Educators will tell you that teaching is all about connecting with students.
In the age of COVID-19, the connecting part has become tricky, with many parents opting to keep their children home to avoid possible exposure to the coronavirus.
The state and its 262 school districts have turned to technology as never before to make sure that teachers and students are still on the same page.
Technology was already a part of the educational system, to be sure, whether through interactive videos in the classroom or computer tablets students were given to use during the school day.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced that technological reliance to the forefront.
Schools in Arkansas typically offer three pandemic learning options: traditional in-school instruction, virtual learning or a combination of the two. All three require, to varying degrees, the internet.
“The biggest piece is internet connectivity,” said Mickey McFetridge, the director of federal programs and assistant director of professional learning for the Fayetteville School District.
Fortunately for the state’s school districts, the state launched a program to provide bandwidth to the schools a few years ago.
That foundation is allowing the state to upgrade this year to keep up with the increased demand seen under the pandemic.
The goal is to increase the bandwidth available from 200 kilobits per second, per student, to 1 megabit, said Don Benton, the assistant commissioner for research and technology at the state’s Division of Elementary & Secondary Education.
“We are in the process of increasing that bandwidth right now,” Benton said. “We have dozens of [internet service] providers throughout the state. Every locale has a different ISP. In some areas it is as simple as flipping a switch.
“In other areas there may be some infrastructure and other components that have to be upgraded. It varies from place to place.
Our goal is to have all the schools integrated by the end of the school year. We’re hoping to get it done way sooner than that.”
Rural Service
Benton acknowledged the state’s biggest challenge when it comes to internet service: its rural nature.
Providing increased bandwidth to rural school districts can be exacting and time-consuming but achievable, but making sure students who attend school in those districts have internet access can be more problematic.
Some students in a rural state like Arkansas may live where there are no internet hot spots or coffee shops or even reliable cellphone service.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced in July a $10 million agreement with AT&T and T-Mobile to provide WiFi access points and devices for the state’s school districts. Recently, he announced a plan for 18,000 additional hot spots.
“As the coronavirus pandemic has forced us to adjust our methods of teaching, we have become even more aware of the need for virtual education as an option,” Hutchinson said in July. “This project expands our reach and narrows the gap between those who have access to high-speed broadband and those who do not. This is especially important for our rural communities and for families who otherwise might not be able to afford this vital access. This project opens new opportunities for our educators, parents, and students.”
McFetridge said many of Fayetteville’s campuses are boosting their WiFi signals so students can come by and use the campus as a kind of hot spot. Even though Fayetteville is largely urban, not all of its students have WiFi access, for a variety of reasons.
The school district provides tablets — Chromebooks — to its students, McFetridge said.
“The device piece was never an issue for our district,” McFetridge said. “The connectivity was definitely on some of the families’ minds. This has highlighted that idea — I’m not going to quote it correctly — but WiFi is becoming a necessity just like electricity and water. It is how we access information.”
Asynchronous or Synchronous
Schools offering virtual learning have two options: asynchronous or synchronous.
Synchronous learning, in this context, means a virtual student is at home “attending” class along with his classmates who are physically present. Asynchronous has students accessing video presentations or instructions remotely and then working on them, although many asynchronous models have students attend a virtual classroom with live instruction every week.
Bentonville uses the synchronous model so its 4,800 remote students attend class, but rather than sitting in a classroom they view the class through a computer camera.
“Our biggest issue is how do we deliver it remotely,” said Thomas Rice, the director of technology for the Bentonville School District. “We do synchronistic instruction, so we are doing live instruction. We emphasize that. We are not using canned curriculum. It is our teachers teaching our curriculum live to our kids.
“Our teachers have been rock stars coming up with ways to get kids interested. [They are] finding unique ways and clever ways to engage kids, especially as they get younger and younger, to get them to engage with you remotely, innovative ways to get them interested and involved with what you’re doing when you’re doing live instructions.”
Fayetteville uses more of a blended model, McFetridge said.
Students check in with a Zoom class and have periodic virtual classes, but teachers also make instructional lesson plans that virtual students can access at their own pace.
“That ability has allowed students to watch those instructional videos, take notes, pause it and rewind it, those types of things,” McFetridge said. “It has helped out some kids who haven’t always had that ability with the teacher in the room.”
McFetridge said technology is helping combat one of the biggest challenges of remote learning: a teacher’s ability to monitor how his or her student is learning the lesson at hand. For a reading class, for example, a teacher needs the ability to hear how well the student is doing or what words might be causing difficulties.
Fayetteville answered that by using federal CARES Act money to buy a program for its Chromebooks for all its schools and remote students that allows video recording and annotations.
“Students can respond by a video, and the teacher can hear the fluency and those types of things,” McFetridge said. “Those tools allow students to self-evaluate, check those things and listen to themselves reading, ‘Oh, I’m really stuck on this word.’ It gives them that extra tool we didn’t always have. It’s the idea of a musician who can record themselves playing or a football team that watches game tape.”
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