It was terrible, maybe they will get their act together for fall.

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.

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

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.

Awful. Will be in the Fall too

Anonymous wrote:moving from PGCPS to HCPSS this summer. any idea if DL will be improved this fall? 5th grade homeroom teacher was not tech savy. and there was literally no communication with teacher.
I'm really happy to wash my hands off and move forward. Hoping HCPSS has a better structure.

Another HoCo parent here (high school). As others said, the spring was terrible. The county has decided on all virtual learning for the first semester and 4 by 4 blocks for middle and high school. Other details are subject to change, but you can find proposals at the link below. They are proposing much more synchronous learning.

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

moving from PGCPS to HCPSS this summer. any idea if DL will be improved this fall? 5th grade homeroom teacher was not tech savy. and there was literally no communication with teacher.
I'm really happy to wash my hands off and move forward. Hoping HCPSS has a better structure.

Parent of a fourth grader in Hoco schools.
It was terrible!

It wasn't great. My kid will be going into second.

There was a lot of pre-recorded videos and there were apps that they did for math and reading. Younger kids required a lot of help to do the assignments. They also did not actually check any work- but that may have been this particular teacher.

My kids in high school, and it was terrible, same as everyone else. High school students had one hour of check in time with teachers. That's it.

Someone else can talk about their experience with younger kids. With that said, HCPSS has acknowledged that if there is DL in the fall, it will be much different.

We are thinking of moving to Howard County. What where people's experiences with the distance learning provided by Howard county? I'm particularly interested in elementary school distance learning?