A Day in the Life of a Distance Learning Coordinator

Inspired by Arnie, Roxanne and Sandy, I thought I would write about a day of videoconferencing. So I picked a pretty busy day to record. If you are blogging too, pick a day yet this school year and tell us what it’s really like!

7:30 a.m. River Valley participates in the first ever Literature Quest. I came in early and sat by my phone waiting for a call in case they had trouble. No phone call so they did great on their own!

8:00 a.m. Patrick Hamilton connects to the Buffalo Museum of Science. This connection didn’t go well and after a few minutes of struggling, I had the school dial directly to Buffalo and then I didn’t hear from them so they were fine!

8:30 a.m. River Valley’s second Literature Quest starts. Again they were doing it on their own. At about 8:40 I called the media specialist to see how it was going. Very well. We’ll probably modify the materials to include three presentations from each school. At the high school level it seems, based on this pilot, that a full MysteryQuest with six presentations can be done between two schools in an hour long class period. Good to know and we’ll continue to use this model to develop more programs.

9:00 a.m. Pat Ham finishes with the Buffalo Museum and Washington Elementary connects to them. With Washington El it worked fine on the bridge. I scramble to set up the distance learning room for an ASK program. Presets, tables, logo. Welcome panel participants.

9:30 a.m. Sam Adams and Marcellus Middle School participate in ASK: Monkey Island with our panel of experts. We rescheduled to today so that Marcellus could participate. So now I’m facilitating and making sure the Buffalo Museum program is still going at the same time!

10:00 a.m. Washington El finishes with Buffalo Museum and Patrick Hamilton is back for another session with a different class. While facilitating the ASK program, I keep checking my bridge to see when Washington is done. Then I disconnect so Pat Ham can dial directly. Note: Later today I received an email from Washington Elementary with this feedback on their program with the Buffalo Museum of Science: “The vc went wonderfully. The kids really enjoyed it, and I liked that the kids were making good observations and deductions. It’s definitely one that I’ll recommend to our teachers.”

10:30 a.m. ASK Monkey Island finishes and I thank our panel members and walk them out of the building.

11:00 a.m. Brandywine and St. Joseph High Schools connect to Global Nomads Group for their Pulse program on Muslim-Western relations. St. Joe’s camera was acting up so we had to reboot. Brandywine was connecting at 128K and we tried to resolved that but finally gave up. This program is led by David MacGuirt and is a facilitated dialogue with David posing questions and the students responding to the question, and then commenting on each others’ responses.

12:00 noon. Whew. Time for lunch.

12:30 p.m. River Valley’s last LiteratureQuest starts. On their own again. They did fine!

1:00 p.m. Catching up on email and phone calls. Arranging two more videoconferences. Helping a teacher in my online class. Answering a district tech coordinator’s questions about a grant.

2:30 p.m. Ottawa Elementary goes to the Bronx Zoo. For some reason in today’s connection I couldn’t call the Bronx Zoo, so I had to have them call me. But that was quickly resolved and we had a great program on Animal Colors.

3:40 p.m. Quick test call for Where in Michigan tomorrow.

4:00 p.m. Final videoconference reflection for the Kid2Kid Videoconference Class. We talked about what went well with their projects this year, talked about challenges – mostly related to technology and communication and talked about what other VC projects we have going on. It was a great debrief!

In between VCs today I worked on automating my final report for this year. It’s almost done!

So tell us about one of your days!

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