Design of the Class Agenda
The following do not necessarily fall under the learning design realm, however they are evidence of materials I have created to enhance learning. As we prepared to move our students and teachers to a multi-modal learning environment where some students were learning remotely and some were learning face to face, we had to create organizational structures that would allow communication to remote asynchronous learners, parents, and often times grandparents and other family members helping out with remote learning. We started that model by creating our weekly agenda.
The goals of the weekly agenda were to communicate exactly what was taking place each day in a class so that asynchronous learners could map out their week. The agenda included live links to instructional videos, assessments, and other resources needed for their learning. It also provided clear expectations as to what the students would be doing every day in each of their classes, serving a similar purpose to an agenda posted in a classroom.
This agenda was designed as a support for remote students and parents, but became a resource for teachers, allowing them great ways to build their lessons and map out the learning goals in each classroom.
This agenda went through a few different iterations as I received feedback from our Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction finding the best ways to deliver the information to parents.
In the end the agenda wound up being a great tool that helped the multi-modal environment happen during a very fluid and scary time in education.
Remote Learner Attendance
During the 20-21 school year, our school district offered students the option to become a committed remote learner where they learned asynchronously from home and we had some students who had to quarantine as a result of close contact to COVID-19. Overall, at any time we had a portion of our population learning remotely. Our main focus in preparation for this was getting our teachers, students, and parents prepared for the challenge that would come from this new learning environment.
What we didn’t prepare ourselves for was the ultimate challenge of keeping track of remote student attendance during this time. We had to go off of the TEA regulations that identified a student being present in one of three ways. The student either had to show progress in the district LMS, turn in an assignment, or have some communication with their teacher. Using these guidelines I moved forward to design our attendance protocols.
In the end I designed a system that was eventually perfected after gathering feedback from our Assistant Superintendent. The system involved utilizing some of our analytic tools in our LMS Canvas, and our single sign on solution Classlink. We were able to pull reports from those systems daily to see when students had logged in to do their work. We were able to hire extra staff members for the school year who would copy and paste from these reports the names of the students who had logged in that day and check the attendance of all remote learners utilizing pre-written spreadsheet formulas.
This task worked well for remote learners at the elementary and middle school levels, where attendance only has to be taken once per day. However in Texas, high school students must attend 90% of each class they attend in order to get full credit for the course. This brought on new challenges. We created what we called a “Learning Log” for students where teachers had lists of all of their remote students in every class period. Teachers would mark daily how the student complied with the procedures for being present for the day, or they marked them absent. We gave the teachers a drop down offering the three ways a student could be marked present, and an option to mark the student absent.
This system relied heavily on our extra attendance staff that was hired to maintain the names of the remote learners on a daily basis, and also on our office staff who would check these lists regularly. In the end it allowed our staff to take attendance properly and ensure that our students were in compliance with state law to receive high school credit.
