Well, we’ve started. Today we only had half the classes in the rotation meet. Tomorrow we will have the second half. It’s all about getting adjusted to the new way of school. I started with my advisory period (home room to many people).
All of my students showed up. Some of them were actually awake. It was nice to chat with some of the early arrivals. They’re adjusting and seem ready to give it a go. We’re trying to keep things as normal as possible so we started the day with a prayer and the pledge of allegiance as we do in a normal day. Note: Catholic school so pray is an important part of our day.
One plus of having advisory this morning was that it gave all of the students a chance to try out Google Meeting in a way that is less stressful than a regular class. Students are fairly used to video chats as they use Facetime, Skype, and other video tools for their own communication. Some of the teachers seem a bit less comfortable. I’m now almost glad I had all those conference calls and video calls while I was working in industry.
Mixed results with the first real class. On the plus side, everyone showed up. Almost everyone was able to connect to the virtual machines at school. The person who had trouble was using Chrome and a Mac. I need to look into that. We had some issues with some files not being available where we expected them to be which is not uncommon when some files are on a local drive and some are in the cloud somewhere. The good news is that this class doesn’t meet again until Thursday so I have some time to work out the kinks.
The students were all awesome though. Not afraid to try things and not upset when things didn’t work perfectly the first time. Hopefully that positive outlook holds up.
Tomorrow’s classes will be very different. Mostly upperclassmen while today was freshmen. That may be easier in some ways. May be harder in other ways. In any case, the adventure continues.
No comments:
Post a Comment