Rapid transition to distance learning

It's March 2020 and our school has been busy talking, thinking, discussing potential disruptions due to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) attention. It's all very interesting but there are a lot of unanswerable questions out there. For prudence, I've crafted a plan for our Junior School that outlines varying degrees of closure scenarios and how we can adapt using distance learning principles. It's quite lengthy, mostly because there are so many potential scenarios.

What if school closes temporarily while it is being disinfected? Will it be considered similar as a snow day, where classes are suspended and no teaching is expected?

What if half the student population and a quarter of the staff population turn up at school one day? Do you run hybrid virtual-physical classes where students connect virtually to physical classes, or schedule asynchronous plans?

What if it's a full closure? Are neighbourhood and infrastructures affected? What are the legal and Ministry requirements for teaching load?

One of the more important things I want teachers to keep in mind is that in the Junior School, any plan must address the importance of pastoral and community care for our students. Academics is only maybe half of the thought process. Checking in virtually with our Junior students gives them an opportunity to see routine, their teacher and friends in something outside their home.

For technology we are relying on tools that we currently use as much as possible. One of the recurring themes I'm hearing from international school and schools that have been experienced closures is that this is not the time to try new things. Also, it is difficult to maintain appropriate levels of work since we are all so inexperienced at running distance learning. Typically teachers will tend to overload students with work.

For us, we are relying on Seesaw for primary grades and Google Classroom as our main student communication and learning management systems. Email and our SIS will maintain communication links to parents and between faculty. The Junior School has not used virtual meeting software at all, but the ease and simplicity of Google Meets is an obvious choice. We also have a site license for Citrix Webex but I find it overly complication to just host a meeting. Mandatory passwords? Email signins? Ugh.

The Junior School plan is quite lengthy also because it includes tips on how to run a virtual meeting and connect users. These tips are as simple as how to mute participants, to showing the possibilities of screen sharing. I am hesitant to share it here right now because it's work in progress, and I don't know how much of it will turn into an "official" plan.

Custom docks on iMacs using profiles

So there's lots of ways to lock down iMacs so clueless (or malicious) young students don't mess up too many settings. I found the easiest way for me to manage is to just turn on the Guest User option which allows anyone to do a simple reboot to reset the machine to a pre-determined state.

I ensure the desktop wallpaper has a warning about saving local files to their school GDrive account and that restarting will delete everything. All iMacs are linked to my machine using Apple Remote Desktop which saves me a walk and multiple keystrokes by remotely rebooting or sending command line queries or commands. They are also binded by Meraki management profiles which allows another layer of control and observation.

I use the Dock Master website to create a custom dock profile which I then push out using Meraki. It works like a charm and a I can near-instantly update it by replacing the profile with a newer version and checkin-in all the iMacs. I also use custom profiles generated out of Apple profile manager for printers but I find Dock Master just so easy to use.

It's a bare minimum of dock items: Finder, Safari, iMovie, Pages, Keynote and some links to our SIS and school website. The Macs are so rarely used nowadays it doesn't really make sense maintaining a massive library of apps.

Primary STEM

In the last few weeks I've been doing some intensive STEM activities with our kindergarten classes. Intensive because it involved a lot of supervision and teacher involvement. We played with greenscreen wormholes:

where we used the greenscreen effect in iMovie to embed different images together.

After that, we used the greenscreen to transport students to the Arctic where they helped build igloos, swim with polar bears, and ice fished. The iPads made it quite easy since we could use the front camera and they could see themselves instantaneously, ala a weather forecaster on TV. For this activity we used the Doink Greenscreen app which is still the most feature-rich easy chromakey app I've used.

Another class we experimented with paper circuits. I gave segments of cooper tape out, a button battery and one LED and challenged them to make a circuit that lit the LED. Most were successful, though the finicky nature of the copper tape made for a lot of troubleshooting from teachers.

Today I decided I needed to step back a bit and let the kids do some of their own exploring. So I'm planning on just bringing down tubs of playdoh and toothpicks and let them loose with just a vague idea of "3D shapes." I might start with challenging them to make their initials and see where they take it!