A very happy Sunday to you our Camino Community. First I hope each of you have had a safe holiday break, connecting or in some cases reconnecting with family and friends. We are all looking forward to seeing you online tomorrow, Monday April 20th. We are returning to online classes with Day 3 and teachers will be online during their regular schedule. Please try to attend your classes on time as much as possible. The Schoology Tech Team has been working hard worldwide to address the stability of their platform to support hundreds of thousands of students and teachers online worldwide. We hope to see more stability from here on.
Thanks to you the students and parents of Camino who answered our surveys prior to the holidays. We had 125 responses in MS/HS, 90 in Elementary and 30 in Kinder. We were able to organize online meetings during the holidays to discuss and analyze the results and read your comments to determine our best practices and areas to improve. Your input was so important for us to see your perspectives. With this feedback you will see some of the adjustments being made immediately while others will be piloted and tested over time. Please understand everything needs to be piloted and adjusted. For example, you will see more video conferencing with standardized protocols for participation to ensure student equity in participation. These sessions will be recorded as well so students and parents can access them later if being online live during the scheduled conference is not possible. You will see more teachers recording lessons so you can watch them over and over if necessary to better understand and so students can see their teachers more.
Parents, older siblings or other family members can better play the role of an assistant in their learning rather than having to learn and explain to younger child(ren) while attempting to balance attention to your businesses, homes and families here and afar. You will sometimes see the use of breakout groups in conference calls to create smaller groups of students interacting so they can see their friends and learn more together. Guides have been created for you, the parents and students to create a more effective learning experience. Those will be shared throughout the week to help everyone. As well, many teachers are piloting a platform called Flipgrid so students can record responses to activities, practice their verbal communication skills, use creativity in creating video responses and to see their friends’ videos. It is user friendly. Workloads are being adjusted to reduce where there was too much and in some cases add where there was more need. We are also implementing an online safety program and online student group support sessions to better attend to students social/emotional needs.
Teachers who were less familiar or experienced with much of the technology online have spent vacations learning from webinars, online tutorials and from each other.
None of this is to say that all this work in preparing will be perfect. Perfect is not possible, especially in the face of a monumental crisis such as this.
Teaching doesn’t usually work like this, and with good reason. This is why most of you have chosen our school over homeschooling. Children also need the social, physical and emotional experiences along with the academic program. That is why we are making changes to our Online Teaching Plan to better attend to these aspects. Many of our teachers and support staff are parents as well, and have to face the same challenges so we empathize with you. We hope to return to face to face classes in the near future, but if the quarantine continues and we cannot return to face to face classes for now, we will continue with our online program. We are already planning how we will do the PYP exposition and Graduation Ceremonies, celebrate Mother’s Day, Father´s Day, Teacher´s Day etc. if the quarantine is still in place at those times. We will follow the SEP calendar and our internal calendar respecting national holidays and Concejo Tecnico days. We will also be preparing for the likelihood that final report cards will be handed out digitally and a calendar for online conferences with parents and students as are needed. We only ask that we all, teachers, administrators, support staff, students and parents continue to try your best, show patience and flexibility in moments of frustration and work together towards solutions.
But when this crisis subsides, our world will not go all the way back to “normal”. That includes our approaches to learning and teaching. We are more empowered than ever to continue embracing uncertainty, learning through trial and error, experimenting and incorporating new technology and techniques. We will work even more collaboratively across and between grade levels as well as with international educational organizations and with you our community which will help us all see different perspectives that will be brought to the table to enhance the learning experience. Our Teachers, administrators and support staff will continue to reflect the IB Learner profile, as lifelong learners seeking to innovate in their teaching approaches as much as students and parents will continue to benefit from it.
Remember to eat well, get exercise, have fun, spend as much time together as you can, keep the faith that we will get through this. We will see you all tomorrow and I leave you with these thoughts from Henry Ford.
Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success so don’t find fault, find a remedy and when everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
Thank you for your continued efforts to adjust to the ever changing needs of our children and your amazing staff.
I, for one, have grown to respect your efforts more with each new challenge you have faced
God bless you all.