National discussion and planning on one of the hottest topics of the pandemic is being led by a pair of former EVSC educators.
One of the hottest topics in education right now is e-Learning. It turns out that two of the people leading the national discussions among educational technology directors are former EVSC teachers and still live in this area.
Jason Bailey is the director of innovation and design for the State Educational Technology Directors Association, the national group very much in demand right now as school districts struggle to finish this school year and get ready for the fall.
Bailey said, “There’s a lot of work to be done and no time to do it. These are some of the things that our best districts have been working through step by step for years. Certainly, those districts that have never done it- this is a real wake up call for them.”
The former Harrison High School teacher says Indiana is ahead of much of the nation in adopting e-Learning. He refers to the current situation as a "recalibration point" for schools and state education associations as they scramable to deal with the effects of the pandemic.
WNIN’s Steve Burger talked with Candice Dodson, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, or SETDA about how schools can adapt programs originally designed for short-term weather cancellations into something teachers will use every day.
(SB) “Most of the solutions I’ve seen are meant for a day here, a day there for weather events, things like that. What are you seeing discussed as solutions for these extended times because of the coronavirus, and that schools may not even be open in the fall?”
(CD) “Yes, they are completely different things. As you can imagine, I’m having a lot of calls nationally about that. There are a lot of good people thinking about it. From classroom teachers that were gathering together to help curate the best tools for others to share in and understand, to actual companies that are putting together sets of resources bundled that can come in and help districts that haven’t done this in an extended way.
I had a couple of teachers say to me the other day, ‘You know, we feel pretty good about e-Learning’, but they’ve never truly used it to present brand new material that students have never engaged with. They used it as a past- they were planned, they knew they were coming, a lot of times they did it for more like kind of a review thing. So now, they’re actually having to think about trying to impart some new learning with students.
So, that’s what we’re seeing and one of the roles at SETDA, we’re working with others on, how do you put together really good plans, engage with providers, vendors out in the world that already have some really good tools that can be used. So how do we bring those together, along with educators, along with administrators and funders to make sure that it’s not just this piece here and this piece there, but really think about what this looks like in the long term and how do we get from here to there.
Most school districts I’ve talked to across the country are saying they’re not going to try to do a ton of- bring in lots of new tools and curriculum. (They say) We’re going to try to use the things we’ve been using in our schools until we can get to June, the end of May. And then, all of us are working together across the country and put together plans for what the re-entry could look like, where could we build that curriculum that the family and teachers and students will feel comfortable with.
So, it is an ongoing, every day, morning until night conversation with people coming together. I think, I really have to believe, that education is going to be better on the other side of this, that there’s going to be an equitable way of engaging learning that is real and feeds childrens’ interests and personalized learning. We’ve been aiming that way for a long time in ed-tech, but this just pushed the accelerator down on everyone and and we just have to do it. There’s a lot of questions though, and that’s the hard part.”
