#TechTipTuesday – Remote Learning Back-Up Plans

    Every Tuesday I share a Tech Tip on our social media pages to assist our staff in their use of technology as it relates to their role.

Yesterday there was a province-wide internet outage in all school divisions that are hosted through MERLIN. While they did a fantastic job of addressing this large-scale concern quite quickly, it did mean that most educators were without internet access for at least half the day. What would have been an inconvienance last year was now a major concern for schools and families as we now have a significant amount of students engaged in remote learning via online platforms. It lead to some important questions for teachers and families.

Teachers:

• What do I do if I cannot connect with my virtual learners during our scheduled time?
• How do I communicate quickly to my at-home learners if our internet is down?

Students:

• What do I do if my teacher isn’t online during our scheduled time? or if they lose their connection mid-session?
• What do I do if I am having connectivity concerns or a device malfunction?

I recommend that a clear, “Plan B”, is established and communicated to all remote learners. It can be posted within your LMS (Teams, Google Classroom, Canvas, etc) but should also be sent home as a hard-copy so that families can still access it if the tech concern is on their side. This, “Plan B” should be specific to your teaching context but an example that I made up can be found below:

*You can use this as a template to create your own by using Canva.

It may also be worth developing a plan at the school level to push-out automated phone messages to families in the event of a school internet outage that prevents remote learning from occurring for a period of time.

Do you have a communicated back-up plan for your remote learners? If so, what does it include?