For the 433rd time in my life, I'm grateful I have flexible seating. I threw out my desks some several years ago, and what my classroom has looked like since then has shifted, but it's been flex seating every since. And now I'm grateful for it. It's easier to put six feet of space between two chairs than two desks, and I have students coming back tomorrow. Only seventeen or so - maybe seven in one class, maybe nine or ten in another. It's just the ninth graders who wanted to. But the next week, I'll have the sophomores, too. And if we're still open after that, I'll have juniors and seniors who signed up to be here. And I have a bunch of those. So I'm looking at upwards of ten kids a class in person, plus no fewer than ten online in any given class. Welcome to hybrid life.
So here's my plan:
I have my various seats arranged six feet apart in a non-square shape. They're facing the door instead of the board, because I'm going to set up an easel with a white board there. I'll project the faces of the kids who are on Zoom onto my actual whiteboard, so that I can see everyone writ large all at once, and I have some hope of seeing the chat box for the kids who can't or won't use their microphone for any number of reasons. I've got a good quality webcam with a mike on it for my computer (my school, god love them, somehow got them in before kids came back), and you can hear me from across the room: we tested it.I'm teaching live.
I've covered up all my stuffed animals and costumes, and I'm okay wearing them for them, but I'm not sharing them with kids right now, which feels tragic to me - but it's a safety issue. Seating is less flexible this year: they have to stick to the seating chart so that the school can do contact tracing more effectively. I'm not taking up papers. If the kids write something on paper in class, I'll push out a google classroom assignment, ask them to take a picture, and have them attach it. I've asked each of them to own a white board and markers for use in class - in person and on Zoom. Twice a week they'll read - I've got an online library of texts, and all kids will use that. No books right now. We've been instructed to try to only teach for part of the period and then let the kids go to do independent work so they aren't in Zoom all the time. I'm doing my best with that instruction.
Flippity (thank you to Andrew Morehouse, who told me about this thing, it's the best thing i've ever seen, and it's saving my butt right now) is an amazing tool that essentially is a randomizer. You upload a google spreadsheet into its template, and it gives you whatever format you clicked on: board games, manipulatives, a "scavenger hunt," a trivia game, among other things. Today my Latin II students used it to build monsters. Tomorrow we'll do that again, but they'll pull out their white boards and illustrate them, and we'll discuss.
This is, I suppose, more meditative than anything else, but here's where we are. Building the airplane while we fly it. Do you have any good ideas? Things you've done that have worked with your kids - either hybrid or digitally? I wanna know about them. Write me a comment.