One Foot Forward, One Foot Back

 How was the overall experience of learning Science through ‘Distance Learning’?

I was surprised at how 'tiring' distance learning was. After a full day of teaching and virtual zoom meetings, I was pretty exhausted and this is without the commute to school and walking around campus and all the meetings there!

The thing I miss most of all is being able to make 'connections' with students. The human connection in education is so important and it's hard to foster such relationships through a screen. Sure, you can talk with people, tell jokes, but there are some people that just don't like being on the screen front and center every day so some students have their cameras tilted up (or off for much of the class) and I haven't gotten to know them as well.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons

I'm proud of the educational experience we have offered. Back home in the US, there has been a noticeable spike in 'failing students' stemming from a variety of issues such as lack of hardware, teacher and student training in distance learning and internet access at home. At FDR, our faculty have worked hard to build capacity for distance learning activities and create a viable curriculum that allows students to learn from home and to ensure that this pandemic does not slow down access to a quality education.

Which experiments or projects are you most proud of or learned a lot through doing?

For me, the 'Kitchen Chemistry' summative lab was the 'funnest' as I have a lot of experience video editing and movie making. I was surprised at the scope of how awesome some students movie making skills were and how 'new' movie making was to some other students. Some of my students struggled with 'iMovie' as they didn't have the most current version of the app or IOS installed to ensure that the platform worked well. I also encouraged many students to come to 'office hours' for help and the ones who needed the most help did not come. We addressed some of these issues in our 'Bootcamp #2' in advisory but some students did not execute these tasks after watching the videos. Live and learn I guess.

The 'Flipgrid' community was also a new 'first' for me that was fun, but also created a community of learners who could 'share' their work. I like how it's 'private' and I can give access to my students that can view other's work and not have it be out there in 'youtube'. For many families that value privacy and protection of their child online, this is a nice outlet. I hope to use the 'classroom blog' to teach digital citizenship more next semester!