Swine-Flu Preparations Spur E-Learning Plans

High-Tech Partnership

The U.S. Department of Education released recommendations Aug. 24 for steps districts can take to prepare for possible long-term closures prompted by the H1N1 virus. Some of the suggestions were decidedly low-tech—such as sending home hard-copy packets of information and homework with students—but most focused on high-tech tactics. Federal officials urged school leaders to look into digital resources, webinar support, phone conferencing, online courses, and virtual classrooms as possible ways of delivering education.

The Education Department also announced a partnership with companies and organizations such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Pearson, Scholastic, Curriki, INACOL, and others to pool resources designed to support “continuity of learning” in case of school closures.

“We want to make sure as a department that we’re both putting forward best practices and ideas for the education community, but also dealing with innovators in the private sector to partner with them and make sure that together we can all work on putting together resources that will be helpful,” said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the department. “Our partners will be working to provide discounted services like conference calling and collaborative Internet teaching technologies so that we can better and more affordably connect students and teachers.”

The initiative was a natural fit for Curriki, an online community for educators and a repository of free and open curricular materials, said the organization’s executive director, Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan.

“It’s so in line with what we do that it was easy to pull together the documents and materials and to show districts and states how to create collections of content,” she said.

The organization has crafted instructions to help schools, districts, and states make use of the resources on Curriki that could be helpful in the event of school closures. For example, teachers can post content from their curricula or flag curricular materials that already exist in the Web site’s database of resources for student use, said Ms. Kurshan.

One critical step for preparing a continuity-of-learning plan, said Ms. Patrick, is completing a readiness assessment to evaluate what kind of technology infrastructure is in place both at schools and in students’ homes, as well as what kind of training teachers have had in delivering instruction online.

“Now is the time for school districts to be surveying and finding out that information,” Ms. Patrick said.

She said that INACOL, in partnership with Steve Hargadon, the director of the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking’s K-12 Open Technologies Initiative, as well as the Pleasanton, Calif.-based Elluminate, which provides Web-based audio- and video-conferencing capabilities for educators, has built a wiki to list all the resources that both private and nonprofit organizations make available to schools to assist with continuity-of-learning plans.

The exploration of online learning and open educational resources to help during long-term school closures has also spurred states and education leaders to review policies surrounding online learning and help establish stronger partnerships between traditional school districts and virtual education, said Ms. Patrick.

“Given the magnitude of the pandemic and what it means for communities, virtual schools and the school districts are working through the policy barriers right now and finding ways that they can be a solution,” she said.

Making E-Learning Plans

Debra S. Munk, the principal of Maryland’s Rockville High School, knows firsthand the chaos that unexpected school closings can cause. During the last school year, her school in the 139,000-student Montgomery County district closed for three school days because of a swine-flu outbreak. The period spanned a weekend in which the school was set to host area SAT testing and athletic events.

“It was unreal,” Ms. Munk said. “We learned a lot from our experience.”

Over the summer, each principal in the district received a memo directing him or her to develop plans to deliver lessons electronically if large numbers of students were absent or schools were closed.

Ms. Munk had already been working on her strategies. Last spring, the district used automated phone banks to call parents and students to provide updates, but officials quickly realized that many of the phone numbers in school records were outdated. This year, the school is making it a priority to get accurate numbers, Ms. Munk said.

The district also uses an online system, called Edline, that allows teachers to post grades and homework. However, last school year not all teachers were consistently using the system, Ms. Munk said. During the week before classes began this school year, Rockville High provided extra teacher training with the system and underscored the importance of getting students accustomed to accessing their homework electronically in case they were absent.

“Automatically, if we’re closed or a student is sick, they know where to go to get their homework,” Ms. Munk said. “We’ve made it imperative that teachers do that so students get used to it.”

In addition, the school has modified its e-mail policy this school year. In the past, students were prohibited from accessing their personal e-mail addresses in school to prevent electronic communication between students during the school day, Ms. Munk said. But most students don’t use e-mail as their personal mode of electronic chit-chat anymore, Ms. Munk said. Texting via cellphone is the preferred method.

So, with the e-mail policy restrictions now eased, students can get accustomed to sending their work to teachers using attachments to e-mails. “We want them to feel comfortable with it in case they have to be out for long periods of time,” Ms. Munk said.

On the low-tech side, she also asked teachers to provide extra lessons, in case of their own absences. “In the past, we’ve asked teachers to have three days of emergency lesson plans available,” she said. “Now, we’ve asked for five.”

Ms. Munk said the school already had many technological options in place that could be used in case of school closings or student absences to keep learning going.

”I could see us doing distance teaching, videoconferencing, or sending things out over the Internet,” she said. “It would take some training to do, but the technology is at our fingertips. If this happened five years ago, it would not be possible.”

‘Keep School Running’

In the 33,000-student Irving Independent School District in Texas, the executive director of technology, Alice E. Owen, did an assessment of all existing technology and how it could be used for a continuity-of-education plan.

The district has a one-to-one laptop initiative at its five high schools, making it easy for teachers and students to communicate in the case of absences or school closings, she said. The district would also tap its Web site and extensive cable TV programming to put lessons in a televised format for middle and elementary school students.

“We would work with the content coordinator to come up with short videos, including lessons and exercises to keep the kids busy at home,” Ms. Owen said.

In middle schools, the students also work with laptops, but don’t take them home. In the case of extended absences, schools are considering allowing students to check out their laptops and submit work that way, Ms. Owen said. The district is also looking at creating teacher videos and PowerPoint presentations that would be posted on the district and school Web sites.

“Last [school] year, we came about an inch away from shutting schools down,” Ms. Owen said. “Now, a group of us have tried to brainstorm ways we can keep school running.”

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