Simple, but Cool Afternoon with Kids

A little background. Our school is an online high school with a single day face-to-face component. Our interaction with these kids is limited for a number of reasons. They only come on campus once a week and its usually not to see their online teachers (me). Many of the phone numbers they provide us are disconnected and/or they just don't answer. The main form of communication is email, and whenever I send out an email asking for all students to reply back (usually at beginning of semester to set up my Outlook) I get only about a 20% response. The kids at our school aren't the tech savvy teenagers that are rumored to be about and email is often ignored even though that is how we "talk" with kids. On top of all those factors, I'm working from home and taking care of my son right now so even more limited on communication. That's what made the other day so cool.

I received a new student at the 2nd semester and she was turning in her first short essay paper too me. She uploaded a .wps file which our computers won't open so we ask all docs be converted to .rtf. I have a form email that I send out for this very occasion. A day later I received a frantic email from her saying that she tried and tried to convert the document but just didn't understand what my email was saying. I asked her for her phone number so we could walk through it. A few hours later, I was using Skypeout and showing her this process. While we are on the topic I taught her how to make folders for each of her online courses so she could organize her work. Then the little light bulb that is Google Docs went off and made a deal with her to get her Google Doc account up and running (I couldn't do it at that moment because we were 20 minutes into the call and baby was screaming).

A few minutes after I got off the phone with her and the baby had calmed down, I received an instant message from another student. She needed some assistance with a class assignment so we walked through that via chat. An hour later I received another message from my Facebook account that a former student wanted some tutoring for her high school writing exit exam. We made temporary plans to set that up soon. While I was on Facebook another student chimed in with some concerns about a grade he had received at the semester, it wasn't in my class, but as his mentor teacher I promised to talk with his English teacher on his behalf.

Could all of this have happened at a traditional school in such a short period of time? Of course. Could all of this have happened at my virtual school a year ago, no way. The use of these social tools has changed the way I collaborate and interact with my kids. Now just hoping others at the school will see the benefit.

Failure Rates

I just received an email from our outstanding office manager with a list of students who had been withdrawn from school for truancy (etc.) There was a list of about 20 kids which is only a small fraction of the 650 or so left here. Each of the kids were listed with a withdrawal code next to their names. This comment was at the top of the email:

"I'm sending a list of students that have been W/D this past month. Please look over the list to see if any of them are on your class list..... It should be good news for your failure rate."

I was immediately struck by the last line which was emboldened in the original email too. Why should teachers care about their failure rate more than the fact that these kids are losing an opportunity at life? Why are we reducing human life to numbers like wd codes and failure rates? Our school is usually a last chance stop for at-promise students and when they are withdrawn for truancy, they don't make it back to HS. They are done.

Now, its not our office manager's fault for the language she used (although I did send her a biting response). She only reflects the language of the instructors here. If we are more concerned that our student failure rate is low rather than a student's humanity then something is really wrong.

Accessibility in Online Classes

There are some fundamental accessibility problems at our online school. High School students, and students of all ages for that matter, have trouble navigating online courses. So, if we know that, why don't we make it easier for them? Are we trying to trick them? Are we trying to exude power by playing guessing games? It's simple, they will learn more of the actual content if we take the time to include some fundamental basics when constructing our courses. Below are 5 tips for making your online coursework more accessible.

1. Lesson Introductions - Most of our online teachers do not include this basic part to a good lesson plan. The introduction, or what I call the hook, has to somehow connect what kids are about to learn to what they already know. Building your lesson to connect to their background knowledge is the first rung on a ladder to creating schema organization in long term memory. It also gives the lesson relevancy and motivates students by tying into what they already know or like.

2. Be Brief but Organized - We have all been to a website where you scroll down further and further, seemingly never coming to an end of the webpage. If you do that in an online lesson the kids are gone, done before they ever begin. Lessons have to be constructed in small, organized parts without including pages worth of material on one webpage.

3. Requirements - Tell the students what you want them to do. For example, if you are sending the student to a link outside of your webpage then tell them what to do once they get there. Be specific, tell them exactly what to read and sometimes what to ignore. Also, when the student is completing a project or written assignment, you should include the exact requirements of what they need to understand for that assessment.

4. Student Samples- Try to provide student samples. We do this in a regular class, why wouldn't we do it online? All of my courses utilize a wiki that my students have created and host to show off quality work.

5. Don't hide things from our kids- If you want HS kids to find what you want them to learn, put it right in front of them. Don't make them go to one page to find a password or another to find what you are going to assess them on. Don't get me wrong, it's okay to have links that shoot the kids off to content, but don't make accessing the content a labyrinth they have to navigate. Its difficult enough for kids to just complete the assignments in an online course, don't try to teach them how to be successful scavenger hunters to do that.

Many of us believe the way we have set up our courses is spot on. Are we paying attention to the signs that student's are giving us that tell us they aren't?

Does Communication Equate to Attendance?

We have a very high at-promise population at my charter school. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that 90% of our kids are at serious risk for not completing HS. This is the time of the year when it really starts to get scary. It seems that the initial burst out of the gate wears off right around week 5 (we are in week 7 now) and student's start missing class. Early on attendance is up but then they hit a wall. They just stop showing up. So far this year that hasn't been true in my courses, but its still true in other classes on campus. It got me thinking. If I'm getting 80-100% attendance everyday but many teachers are only getting 40-80% attendance everyday, is there a relationship somehow. I've made some formal and casual observations through substituting and observing classes throughout the day and I see this pattern a lot. A theory has started to form..... The teachers that spend a lot of time tracking students academic achievement, which includes knowing almost every detail of their coursework, monitoring grades bi-weekly, and calling home on a regular basis, seem to have better attendance. The kids whose teachers are much more blase about tracking progress and calling home have lower attendance numbers. Well, thats my hypothesis anyway. I wonder if it could be true.

It would be really interesting to break down attendance numbers by teacher and compare that to the amount of time each teacher spends monitoring students to see if my hypothesis could become a theory (shout out to my 7th grade science teacher for teaching me the difference). Too bad I can't do that. Its pretty invasive and calls for a lot of formal judgment on my part and probably wouldn't lead to any change at our school anyway. So for now, I will just continue to watch most students fall through the cracks but hope that the work a few great teachers at my school are doing can save enough. Oh yeah, one of my goals for this year is to stay positive so I'm writing this entry with a smile on face to counter balance the negativity in the last paragraph.