Hoover City Schools in suburban Birmingham, AL, was already one-to-one when the pandemic struck in March. And while its transition to remote learning in the spring was relatively painless, teachers and students continue to adjust to the new realities of hybrid school days.
In this conversation with eSchool News, Bryan Phillips, CTO of Hoover City Schools, describes some of the positives he notices with this forced migration and divines which practices should probably remain once we get back to whatever normal is.
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eSN: What are some of the things your teachers are doing that they didn’t do before COVID, but you think they will continue to do when the pandemic finally goes away?
BP: A lot of teachers are running Google Meet every day, recording their lesson, and keeping it. So the kids that aren’t there, they can just send it to them. It’s a vlog—a video diary of what they do every day. Keeping those lesson plans, I think that’s a plus.
For a lot of the advanced courses, we don’t have a teacher for both physical and virtual. So she may have office hours on Tuesdays with the remote kids can ask questions, which I think will be a huge plus moving forward. Some kids may not feel comfortable walking up to a teacher or calling a teacher over their desk in class and asking a question. But if they can go back and send the teacher a message, “Hey, I need to talk to you.” They get them on Meet and work that out and learn whatever that concept is. That’s something you do in college. Well, kids are now learning it in seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th grade.
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