One of the many wonderful things about my school is the willingness to share on the part of our teachers and administrators. In this case, our administrators literally wrote the book on virtual school orientation for our parents. Here is the schoolwide SSIS Virtual School Parent Guide and the guide for elementary school parents for your review.
Offering orientation to new students and parents is a common practice by schools. Going the extra step to provide information before face-to-face orientation meetings makes sense, especially in schools with many turnovers. This is the case for international schools.
International schools provide early-stage onboarding for new staff by digitally sharing resources about local culture, the school, FAQs, etc. Teachers with Instagram and Twitter accounts, where they post information about the learning in their classrooms and official school accounts, can be incredibly helpful in painting the picture for new students, their parents, and new teachers. It seems reasonable to do the same for new families.
I see bringing interested students and parents on board to help the portal design committee to develop the orientation section of the parent section of the portal.
Having new teachers photocopy a hand and send it to their email account? What sort of learning experience is this? This is just one of the scavenger hunt “to do’s” that our new teachers did this past Friday at Alexandria Country Day School (ACDS).
Elizabeth Lockwood and Liz Hendrickson are creative educators who created a scavenger hunt to orient new staff to ACDS. This effective strategy to improve the new teacher tour/orientation offers a very engaging and fun experience for schools to share with their new hires.
As our iPad Pilot is now rolling from the Fifth Grade to the remainder of our Middle School, Elizabeth and Liz came up with a way to have the new teachers use their iPads in a scavenger hunt using problem-solving skills while working collaboratively to produce a product much like we hope they will be doing with their students.
One driver in these tours is to help new staff learn of the people they need to seek out to meet specific needs (e.g., business office, tech support, etc.) and where to go to take care of everyday tasks like using the copier, getting ice for scraped knees, etc. Elizabeth and Liz met the new staff and divided them into two groups with iPads. They then emailed them the scavenger hunt list with an expectation for the final product: a video slideshow. Using apps on the iPads to create drawings, take photos, and compile them into a video would give the teachers some experience in how the iPads can be used in their classes.
Here are a few of the assigned tasks:
A second start-of-the-year strategy involves professional development. Our Information and Communications Literacies (ICL) team designed a workshop for our staff this week. With all of the Middle School teachers having spent a couple of days working in our Curriculum Collaboration Team meetings this summer, reviewing and developing units of study using the Understanding by Design (UbD) construct, we want to give all of our teachers time to share ideas and build on them as we focus on alternative assessments. A secondary goal is introducing our Curriculum Review system to the lower school teachers.
The plan is to review a presentation and workshop for the Middle School at the end of last year, where we introduced our systematic way to develop UbD-style units in meetings led by teachers collaboratively. We will share some unit plans developed over the summer, looking closely at Stage 2 of the UbD process involving assessment. The next step involves listing alternative assessments to the standard paper and pencil test. We plan to share “analog” assessment strategies based on what the teachers are already comfortable using. From debates to writing a newspaper article to drawing a picture, the teachers will receive a listing of multiple assessments that don’t engage with technology.
Teachers will be grouped with one lower school, one middle school, and one particular teacher. Each teacher will use the assessment listing, looking for ones that catch their eye as a possible replacement for current tests they might be using in their units of study. They will be tasked to write how they might use an alternative assessment in one of their units for the coming year.
The next step will be to have groups swap their assessment plans. Groups will then use Post-It notes to write their ideas on how alternative assessment ideas might be expanded upon or taken in different directions. The teams will stick their notes on each assessment write-up, sharing their ideas with their group. The ICL team will then collect all the assessment handouts to be photocopied and returned to their authors. The collaborative efforts will help guide our teachers to try some new assessment techniques and some of the ideas that their colleagues added with the Post It notes.
We will then use the assessment idea documents to meet with teachers individually to discuss further how the analog assessments could be improved by making them digital with Web 2.0 tools, video, screencasting, apps, etc., using the iPads.
In roughly a month, we plan to share some of the alternative assessment ideas that have been digitally enhanced. We will also present a chart like the Learning Activity Types produced by Judi Harris and Mark Hofer of William & Mary. Ours will have a left-side column listing the analog assessments and a right-side listing the digital versions. Our plan fits with the normal process of working with teachers in their comfort zone to help them see the connection in how technology, in so many ways, builds on what they are already doing and, in many cases, offers more choices for students and enhances their learning.
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We know that August will be different for international schools this year. Hopefully there will not be a need to start with virtual school. New students and their parents will be able to join their new school community and really make connections with students, teachers and other families. The new students and parents will probably have experience with virtual school whether they are simply transferring in the same city or have changed countries.