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Hi Maura,
This is an older post, so I hope that all is going well for you. I teach elementary in a rural county. What we did in spring 2020 is different from what we have been doing this school year.
Last spring when schools closed and they had to come up with a plan for something no one ever fathomed, my district subscribed to an online teaching website for the last three months of school. Teachers got online to monitor, but the lessons were all built in. For the students without internet access, they would come to pick-up site to receive paper copies of the lessons and food.
For the 20-21 school year, though, my county remained in person with one or two virtual classrooms per grade level. I'm the second grade virtual teacher. I started out with only virtual kids, but as parents decided that virtual was too hard and they wanted to come back to the building, I now have in-person kids, too. When a student from another second grade classroom goes into quarantine, they stream with me for two weeks.
Now, our county has the issue of families without internet access, too. They also worked with internet companies to get hotspots, but there are areas in my county that internet/wifi just will not connect; no matter your socioeconomic status. So, this year if a family wanted to be 'virtual' but did not have internet access, the school gave them a chromebook to borrow. All of my lessons are recorded on Zoom. So, at the end of the week, I would upload all of my lessons to a USB with paper instructions, and the family would pick up the USB the following Monday. These USB kids are always a week behind in lessons. They return any work with the old USB the following week when they pick up the next USB.
I think that this USB solution has been good for these families who want to stay home because of the virus but don't have internet to be live virtually. We do have issues with truancy and worry about these kids actually doing the work . . . As a teacher who stepped up to be virtual in this unprecidented year, it is difficult to balance all the extra things that have been thrown my way - virtual became virtual and in-person, while keeping track of USB kids who are a week behind everyone else, and add in quarantine kids coming with no computer skills at all.
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