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.

Opposing Forces

My school made several commitments to dramatic change this year. Since we are a charter school, have missed AYP every year, and are on the verge of losing our sponsorship from the district, we had to make some HUGE changes. The two biggest changes seem to be opposing forces though and that is making the teachers lives very difficult right now.

The first major change is the new Learning Management System we use to host our online courses. It was never made clear why this system was brought in but it has proved to be the opposite of what we needed at this junction in our school. You might be thinking, "its so early in the year, how can you make that judgment right now." Well, there are two really good reasons. One, this system is not designed to communicate with high school students, and in an online school filled to the max with At-Risk students, communication is a major factor to success. Two, this system takes a lot more time to operate than our previous system and right now time is not one of our luxuries. This is where the second major change comes in.

We have shifted our focus as a school, hopefully as an entire school culture, to promoting the success of our lowest achieving students. We are supposed to be better mentors, better student advocates, better instructional designers (in order to motivate production of course work), and better communicators. As stated earlier, the nature of our new LMS demands WAY more time. So if the system forces us to take more time to grade, more time to input quality assignments, more time to communicate and more time to operate the basic system components than we are losing more time to call the students, losing more time to visit them when they are campus, losing more time to work one on one with both our online and mentor students, and losing more time to track their progress.

Opposing forces: How do we better mentor and communicate with our students, as demanded for the success of this student population, when so much more time is lost due to a system clearly not designed to fit our high school right now?