Coronavirus Latest: Philadelphia School District To Begin Online Learning With Something It's Never Tried Before
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- We've all had to adjust due to the coronavirus pandemic. There may be no places that have had to adjust as much as schools. Starting Monday, the School District of Philadelphia will begin its online learning.
The technology is delivered.
"As of this week, we have disturbed more than 81,000 Chromebooks," Superintendent Dr. William Hite said.
Starting on Monday, the School District of Philadelphia is starting a new era of online digital instruction, never tried in the district before.
"That is called planned instruction," Hite said. "The focus on planned instruction will be new content and lessons led by teachers in all the content areas."
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Hite made the announcement during a Zoom call with reporters this week, saying that most families have the free Chromebooks and district officials are working to contact those who have not yet picked up theirs.
"The mean of the distribution across our 240 academic programs, is about 71%," Hite said.
"It's a big transition," Nicole Manley said.
Manley is an elementary math teacher at Insight Pennsylvania, a public cyber charter school. She's been online teaching for more than two years and has some advice for the instructors who will now be teaching their students digitally.
"Don't set your goals so high that they're unattainable," Manley said. "If you can get an hour a day out of your students, I call that successful."
For parents with children who are now forced to learn from their living rooms or kitchens, success with online learning will require flexibility as well.
"Come up with a schedule," Manley said. "We're going to do this for an hour, and then after that, we'll play for a bit,"
The goal, Hite says, is to keep students engaged.
"We want to reduce, to the extent we can, the regression that would naturally occur if students were out for long periods of time," Hite said.
As school officials figure out what will happen for the next school year in the fall, Hite says the district has formed a task force to answer those questions.
"How do we reopen and what does that entail?" Hite said. "How do we do lunch? How do we do recess? How do they get to and from school? How do they manage that on SEPTA?"
He says remote learning is not off the table for next year, especially for older, more mature students in high school.