I haven’t posted here in a long, long time. Obviously.
Mostly, I have been living my life, my real life. I’ve not been engaging in social media in particular, but that extends to most things online and device-driven.
I’ve also been teaching. I started teaching second grade in August, 2019. When the pandemic hit, we went to distance learning. To keep students engaged, I held twice-daily check-in sessions. These were at 8am and at 1:30pm, so as to mimic the “regular” school day and provide routine and stability for my students (and their families).
I also quickly realized that keeping kids engaged — and not letting them slip into a de facto early Summer Break — would require some extra work. So i came up with a game, “What the Heck is That, Mr. K?”
I bought a simple digital microscope and snapped images through it of everyday things — fruits and vegetables, desks and pencils, salt, my beard, my phone case… you name it.
During our online sessions, I would have these images ready to go, and then share them with the students when they needed a break or when we were transitioning between subjects or modalities. The microscope cost me about $30, I think, and it took about 5 minutes, each, to shoot, label, and prepare images. The results were priceless. As a “brain break,” it felt like a good leveraging of technology in a distance setting, yet very much like something I might have done in class as well. It kept students guessing and thinking and engaged.
Distance Learning, all of a sudden and in the early stage of the pandemic, was far from ideal despite the best efforts of the district, admin, and teachers. There were students who were not well-served by circumstances or family dynamics in that version of distance learning, and there were a myriad of issues that cropped up, large and small, unforseen and predictable.
One of my personal goals during distance learning was to make sure the students still felt connected as a class, to make sure they knew they were not going through this upsetting time alone or isolated, to bond them to one another as closely as possible outside the classroom, and to have them be able to come back together at some future date with shared, common experiences, stories, and memories.
Sometimes, a small thing helps make a big thing happen. I am very pleased with the results of my experiment with “What the Heck is That, Mr. K?”. In the big scheme of things, it was really just a drop in the bucket. But that drop rippled through the lives of most of my students in a very positive way.