Moving Forward in Spite of Resistance

There has been resistance this semester to the idea that a snow day is not a free day any longer. With the Chromebooks and Google Sites and Docs, class goes on since the course website has all the handouts, quizzes, deadlines, etc. that any student needs for success, or to at least move forward until we meet again and have face-to-face time to answer questions.

My students know the expectation is that the work continues, the deadlines remain, and everything they need to be successful exists.  Still, a snow day is a free day in their minds. In fact, they expect ME to change lessons around, move deadlines, and make adjustments to accommodate the loss of school days even though expectations have been reminded, reinforced, and rephrased over and over.

This year, only the 6th grade have Chromebooks across the county. My classes have them as part of the initial study, but the students believe themselves out of the norm so class expectations are pliable. HOWEVER, next year when all the grade levels have Chromebooks and all the teachers have class websites, classes will continue through snow days. Is that what is needed to make the digital life real for students?  Consistent, across all classes expectations?  Probably. When the expectation to self-direct through a snow day is in only one class, it seems subjective and silly. As a school-wide expectation to return with completed work or at least questions about the unfinished work, lollygagging through a snow day is a lot less inviting, you know?

Backlash

Now we're at the place where the newness has worn off and students are devising ways to get out of doing their work. Yes, it is not enough to have a blog, and YouTube, and links to expedite learning...this semester half the students arriving to class say they do not have home internet services, or very limited at best.

It seems that now with the Google Cloud and the Chromebooks, school work proceeds with or without snow days. The students have learned that a snow day is actually a window of opportunity to work on their projects and that expectations are that the lesson continues and questions are asked/answered online. Shocking!

So, in these cases I am back to printing off hard copies of the lessons and the students are producing notebook journals and index card notes manually. I still expect to see work on snow days, and hard copies for a unit are issued all at once at the beginning of the unit. That reality has come as a surprise to some. In fact, I await today's classes to see how many suddenly decide having access to the internet is not such a problem after all since NONE of them like to hand write information. We are becoming a typing society.

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