When the School District of Philadelphia, where the vast majority of educators have never used Google Classroom, went live with remote learning the week of April 20, teachers were instructed to take it slow: “review and enrichment” only for now — no
When the School District of Philadelphia, where the vast majority of educators have never used Google Classroom, went live with remote learning the week of April 20, teachers were instructed to take it slow: “review and enrichment” only for now — no new material will be taught until early May.
In preparation for the debut of its distance learning program, the Metropolitan School District of Pike Township, a small district outside of Indianapolis, relied on more than tech coaches to help teachers with digital training: Librarians got into the mix, too.
And when Miami-Dade Public Schools joined the wave of coronavirus school closures sweeping the country coast to coast in mid-March, the nation’s fourth-largest school district rolled out a smorgasbord of online instructional offerings, including dozens of webinars and third-party ed-tech resources.
The three approaches highlight how professional development for educators is adjusting to meet the new reality of digital teaching during a pandemic, and how there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for districts facing the challenge of delivering remote learning on the fly.
Across the country, educators are being equipped with new tech tools — devices, apps, software, and online textbooks — in greater volume than ever before. So now the push to train teachers on how to effectively use that technology is in full swing.
The approaches are almost as varied as the districts themselves. Some have seemingly made training available to teachers for just about every video, podcasting or live streaming app available under the sun, letting educators pick from a wide menu of options based on their individual tech know-how. Other districts are minimizing their offerings for now to avoid tech overload.
PD ‘for the forseeable future’
At a time filled with uncertainty, and no shortage of individual district game plans for how to survive or even thrive in a total remote learning landscape, district academic officers and ed-tech leaders agree on this much: digital professional development has a long way to go.
“The need for this type of training is going to be ongoing for the foreseeable future,” said Jennifer Hall, an education-tech specialist for the Atlanta Public Schools, a district of about 55,000 students.
Nestled in her home office, behind a crowded workspace equipped with a PC and two full-sized computer monitors, an iPad, a Macbook, and a podcast mic, Hall is one of about 15 education-technology specialists with the Atlanta school district helping train teachers remotely to use different tech tools.
A typical day for Hall might involve one-on-one virtual help sessions with teachers, recording tutorials, writing tip sheets, or holding court about a new tech tool via a webinar broadcasting on public television.
Before the pandemic, all teachers in the district were already trained on Google Classroom in case of inclement-weather closures. Since teachers and students were familiar with how to log on and navigate a basic online platform, the district was “ahead of the game,” Hall said.
And that’s opened the door for much more creative uses of technology, even during the early stages of remote learning this spring.
Teachers are holding live classes with Nearpod, an online engagement tool, in conjunction with Google Meet. Math and foreign language teachers are using Flipgrid to let students record short video responses during online classes. Jamboard is another common collaboration tool helping substitute for a lack of face-to-face interaction. Meanwhile, art and theater teachers are asking Hall how to use image-and-design tools such as Adobe Spark and Google Drawings to facilitate class projects remotely.
Hall said teachers who have never used technology before are now seeing its benefits.
“It can be overwhelming. There’s not an expectation that teachers use all the tools,” she said. “The goal has been to provide as many resources as possible for our teachers.”
‘Deal with this new normal’
Long before the coronavirus forced schools into throwing together remote learning strategies, Miami-Dade district officials were steadily ramping up the use of technology over the past six years as part of a “Digital Convergence” initiative. It has included the acquisition of more than 200,000 new devices and continual professional development focused on e-learning. District officials say it allowed them to hit the ground running during the current crisis.
On the morning of March 16, when Miami launched its online curriculum following the sudden announcement three days earlier of district-wide school closures, teachers were able to view a fresh webinar guiding them through the newly hatched distance-learning curriculum. Staff spent a portion of that weekend at a district-owned television studio recording voice-overs so that new online instructional videos would be ready on day one.
“We were up with our phones in bed until 2 in the morning the night before because we were waiting for sound engineers to finish renderings, and for IT to upload the content to our YouTube channel, so we could hit send