A Digital Redesign on the Fly

When I was growing up, my dad had a saying: “When you know better, you do better.” When the Cherokee County schools in northern Georgia shut down in March due to COVID-19, our district turned to a digital learning plan we had developed for the occasional inclement weather day.

The process enabled teachers to post lessons on Canvas, our learning management system, for students to complete on their own schedule. In developing our Digital Learning Day plan, we never considered the possibility we would need to manage the plan for weeks on end. We know now our plan was not meaty enough to sustain us during longer school closures.

We discovered we needed to provide guidance on attendance, grading and just what exactly online teaching entailed given most of our teachers graduated from teacher preparation long before virtual instruction was even an option, much less a necessity.