Teaching From Home - 2020

Living in China is usually an exciting adventure, but this past month has been a challenge due to the threat of the Coronavirus, which we've just learned about here in Shenzhen. A little background information : after returning from our Lunar New Year vacation to Japan in late January, we've been told to stay at home in Shenzhen and wear a mask in public, which seems the safest thing to do right now. Although the virus originated in Wuhan, a large city in a district far from our province, the virus has spread throughout the country, and our entire city has entered a lockdown.

During the last week of January and first week of February, our school decided to follow the recommendations of the district's Education Bureau and cancel our return to campus. We were scheduled to arrive back for classes on February 2nd, but instead our school decided to move us to online teaching. For the first two weeks, we used email and Microsoft Teams to teach online. After one week of asynchronous work to get adjusted, our school moved to a synchronous timetable similar to one that we had in the real classroom last semester. To get authorization from the Education Bureau, we needed to implement strict time limits on screen time and content. Right now, we're limited to about 20 minutes of direct instruction every day per subject -- very different from last semester, when we had about 70 minutes a day!

After a month, I can say that it has been challenging to really connect with students over the internet, and I feel their disappointment in how the semester is going. There are feelings of uncertainty, fear, and confusion. Fortunately, our school is doing a great job of emphasizing the person over the progress, meaning that we are all more focused on our students wellbeing and health rather than plowing through our unit 5 standards on simple machines! These are stressful times, and even more stressful as we see the virus spreading to other parts of the world. Hopefully this information can help in other areas that move to online learning soon.

I have found that teaching STEM online is particularly fun, because I can have students use household objects for building and engineering challenges. We're studying simple machines, technology and buoyancy right now: a strange mix of standards, but it fits within our PBL project on Ancient Commerce of the Silk Road. Students are learning about historical trade in the Ming Dynasty, and also using their knowledge of buoyancy, density, simple machines and materials comparison to create their own workshop for a product that their family might sell during the era. Students get to choose their own "product" and then learn how they would make it back then, whether that involves a lever for pressing paper, or a pulley for lifting heavy boxes in their warehouse. The project itself is exciting, although I know it would be easier and more engaging if we were back in the real classroom!

For posting information and assignments, our students are using Microsoft Teams. We already had Microsoft 365 accounts for the school, but in grade 5, we have needed to expand access for students in this switch to online learning. Now, students can access chat rooms with teachers, see assignments posted online and even have little video meetings. However, the video functions of Teams are not very stable here, and so we are using an alternative. Our school has implemented online classes with RingCentral, a Chinese-based version of Zoom Meetings, so that we can meet all of our students in a secure room online. It can be a little slow to connect, and some of the students need help getting used to it, but all of us actually really need the interaction right now so it's a good alternative to asynchronous work.

Overall, this year has had a lot of challenges already -- building our new school has been exciting and rewarding, but full of unforeseen challenges (imagine trying to bake a cake, but then realizing you need to build the oven first!) Teaching online because of the coronavirus has derailed some of our efforts, but in other ways it has forced us to kick start our digital learning platform, which has benefits as well. Time will tell how we leave this experience, but for now - we are safe, and trying our best, and hoping that we can stay healthy enough to return to the classroom soon!