Summary of the teacher Survey for English Teachers in the Ponce Region (ORE)
Welcome to our blog post. As a Facilitator, we have to work with the needs of our teachers. This pandemic situation, and before that, the earthquakes, made us think of innovative and different ways of reaching our teachers/students/parents. We collected data to helps us know how to and who to assist in this new experience.
Most recurrent questions and situations
Online assessment techniques is possibly the most asked about topic for our teachers. It is hard enough is our mixed-ability classrooms where you have bilingual students among basic level students.
Topics we will address in our website/blog
1. Online Assessment
2. Online platforms
3. Differentiation of lessons
4. Special Education students
5. Integration of parents
6. Emotional Intelligence
7. Technical difficulties- I will address
8. Using the PRDE Modules (planning & timeline)
See Survey
Stun Your Readers
Sadly, Puerto Rico Department of Education (PRDE) does not have a particular main online platform for teachers.
Every employee of the PRDE carries out an Outlook account. Teachers do so with their account ending in .miescuelapr . Attached to that account is a long list of Microsoft Applications including Office 365 and all their programs, a hefty One Drive storage space, and Microsoft Teams, which will now be the official video conferencing app. But none of those applications or extensions work well for the online teaching and learning process our teachers need. If you are familiar with any university you know that they have a unique platform for the professors to post lessons and communicate with the students. Platforms like Blackboard, and Canvas are everywhere in higher education levels. We have a SIE, but that hardly gets the job done of "daily lesson posting". This platform is mostly for grading. For this reason, our teachers look for free platforms like Edmodo, Google Classroom, Class Dojo, or just sending Power Point presentations through email. Just think for a moment, a parent and student trying to finish their English class through Edmodo, then logging in to Google Classroom for Math, then logging in to You Tube for a video for Science, and fetching PPT presentations for Spanish. Worst scenario is for teachers, who have to create the tools/materials/lessons from everywhere in the World Wide Web for the students to download. We will discuss this situation in a later post.
To see the Survey results click here.
I think it is important that even though we have 365 as a tool, the DE must take a look and purchase a plataforma that can do the job. I personally worked with Edline and it was a great tool for communication,grading, planning, and much more.