On March 13, 2019, Governor Northam closed all Virginia schools for two weeks in response to the spread of COVID-19. This announcement was made to our students during the last period of the day. We were given extra time at the end of the school day to help our students clean out their lockers and make sure they had all the necessary resources to do schoolwork from home for the foreseeable future. The following week, teachers were allowed in the building to develop lesson plans for the coming week. After those two days, all communication and interaction was done virtually over the phone or on zoom calls. On March 23, 2019, the school closure was extended for the rest of the school year. This confirmed that my in-class student teaching was officially over and I would be completing the semester from my own home.
My cooperating teacher allowed me to continue to take the lead in developing lesson plans and instructional materials for our students. We had virtual meetings with other teachers to plan out what information our students should focus on for the remainder of the school year. After these meetings, I made lesson plans, instructional videos, and other materials for our online lessons. My cooperating teacher reviewed the materials and gave me suggestions on how to improve the videos. Creating instructional videos was definitely the most challenging aspect of teaching online. I spent many hours researching various online programs I could use to record videos and borrowing computers with touch screens and iPads from friends and family for the videos. Just like planning a regular lesson, I had to think about what crucial information I needed to relay concisely in each video. My goal was to keep the videos around seven minutes. All of the videos were given to students through a program called EdPuzzle. The program did not allow students to skip over parts of the video and gave me a report of who had watched the videos. I also was able to embed questions throughout the video to check for student understanding. The link below will take you to my personal YouTube channel, where all of the videos I made are saved. I also included a list below of some of the topics covered in the videos.
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