Snow Days Turn Into E-Learning Days for Some Schools

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Morones, A. (2014). Snow Days Turn Into E-Learning Days for Some Schools. Education Week, 33(20), 6.

 This article explores the ways a few districts utilize technology when a snow day keeps students out of school.  Due to an overwhelming amount of snow days in recent years, some school districts have started requiring students to participate in a day of e-learning during a snow day.  In Ohio, over 95 school districts have implemented these e-learning days.  Teachers post lessons and assignments online and students must complete them in two weeks.  The two week timeline is due to some students not having access to a computer or internet at home.  Teachers will also try to include hard copies for those students to take home later. The lessons are supposed to be created so that students would not need help from parents and could do the work independently.
In Grandville High School in Michigan, teachers will take videos of themselves teaching the lessons and post them online for students during snow days.  Students could even watch the videos from their phones.  Everyone is connected on Moodle, but not having internet at home is still an issue for some.
For me, I could see using online lessons for my students in tech.  We are not 1 to 1 right now, but every student has a google account, so as long as they had access to a computer at home they would be able to get on google classroom to see assignments or videos.  For art I can see a day of e-learning to be limited.  Students would most likely not have the right supplies at home to match what we were working on in class.  I would have to create some sort of supplementary assignment.  I have created videos of my demonstrations before.  I use them for projects that have a lot of steps.  For example, my fourth graders were doing a one-point perspective drawing that was complicated so I recorded the steps and uploaded the video for them to watch.  They could watch at their own pace, pausing the video to do a step and playing again when they were ready.  It was great! I didn’t have to repeat myself again and again.  One downside is that making those videos, editing them, and posting them are very time consuming.  I wish I could do more of them but they really take up a lot of my time.  Hopefully in the future I will have amassed a decent amount of them that I can use often. They would be great to use for snow days if students have the supplies.

Overall I would be interested in trying e-learning snow days.  I would like to see if students follow through with the assignments and actually learn something when the temptation of being lazy or playing in the snow is all around them.   


Comments

  1. Nancy February 14, 2018 at 5:15 PM

    Check your post formatting... the same thing happened to me a few posts ago.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Melissa ArnoldFebruary 14, 2018 at 5:29 PM

      Is there a way to fix it without having to retype the whole thing?

      Delete
  2. Dan CarrFebruary 21, 2018 at 8:20 PM

    I love your use of videos for the demonstrations. I think that's a great supplementary resource for students. Art's probably one of the toughest to do as e-learning.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownMarch 2, 2018 at 5:15 PM

    I read this same article and was struck by the take home activities they had for snow days. They would be awesome for lower grade levels. We always lose power during snow storms, so connecting to my classes would be nearly impossible, unless I use my phone's hotspot.

    ReplyDelete

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