BEING THRUST INTO THE NEW DIGITAL NORM

Teaching in the Quarantine Era

This year at Burnet Middle School we were lucky enough to be part of a Verizon grant that enabled each one of our students to have a data-enabled Chromebook that could be used both in-school and at home. With our campus being 99% economically disadvantaged, this was a game-changer. Couple this with our district's blended-learning initiative through the Canvas app and we had the stage set for a transformative educational intiative.

Technology, with all the good it entails, is not without its drawbacks. Within the first few months of school starting we started seeing some of the threads wearing bare: damaged, lost or forgotten devices is not a big deal when it happens to a few students, but the problems became so widespread that planning an in-class lesson around blended learning was not possible because so many would be without their Chromebooks. Slowly our campus started reverting back towards the old way of doing things.

Then COVID-19 hit in March and everything changed. Distance learning was now the ONLY way to conduct business. Slowly, with the district's help, the students' Chromebooks started humming to life and teacher's started populating their CANVAS blended learning modules. ZOOM meetings became the norm, and the Verizon-included data ended up becoming the key component to having it all come together.

The question I posit, however, is why did it take an external emergency to make it all come together? All the components that we now have are there, but there was no urgency to implement. Is it a case of "too soon"? Are we not ready to start taking these digital leaps just yet? Is it a case of sticking to the classical ideal of what a classroom setting and learning should look like? Even me, a technology teacher, did not come anywhere near the level of blended learning implementation that I should have been utilizing. But now, I can't see myself going back. Even in a hands-on, application-based curriculum I see the need for a blended classroom in the 21st century.

The only thing I wish is that it hadn't taken a pandemic to get me there.