Basic principles

Like you, students are being challenged to use class technology in ways they never have before. Helping them through these challenges is going to make the course go better for them, and for you.

There are three overlapping groups we are concerned with here:

• Students whose only access is through smartphones
• Students with improvised access (no home access, so they borrow or use the lab)
• Students with low technology skills (e.g. have not yet learned how to create and save a document).

We can't solve all these issues ourselves, or maybe even as an institution. But we can each narrow the gap and help students over it.

Be open with your students about how you are learning too. The more they see you as someone who is a partner in figuring this out, the less stress they'll feel. 

Throughout this course, we're identifying strategies you can use in your class, but here are some keys that we find helpful. 

Keep it Simple

Stick to a few tools for the entire quarter. Every new skill a student has to learn adds complexity that neither of you needs right now. If something is consistently failing, by all means, change, but the fewer variations and tools you introduce, the better. Zoom and Canvas? Great. Zoom, Canvas, Kahoot, Quizlet, Flipgrid and a few other tools I haven't thought to advertise here? Not so much. 

Design for resilience

Things will fall down, sometimes when you or your students need them the most. Plan a few backups. For instance:

• Install Zoom on your smartphone in case your internet connection breaks.
• Record your classes, so that if a student has problems during the lecture, they can come back and watch the recording. 
• Be flexible about some assignment requirements. For instance, formatting and page limits are different, and difficult to adhere to, for students writing papers on mobile phones (and many do). 
• Think hard about your late policies. Yes, guidelines are good. But given how much grace we're going to need, shouldn't we allow the same for our students?