Snow Day? Snow Way. Mobile Learning Allows Schools to Stay Open Virtually

Picture this: beautiful, fluffy, white snow coming down outside. Being inside in your PJs. Doing nothing but playing video games all day because school is closed! Hooray! That might not be for much longer, though, if the Department of Education has anything to say about it.

This school year, the Greater Clark County School district in Kentucky decided that teachers would now be conducting e-learning days when school is closed for winter weather. Many instructors in the district found the virtual school day to be beneficial. 

"TowPlow truck on rural Interstate in Missouri" by 
SnowKing1 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Megan Roger, an ESL teacher in the district commented, “We want them to have that practice on a regular basis because, if you don’t use a language, you can easily forget it. Even the smallest pieces that they’ve gained, they can lose if they’re not here for several days.”

Also finding benefit to the program, Emily Carpenter noted that many times teachers need to cram material into the end of the year due to all of the missed days. She said, “Thankfully with e-learning, I get to still teach the things they’re learning right then and there rather than at the end of the year, just keep extending that stuff because, that’s not the information they missed.”

In Pennsylvania, this is the case as well. Governor Wolf and the Pennsylvania Senate passed Senate Bill 440 which allows schools to use 5 snow days as instructional days if the school uses technology on snow days. 

Certainly every time we have snow days in my district, I find myself struggling to get myself and my students back on track and have to spend an extra day or two to re-teach what we had learned before the snow day, turning a one-day lesson into a three- or four-day lesson. I definitely see the value in continuing the learning on days where school is interrupted. My big hesitation is for the student who does not have the best home life, for the student who does not have internet at home, or for the student with learning disabilities who needs extra guidance to actually complete work in the first place.

This initiative seems like it has good intentions, but I think there is still some work to be done in perfecting it.

Language Lab in Montreal's Akiva School Models Beneficial Language-Learning Program

Students in the Akiva Language Lab. Retrieved from https://akivaschool.com/academics/francais/akiva-language-lab/

The Akiva School in Montreal, Quebec has unveiled its new foreign language lab, which they are saying is the first of its kind in North America. This lab allows students to practice French using technology either in small groups or one-on-one with the teacher using technology.

Cindy Warren, the assistant head for school advancement said, "The Akiva Language Lab is a unique learning space that enables students to explore languages at their own pace [...] Research tells us that the only way to truly learn a language effectively is through immersion and practice. Statistically, in a traditional classroom setting, each student speaks for less than 20 seconds for every hour of class time."

Warrne and the Akiva School share a huge point, and it's one that all schools should focus on in relation to their language learning classes: students need to spend more time actually practicing the language for it to stick. Anecdotally, I remember spending a significant amount of time conjugating verbs in Spanish class in high school, but I don't remember much of what we leaned (except, of course, for asking where the library is...why does everyone seem to remember "¿Donde está la biblioteca?" anyway?).

I would be curious to see a follow up in 5 years and in 10 years to see how much students' language has improved at the Akiva School and would love to see other schools following suit, spending more time on students making meaningful conversation during class to help make their learning stick.


Source:
CJN Staff. (2019, November 6). "Akiva School Goes High-Tech on French Instruction". The Canadian Jewish News. Retrieved from https://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/akiva-school-goes-high-tech-in-french-instruction