The spread of the H1N1 virus reminded me of our running a virtual school in Hong Kong during the outbreak of SARS in 2003 when all the schools were closed. Our elementary team of teachers came together to create a program focusing on what we called the “3 C’s of Communication, Community and Content (Interactive & Collaborative)”. We quickly realized that continuing the learning became secondary to the creation of a network that provided our students and their families the social and emotional connections that they so needed during their very isolated days.

I wrote an article entitled “Surviving Crisis Mode” in Learning & Leading with Technology that documented our many weeks of virtual school while outlining the follow up efforts to prepare for the future possibility of school closure. It hopefully can provide some insights to readers thinking about creating and implementing a virtual school plan.

One important positive from the experience was that our school leaders, teachers and parents were much more open to the shift in instructional an assessment practices that our small team of early adopters had previously been pushing for.

For other ideas on how to prepare for the possibility of school closure, check out Britt Watwood and Stephanie Sandifer’s recent posts.

Image Source ISTE

1) How does your school currently document and later archive your curriculum?

2) How do you organize your units as in timeline, size, importance, etc.?

3) If you have an online curriculum mapping tool, what are its strengths and weaknesses? What barriers are there to using it?

4) If you don’t have a mapping tool, what are the barriers for your school in either purchasing or creating one?

5) How does or doesn’t this tool connect to what is happening in the classrooms?

6) How does it connect to your online course management tool?

7) What does the template for all of your units look like?

How is your unit planning template functional in guiding input to then lead to output/action?

9) How does it support your school’s teaching and learning beliefs (i.e., mission statement, strategic plan)?

What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

A well-designed school portal/virtual learning environment using wikis, blogs, shared calendars, vodcasts, etc. leads to two-way communication especially in the very busy lives of parents who sometimes have trouble making it to campus. Just think of the little league baseball coach or scout leader wanting to share information about his/her team. Give him/her a Web page in the school portal, a blog, an image gallery, etc. and you will have a parent feeling connected to the school while modeling how to make connections for other activity leaders.

With our telecollaborative efforts to extend the learning beyond the school walls, we shouldn’t forget that many of our parents are subject-matter experts. E-mail, Skype and/or simple telephone calls to interview and gather information really brings parents into our learning circles. Students producing news shows can record interviews over Skype for upcoming telecasts. Parents can watch or listen to media files of teachers sharing online some of their recent lessons. And how about using Ustream for live webcasts sharing panel discussions, parent education presentations, etc. The videos can then be posted on the school Web site for parents not able to attend in person or via cyberspace.

Looking at supporting 21st century learning initiatives, it makes sense to engage parents in discussions from both the parental and employer viewpoints. If we want to shift our schools, get the corporate parents in to discuss the skills they want from their employees. This real world information can only support efforts to change how we teach. From there, get parents involved in big picture curriculum discussions. Use the school portal to educate and also to engage parents in discussing what our learning environments and instructional strategies should be to develop creative, collaborative and adaptable thinkers.

I taught a fifth grade class that past week. I was in school today reading their journals (as opposed to carrying home 20 notebooks) and typing up responses to be printed and placed in the notebooks (my handwriting is not readable). My responses were questions and prompts to lead the students to rethink and revise their writing. I will give them time on Monday to react and write in their notebooks.

The barrier to this dialog continuing and being differentiated (some students will need much more of my attention) is the back and forth traveling of the notebooks. I think about those days when I would have some unexpected time to look at the journals of a couple students but am at home and their notebooks are at school.

We know that wikis, blogs, Moodle, Google Docs, etc. offers the virtual 24/7 environment for digital journals (not blogging as these journals are just between the student & the teacher) to provide the efficient way for students and teachers to connect with their writing. And what about really having a dialog via my posting of voice files into the students’ digital journals? One way I am prompting a few students to develop their writing is to have them mind map out the characters of the books they wrote about. It would have been nice to model this in Bubbl or Mindmeister depending on where we had set up a class account to then just put a link in the student’s online journal.

Students could also do their peer commenting online while parents have constant access to participate in their child’s writing or other school work. The main barrier is access to the computers at school as all the students can connect at home. I look forward to the day when my sons will carry a small laptop with them as opposed to the notebooks and books they use now.