Alamance-Burlington schools see limits, potential in remote schooling

After six years teaching, Fowler has ways to keep kids’ interest. Her students didn’t know what a triceratops looked like, so she carried her laptop to the other side of her empty classroom and pointed its camera at a 1-foot-high animatronic triceratops skeleton with eyes that light up when it growls. Then she read them a book about dinosaurs running amok in an elementary school, holding the pictures up to the camera, while watching two laptops each with six or seven young faces on a “Hollywood Squares” Zoom meeting screen to see whether they were paying attention and asking questions to keep them focused.

“I know it’s a long time for them to sit and do things,” Fowler said, “to sit and pay attention.”

“I can’t help them in the way they need help,” Fowler said. “If I could reach through the computer it would be so much easier.”

 

— Rachael Fowler, first-grade teacher at Highland Elementary School

Fowler said she kept giving them short breaks, and was relieved to see them mostly come back on time. A parent sent her a message during the lunch break thanking her for being flexible that way.

She thought about a quarter of her students did not have parents there to help. Many were at childcare centers while their parents worked, so they were supervised, but still had to be more independent than first-graders usually are. She still has kids looking to her when they can’t find pencils.

“I can’t help them in the way they need help,” Fowler said. “If I could reach through the computer it would be so much easier.”

The state’s technical issues didn’t really affect Fowler’s class because elementary schools use a different system than middle and high schools, but there were other issues, like two students who didn’t yet have district emails set up so they couldn’t log on. Of her 18 students, 13 were logged on, which she thought was pretty good attendance.

Her students had Chromebooks in the spring — the cheap laptops found in nearly every public school — so there isn’t much of a learning curve there, but some still have trouble working with Zoom and Google Classroom, and it’s hard to help them figure it out remotely.

Typically, early grades switch from whole-class to small groups. That means switching from Zoom to Google Classroom for one-on-one work with students, which Fowler said was tricky. Not all the students managed it. She thought tweaks to the schedule could help with that.

“Patience — that’s the word we learned today,” Fowler said. “Especially them.”

Standardized testing is also supposed to start soon, Fowler said, and she was not sure what that would be like. She suspects starting young children out this way could affect those test scores for years.

“Every grade is going to be affected by it,” Fowler said.

‘Good progress’

High school, of course, is different. Most educators expect middle and high school students to get more out of remote teaching than elementary school kids.

Problems with NCEdCloud slowed things down for the first three hours of the day, according to Angela Bost, deputy superintendent for student learning, but she was pleased with how the district coped with it.

“I think it was a little bit of a challenge early on, but we were able to get a pretty substantial percentage of our kids on,” Graham High School Principal Harold “Bear” Bryant said. “I think we made good progress today.”

Biology teacher J’Lisa Miles stood between her Smartboard and whiteboard guiding nine students through first-day basics like the syllabus and starting lessons on DNA, lipids and carbohydrates. Focus was a problem for her students too, though.

“It’s only one hour — you can do it,” Miles told them.

More than one of them said they were worried about keeping up with the class, though they seemed more afraid of biology than working from home. That they liked. Miles encouraged some basic things like taking notes during class and working with each other, and even with students in other biology classes, but she said to make sure not to cross the line into cheating.

“Even though you’re not in the school, there’s help,” she said.

Bryant said it was important to get students to feel like a team since they wouldn’t have the chance to get to know each other in person at least for a while.

“Sometimes it’s hard for kids to buy in when they’re not here,” Bryant said.

This article originally appeared on Times-News: Alamance-Burlington schools see limits, potential in remote schooling