relieved to find the stories circulating social media were merely a set of bad April Fool’s jokes rather than a government-mandated strategy to get students caught up.

In reality, solutions to the so-called “COVID slide” will vary from district to district — and may be much more complicated.

What to expect

“It’s going to be really important to understand the gaps kids have, the unfinished learning that exists when kids come in,” said Jacob Bruno, vice president of professional learning at NWEA. The nonprofit organization recently released a report about COVID-19’s impact on student achievement.

Based on research of typical summer learning loss and data from the organization’s 2017-18 MAP Growth assessment, researchers projected students will return to school with about 70% of learning gains in reading and less than 50% in math compared to a typical school year.

There are other factors to consider as well, such as students’ social and emotional wellbeing.

“Because the learning loss for kids is going to be so varied — because the experiences of kids and families will be so varied during this time by sickness, by job loss, by social isolation — there are a number of things that certainly we need to take care of and attend to,” Bruno said.

Assess students early

The key will be to collect data early, the NWEA official said.

“Normally, you might wait a few weeks to kind of have some review with kids and knock off the cobwebs to attend to summer learning loss before you do kind of a fall baseline data collection via an interim assessment or what have you,” he said. “This is kind of like coming into the emergency room to some degree. As kids come into the classroom, like, ‘What do you know today?’”

California’s Cajon Valley Unified School District plans to use early assessment — in addition to the district’s 1:1 ratio for educational devices — as a key strategy for mitigating COVID-induced learning gaps. The data will be particularly helpful in meeting the needs of students who may not have had the same access to summer learning opportunities as their peers, said Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Karen Minshew. 

The district has purchased the i-Ready virtual diagnostic tool to assess where students are in English language arts and math as they start the school year online, and they will get online school work responsive to their results, regardless of grade level. The district will prioritize ELA and math as it did during spring remote learning while also integrating other subjects, such as history and science, through writing and reading comprehension. 

Ss had SO much fun stretching their growth mindsets and working as civil engineers today. We read one of my favorite stories, explored #RIASEC codes, and used our materials to buid our very own arches. @RanchoWallc @CajonValleyUSD @WorldOfWorkNet pic.twitter.com/PyaAiWN0nH

— Nicole Willis (@ms_nicolewillis) July 28, 2020

In El Paso Independent School District in Texas, students will also take a beginning-of-year assessment, as they do every fall. But the administration is taking a more active role in how that data will be used to inform instruction and support students. 

“We give [teachers] the tools, we give them resources, and there’s an expectation for it to happen, but we’re not driving that work,” said Tamekia Brown, the district’s chief academic officer. “Whereas, now we’re kind of the drivers of this whole effort to ensure we’re filling in gaps because it is a districtwide concern.”

The district is also planning to emphasize college readiness for older students. Instead of focusing on it only in workshops leading up to the PSAT in October, teachers will incorporate this preparation into the first 15 minutes of class, Brown said.

Based on student data collected in the spring, the district targeted certain students who were at risk of falling further behind and encouraged them to enroll in summer school. This led to a 30% increase in enrollment compared to a typical summer, Brown said. 

Meanwhile, El Paso’s curriculum and instruction team has been working this summer on incorporating the essential learning standards from last semester into the first quarter of lessons.

“We’ve had to be really intentional about auditing the curriculum … to say, ‘This is essential for first quarter, this is essential for second quarter,’ so that we’re not just saying, ‘Here’s the curriculum, and then I want you to do this on top of it,” Brown said.

These unique circumstances will force teachers to “weed the garden,” said Nancy Chartier, executive director of teaching and learning at the Green Bay Area School District in Wisconsin.

“Potentially there won’t be time this year to get to the [teacher’s favorite] dinosaur unit unless it’s closely tied to our essential learning and then our expected outcomes,” she said.

Standardize the online approach

Chartier said her district is offering professional learning for parents as one of its key strategies — and not just on the technological side of things. They’re also training parents in best practices for supporting their students. The superintendent is also conducting focus groups with parents to get their input as the district faces a hybrid remote/in-person start to the school year.

One thing they’ve heard “loud and clear” is that parents wanted a unified approach to online learning, and more of a “one-stop shop” rather than every student having to learn their teacher’s preferred learning management system, or LMS, Chartier said. The district purchased Seesaw for preschool through 5th grade, which used mainly paper packets in the spring, and will use Google Hangouts online sessions for students in grades 6-12.

“To me it’s kind of an equity issue,” said Suzanne Newell, director of academics for the Austin Independent School District in Texas, which has taken a similar approach to standardize its online learning platform districtwide. “The student who has the hardest time juggling multiple platforms is the student who has probably the biggest academic need and maybe the least parent support.”

Newell’s department has built six weeks’ worth of model classes with videos and other resources in the LMS for teachers to use this fall. This will also allow the district to provide a more uniform approach to both academic and social-emotional content, she said.

Expect varied experiences

Newell said Austin ISD is expecting a COVID slide. “Students have not been in classrooms with any sort of conventional instruction for several months, and so we know that they will be coming to us in need of accelerating learning in certain areas, and before we do that, we have to assess what they’re coming to us with.”

