Each week, Kat and Brian are working to provide a number of choices for PD, PLC discussions, and other support options each week. Our goal is to make sure you have the support you need when you need it. In this post, we’ll break down all three options at your disposal.
Tuesday: All the PD
Every Tuesday, you can attend any number of PD options available online. These are designed to teach a skill or tool to help you teach and communicate more effectively with students and parents. Brian and Kat split the load and offer sessions on the hour for the whole day. You can see each week’s schedule on the district website.
If you can’t make it during the day, we have these sessions recorded and archived for watching later.
Thursday: District Wide PLC
We don’t have third-person omniscience, so we have to rely on you for guidance on what kind of PD to plan for the district. On Thursdays, we host PLC meetings for every grade level and every department. These are intended to gather birds of a feather, as it were, to discuss what’s working well and what isn’t working as a PLC. We listen and take notes and use those discussions to plan the following week’s PD.
These Thursday sessions also give a place for teachers to share resources, ideas and problem solve together with the assistance of Brian and Kat. It is the most efficient and effective way to meet the needs of the district in this new evolution in teaching we are going through.
One important thing to note: Calling in and just listening isn’t enough. If you want to make progress and improve our current situation, we need you to contribute to the discussion and offer solutions that have worked for you! We have worked with staff to develop sessions based on these PLC meetings that can benefit the whole district. These PLC talks are not recorded because the power is in real-time collaboration with colleagues. All of these meetings are scheduled on the district PD calendar as well.
Other Support Structures
Every department in the district has moved to a work-from-home situation. There are several support systems in place we wanted to remind you of.
- Tech Services for staff and students: Tech Services is answering phones and work orders for staff and students. All hardware or account questions should be sent there first! You can also call 574-262-5676 to speak to a member of Tech Services directly.
- Parent Phone Support: If parents have questions or are having problems accessing Seesaw and/or Canvas, they can call a specific phone number for support: 574-262-5970. There is also non-English support available at 574-262-5965. Please pass these phone numbers out as they are meant to help all community members.
If you’re looking for instructional ideas, this blog is a great place to start. You can use the search bar at the top to find specific articles or enter your email address in the subscription box on the right to receive email updates when we publish new posts. We are also posting videos on YouTube that may give you some ideas for working with students.
Remember, you can always email us for instructional help at instructional-tech@elkhart.k12.in.us. We’ll do our best to get you information as quickly as possible, but it’s best if you do some troubleshooting first so we can get right to a solution quickly.
The featured image is signpost, a flickr photo by andrew tarrant shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license.
