My First Week of Virtual Teaching

Well, I survived my first week of virtual teaching and with a little bit (okay, a lot) of coffee I’m able to write all about it! Hopefully by sharing my experience, you will have a better idea of what to expect!

This was a back to school like no other. I never would have imagined starting the school year online. Even back in May, I really thought we’d be going back to school face-to-face. But, as soon as I found out my district was starting the year virtually I was determined to make the best of it and hopefully make this a positive experience for my new class.

I can’t even tell you how many times I wrote my lesson plans out for the first week. Even though this is my twelfth year teaching, I really felt like a brand new teacher because I had no idea how everything would go! I knew the activities and routines and procedures I usually went over during the first week of school would all be different, but I really didn’t know what to plan for because I’ve never done this before! Overall I was able to get to about three activities per day and read a lot of books!

Our schedule consists of a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous instruction (definitely never really used those words before) during the morning from 8:00am-12:00pm. Then, students have asynchronous time from 12:45pm-2:45pm. They also have specials in the morning for 30 minutes, so I have to plan for 3 1/2 hours of instruction. The first week I wanted to spent more time on live sessions so my students didn’t have to worry about signing off and signing back on. This helped with tech issues, but it was also a really long time for students to be at the computer. I did provide breaks but by Friday I was having them sign off to complete their independent work.

I used a daily PowerPoint to stay organized. I literally put every single slide I was using into one Powerpoint and labeled it by day. Even though I didn’t share my screen for every slide, it really did help me stay on track and make sure I got to everything I was planning. I thought I would only do this for the first week, but I went ahead and started making them for week two because they worked out so well for me!

Each day I was able to complete about three activities with my students. I usually read a book, created an anchor chart together, and then my students completed some sort of independent activity. My team is using Seesaw so I was able to upload activities to Seesaw, like this Back to School Book!

Two things that I used every single day in my PowerPoint were the Live Session Expectations and the Digital Get to Know You Activities. The expectations helped us go over making sure that we were paying attention and staying on topic. I used the Digital Get to Know You Activities during our Morning Meeting time each morning. This was a fun way to start our day and a great way for me to get my new students!

For my set-up, I used my school laptop with a laptop stand. This really helped not having to look down at a computer all day and I think my neck really appreciates the stand! I also purchased a ring light to help with lighting and I use a document camera to help share my mini-anchor charts that I create with my students! In the future, I would like to have a 2nd monitor so that I am able to see all my students and whatever I am sharing at the same time! I was consistently having to move and switch things around on my screen to see what I needed to and I’m sure it made my brain really tired! By day two my back was killing me because the chair I have is not comfortable at all! It’s pretty, but it’s definitely not great for sitting in for long periods of time! So, I ordered a back pillow from Amazon!

So, as you can see from my messy desk, this week was far from perfect!!! But, I did my best and even though it is not ideal, it felt SO good to see kids again! I hope that this helps if you are starting the year virtually!