But she also wants to reframe the narrative.

“They have been doing things with their families, they’ve been doing things in their neighborhoods, they’ve been doing things to learn about science and pandemics and household functioning that they wouldn’t have had if we had been in our quote, unquote normal life,” Newell said.

But, she added, “I know we will have COVID slide and academic gaps that are in need of filling. I also don’t want us to discount the value that some of these other experiences might actually also bring to their lives.”

Article top image credit: valentinrussanov via Getty Images

Rachel Williams is not sure how her classroom will look this fall, but she knows one thing that will continue — her use of video.

She started filming short clips as students transitioned to learning from home as a way to help differentiate the way she teaches math to her 7th-graders at Plaza Park International Prep Academy in Evansville, Indiana.

Williams said the pandemic created “an explosion of learning” for her around technology. She began recording herself explaining daily assignments and topics, sending the clips to students who had questions and even embedding them into Google Slides. She shared the videos with other teachers, as well.

Even if school is able to resume in-person this fall, the videos will be coming back to the classroom with her.

“If a student needs help, there is only one of me,” she told Education Dive. “If a student can watch a video, I can still hold a small group for another set of students. So I can work with kids on different things.”

Online tools swiftly replaced in-person learning when schools closed across much of the U.S. due to the coronavirus pandemic in March. But while digital materials help educators reach students, they also opened the door to another avenue for differentiating lessons that many teachers had not expected.

Online sites and programs that could be tailored to each student's progress found their way into math classes and literacy programs. Educators say they’ll be using many of these this fall, too — whether schools are online-only, in-person or a hybrid of the two.

Video enables educators to differentiate math

While Williams loves making and using videos with her students, she also had a few other online tools she leaned on during remote instruction, including an Instagram page and a class website built through Weebly. But videos were a key way to keep tabs on her students’ progress.

The videos are short — none are longer than 10 minutes — and Williams often uses them to walk students through daily assignments, annotating math problems, for example, in a virtual parallel to how she may have introduced work on a chalkboard in front of a classroom.

She found the videos so effective, she’s planning to beef up her video-making skills this summer.

“I want to make videos so it’s not just the teacher who sits there and talks,” she said. “And I’m interested in green screens, how to change the backdrop to make it more engaging for students.”

As a math teacher at Lackawanna Trail High School in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, Claire Signorello also used online tools to differentiate the work she assigned to her students. Her favorites included online math platform Prodigy, as well as EDpuzzle, which not only allowed her to assigned individual work to students, but also let them set their own pace.

EDpuzzle does have a video component, allowing teachers to embed questions or their own voice-over into an existing video — one found on YouTube or even one they create — and check in on the answers from students. And Signorello found EDpuzzle very effective, a tool she turned to more often as the school year wound down.

“Kids can follow along ... and when a question pops up, they can rewind and watch it again,” she told Education Dive. “That’s a great form of differentiation.”

Audiobooks expand access as libraries close

As school sites closed, so too did access to all physical resources — particularly reading material. School and even public libraries were often not available to students, hindering access to books. That wasn’t necessarily the case with audiobooks, a format Julia Torres, a teacher librarian for five middle and high schools on the Montbello Campus with Denver Public Schools in Colorado, championed long before the impact of COVID-19.

Torres suggests audiobooks are not only a solid way to remotely mirror the traditional classroom read-aloud, they also have a significant role in the classroom and should be as present in school libraries as physical books. To her, audiobooks expand literacy and access for all learners, whether they’re sitting in a school building or their home.

“I’m just trying to meet my students where they are and build their confidence,” she told Education Dive. “We need to make the learning fit them.”

Kimberly Lopes, a 3rd grade teacher at Memorial Elementary School in Upton, Massachusetts, also looks for read-aloud opportunities for her students, wherever they’re learning. As her elementary students switched over to distance learning, Lopes began to lean on Epic, a digital book database with thousands of titles and leveled reading options. While Epic is free to use in classrooms, parents typically pay for a subscription to use the service at home for their children. That fee was waived during shutdowns, said Lopes.

Lopes particularly liked that students could choose to have the text read aloud to them, and that she could watch the progress they were making even with material they were self-selecting.

“Kids could choose their own [books], which would make it more engaging, and they could find books that were more accessible for them,” she said. “Having that choice would make them want to finish the assignment.”

Lopes knows building in choice leads to more excited learners, and the platform provided a wider variety of books than she could buy for her own classroom library, she said. She plans to continue using it when school starts up again.

These past several months have shown her how hard her students worked and the difficulties that they faced daily in their own lives. Giving students some control over their education, whether that’s a choice in what to read, or even a choice in how they engage with material, is something she will continue to offer — in whatever format she meets with her students this fall.

“I focused on building relationships, engaging with families and being flexible,” she said. “So if this wasn’t working for you, I said I will fix it. And I meant it.”

Article top image credit: Permission granted by Alabama Department of Early Childhood