PDS Flu Preparedness for Faculty

Proactive Steps to Prepare for Flu Season

1. Find a Buddy – Ask a peer to be your Flu Buddy. This is someone who could help your sub in the event that you are out for an extended period. Make sure your Buddy knows how your classroom works, where things are kept, and student expectations. Your Buddy can be your agent on campus when you cannot be here.
2. Plan a Backup Project – Have a plan for being out for 7 -10 days. Plans don’t need to be very detailed but should help sub and/or your Buddy keep things moving. It may help to plan with your Buddy.
3. Investigate new tools now. If you are considering using Skype, wikis, blogs, Smartboard record, or any of the other tools that could facilitate distance learning for absent students, don’t wait until they are sick to start learning. Anticipate that stress levels if increase as more students and faculty potentially become ill. Give yourself time to learn in small, bite-size chunks now.
4. Be prepare to prioritize your lessons and assignments. Students will struggle to make-up all the work missed during a 7-10 absence. Be thinking now about which skills and concepts are core foundations and which might have to be left out.

Tools for Coping with High Absenteeism Rates

Smartboard Record – ☀☀
Your smartboard software has the ability to record everything you write on the smartboard and your sweet, melodious voice, too. This would allow teachers to capture classroom activities while they teach. On a scale from 1 to 5 with 5 being the hardest to use this tool is a 2. Below is an example from Doug Burgess, PDS Teacher of the Year and Middle School Science Teacher.

Student Maintained Blogs for Notes – ☀☀☀
In Derrick Willard’s AP Environmental Science classes – APES510 and APES 810- students take turns taking notes for the entire class. Notes are posted on the class blog and categorized. Teachers only need to request that a blog is created and the Tech Team will create the blog, add student users, and train students. One a scale from 1 to 5 this tool is a 3.

Skype -☀
Not only can Skype bring guest lecturers from far away places into your classroom, it can be used to bring recovering students stuck at home into your classroom. Maybe it isn’t the student but instead you are stuck at home recuperating. Skype is an easy to use, free tool that provides video conferencing. The video below is last year’s Kindergarten class of Angel Carroll participating in a skype and tell session with students at Ravenscroft School.

Wonderful World of Wikis ☀☀
Wikis are collaborative web spaces where students and faculty can work together to build resource pages, review tools, and more. Wikis are used from 4th grade to 12th grade and in almost all subject areas. You can share videos, pictures, links, files, and have discussions in a wiki. All users can add pages, edit pages, and modify content. Ponder This is Matt Scully’s 8th Grade English Wiki where students have built a table of examples of literary terms, a class playlist, and participate in discussion. Dr. Mike Turner’s physics classes are working together on their class wikis and Pam Long’s 4th grade class is another example of a wikis in action.

Flip Cameras ☀☀
Students and/or teachers can use flip cameras to record demonstrations or summaries of classroom activities to post online for absent students. The cameras are quick and easy to use with only 4 buttons. All faculty laptops have the software installed to quickly manage recordings from these cameras.