We have been tasked as a cohort to make a large documenting what is a essentially a best practices and resource guide for the coming school year. This year presents a large challenge as the Covid-19 threat still lingers and could flare up quickly. There are also concerns about the countries economy which has slowed drastically since the virus hit a few months ago. One of the biggest steps to reaching normalcy and getting people back to work is to have students back in schools. This is no small task and will require a large amount of resources to be pulled together to be shared with and implemented by teachers, parents, and students to make things run smoothly.

I have grouped up with Trevor Hood from my cohort to tackle two outcomes in need of addressing. The first outcome is that at the start of the year educators/institutions must be able to provide hardware support for students through the district to meet the delivery of instruction needs. All students are welcome to an equitable education and it will likely require the district to work with families to support students who do not have the capabilities to get online. My school addressed this problem by lending out several Chrome Books to students who needed technology to get online. This seemed to work well. One place of struggle with this issue was delivering the technology to students and, when the school year was over, getting them returned and dealing with repairs and other maintenance issues.

To address these issues, it will be important that teachers, parents, and students to understand and implement the minimal hardware needs for student’s success in online interactions. This will require finding out teacher needs for their courses regarding software. Furthermore, teachers and administrations will need to prepare an organized system to lend school technology to students which will require a large amount of communication between school and homes. Parents and students will also need to understand what responsibilities and liabilities there are when borrowing school technology. Students will need to respect their borrowed equipment and parent may be on the hook to replace any broken or lost equipment.

The second outcome is that educators will be able to provide a code of conduct for student to student’s communication in online learning environments. Some districts may differ in opinion on the appropriateness of students being left in an online video room unsupervised, but I believe they would all agree that student to student interaction is important in the student’s development. Laying out the rules for these types of situations will help students navigate their online interactions and provide students with the information they need if interactions do not stay civil. There would likely need to be a reporting system in place for students to communicate to an appropriate authority any online harassment.

Overall, I think we have a good start to this project. The next step is to start looking for/creating resources to help parents, students, and teachers understand and meet these outcomes.