We're just starting our planning. These are my thoughts at this point but hopefully will get further worked out and refined as we prepare for a potential long term school closure.
Our hope is to utilize SeeSaw in grades K-4 and Google Classroom in grades 5-12. We'll expect that teachers communicate with students and parents regarding lessons, assignments and assessments. We'd expect all teachers to offer daily "office hours" to support students. Students in grades 7-12 take their devices home so that will be fine. We're banking on students having access to some device to get their school work (smart phone at minimum). We're fortunate that most of our students have access to some sort of device at home. Our expectation is that teachers will create asynchronous lessons for the most part. Some will utilize Google Hangouts Meet (they just announced all premium features will be available until July) for any synchronous sessions. We want to get teachers to connect to share resources so that we do not have everyone recreating the wheel. They can create their own content or utilize content that has been vetted online. Personally, I'm creating a Google Classroom that I put all of my teachers in for my own virtual office hours, FAQ's and resources for distance learning.
We'll be making sure that our staff ensures that they take their device(s) and chargers home each day. I'm assuming we're not going to be able to access the building once we're shutdown for quite a while. I have a couple of teachers who do not have Internet access at home so we'll be providing them MiFi's.
We're hoping to come as close to a normal school day as possible through the features of the SeeSaw and G Suite. We do not want to just send home the expectation of read for x minutes, complete the following busy work worksheets, etc.
My greatest challenge at this point is getting everyone involved. I'm curious what thoughts/ideas others have for unified arts teachers, social workers, guidance counselors, library, etc. A thought I saw on a blog post was to do Mindfulness Mondays which our social workers and guidance folks could collaborate on. This will be a very different approach than our staff and students are accustomed to using. They'll need support and ways to connect, learn and share successes/failures.
A couple of resources that I'm using as I plan can be found below:
