Category: Uncategorized

You might think by the title of this blog that I’m going to state just how afraid I am of potentially teaching in Fall 2020 with students in the classroom.

You’d be wrong.

I’m not going to say I’m too afraid to teach or do my job because no matter what, I’m at risk of exposure. My wife is a high school teacher – she is at risk of being exposed.

My kids are junior high aged. They’re at risk when they go back to school.

I’ll be at risk every time I walk into a campus building or my classroom.

Here’s the trick…my exposure will be less than they will deal with. Why? My team is working from home. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I’ll be teaching for 50 minutes in a classroom on campus – and I’ll be driving in, teaching, and heading home. 50 minutes, three times per week.

My wife teaches 5 classes with a duty period (lunch), plus she’ll likely have kids visit her during her actual lunch for academic help.

My kids will be around their peers for 6-7 hours, plus lunch, plus the bus ride to and from school.

My exposure will be the least of my family. That will be on my mind every day as school starts in Fall. Am I afraid for my wife, my kids, and me? Yeah, you bet I am.

What will I do? I’ll wear my mask, I’ll carry a tub of disinfecting wipes so I can wipe the instructor podium and technology controls down (I don’t trust others), and allow my students to borrow a sanitizing wipe to clean off their desk. I’ll mandate mask wearing, I’ll change my teaching to reduce close instructor-student or student-student interaction in the classroom.

…and I’ll hope for the best. However, I will not allow the COVID-19 virus to paralyze me due to fear.

I’m not sure what else I can do.

So far this Fall, I’ve been pretty good at keeping my grades up-to-date. However, after the last major project my students turned in, I’ve fallen behind.

Look, I know this happens. We want to give fast feedback to our students, but sometimes life gets in the way. No matter what though, students depend on that feedback. It can help them improve their assignments, and in my class – it can help them improve their presentations by being aware of things they’re doing right (and wrong) so they can get better.

We can’t yell at students about not getting their work done on time when we aren’t prompt at getting grades done. But we should know that when our lives get complicated as instructors, and we can’t get the grading done – it’s up to us to do one thing – take responsibility.

So today, I put aside my pride and admitted to my students that I didn’t have their grades updated and it wouldn’t be until the end of the week. However, in exchange for their patience, I’m giving them 10 bonus points. It’s not much, but at the end of class one student asked me, “Can you tell other instructors to do what you’re doing?” I think they appreciated that I owned up to my problem in getting the grading done.

In a way, I like to think I’m demonstrating something important – I’m owning up to my mistake in not having the work done and admitting it.

In graduate school, I turned in an assignment in January and it wasn’t graded until mid-March. I get the frustration of waiting for your grades to be done. I’m only a few days behind right now, but that’s not the point. They expect their grades back, and rightfully so. All I can do is try to make it right as much as possible.

You want to ruin your students’ day? Tell them they have a group project as part of your class.

Yes, the dreaded group project. Where a student puts their grade in the hands of others. You know the joke… When I die, I want my group members to be my pallbearers, so they can let me down one more time.

The perceived problem with group projects is that students have to work together outside of class. That’s not necessarily a problem, to be honest, but it can be inconvenient when students have schedules that don’t match up, some live in residence halls on campus while others live in apartments far away from campus, some have club responsibilities, and so on. Students’ schedules don’t always work the way we want them to. So what can be done? Technology can help, but what kind of tools do you need?

First, you probably need to make sure students have access to collaborative document creation tools. Gone are the days of when students would send chunks of a paper to one person to slap together – now we have tools like Google Docs and Microsoft Word 365 to allow for real-time collaboration and versioning of documents. If a presentation is required, slide decks can be built using Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint 365. These options can allow all group members to contribute no matter where they are, even if they’re using their smartphone. These are obviously great tools, but now here’s the question…

How do you get students to have meetings together?

This is where it can get difficult. Some students might want to use FaceTime, but that automatically excludes those with Android phones or PC’s. Google Hangouts? OK, there’s an app on iOS for Hangouts, and that could be an option for now, but some reports have Google stripping Hangouts from consumers by 2020 [1]. So that’s OK for now, but down the road it might not be an option.

Of course, there’s other tools out there like GroupMe that do allow for collaboration and communication, but it’s not a tool that is likely going to be sponsored by the institution.

So what about the LMS, does it have a tool? Where I teach, we use Blackboard Learn, and while there’s group tools…they stink.

What would be ideal is a group tool that is provided by the institution that the instructor can set up for the teams in their class, and that the instructor can also actively participate in if necessary. This tools should allow voice, video, and text chat along with posting of links to documents (and maybe the occasional animated .gif for a little bit of a humor break). The tool, though, must be accessible – which could limit options.

If we want students to work together in groups, we have to provide them with the needed tools to accomplish their tasks. Not doing so opens the doors for anything that is convenient to the students to be picked, and those tools may not allow for full accessibility by all students, and it may take away some oversight by the instructor.