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[quote=Anonymous]It was weak in the Spring for the ES crowd.  They had twice weekly check-ins via Google Meet.  One teacher was quite good and used an additional tool called Pear that allowed her to create teaching materials that she could share and the kids could respond to the survey with answers, or they could raise their hand and take turns talking.  Very productive.  The other teacher didn't use any tools and "lectured" to the students and that was only so-so.  The related arts were video presentations that were good, but inconsistency with grading, when they were expected, etc made it challenging.  DreamBox for math was good, and the kids enjoyed using that.  LexiaCore for spelling and grammar was boring.   The problem was that they weren't good about explaining exactly what the kids were supposed to do all the time.  If you made a mistake or you misunderstood, it would loop back and the child would have to listen to the same intro section (that was slow paced) before they coudl try again.  Both of my kids hated LexiaCore and when they did the same lessons interactively with the parents we could finish the lesson and test in about 1/3 the time it took for them to do.

The good news is that the plans for the Fall look substantially better.  I'm sure that it will still have problems, but it looks like they are addressing a lot of the bigger issues that we had in the Spring. The ES kids are going to have daily interactive classes for 3 hours per day.  My kids learned much better in the Google Meet sessions than in just the videos and on-line tools (other than math).

For ES kids you can see the sample of one proposed schedule here in the School superintendent's July 16 presentation on pages 14-15.  Synchronous means interactive Google Meet with the teachers and class.  Asynchronous are videos and assignments posted on-line that the students can review and complete on their own schedule.

[url]https://go.boarddocs.com/mabe/hcpssmd/Board.nsf/files/BRKUGD7981BD/$file/07%2016%202020%20Fall%20Reopening%20ppt..pdf[/url]

I expect it to be like any second attempt at a new system, better than the first but still with some issues/problems.  The increased interactive/synchronous instruction is a huge improvement.  Hopefully we won't need a third revision, but I expect the school district will be working through the fall semester on changes and updates to the system in the event that we need to continue into the spring semester and that it should be better still, if needed.  I think that HCPS did significantly better than what I heard from friends who are teachers and parents in PG and Montgomery Counties.[/quote]

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