Episode Details

Superintendent Godfrey:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. On this episode, we are really excited to talk to some rock star teachers who are collaborating over the course of three weeks summer to create a K-6 online curriculum with content for the entire upcoming school year. It's a significant effort on the part of several school districts that will give teachers and parents options and help to make sure students don't miss a beat and learning throughout the year.

We're talking about curriculum covering all the core subjects designed to meet individual needs. Our rock star teachers are here to tell us all about day. We are fortunate to have on the Supercast Ross Menlove, who is the Digital Learning Consultant for Jordan School District, Dylan Funk, a teacher at Silver Crest Elementary and Melanie Smith, teacher at Antelope Canyon Elementary, which will open this fall. We're going to start with Ross and talk with Ross a little bit about a project that we have in Jordan School District in partnership with some other districts to create online content in anticipation of schools reopening in the fall. This will allow teachers to teach any grade K-12 online. And this particular group is working on the course six part of that curriculum. Ross, can you describe a little bit about what's going on this summer?

Ross:
Yes, thanks for asking. We have invited a group of teachers to come in. They are maintaining appropriate social distancing as they work together to design curriculum for students who need to be able to take school online this fall. These teachers are working together to design the lesson plans and to look at the year-long curriculum and the standards to ensure that the students are able to learn those standards while participating in an online environment. The way it's designed is, there's a learning target for those students to succeed every day. And there's an assigned teacher. The teacher will meet with those students every day and provide online instruction, whether that's, um, through a, maybe it's over the phone, or maybe it's in a video in a web conference or whatever it might be. There's a teacher every day that provides instruction to those students. And then, they can have some activities that those students can participate in to be able to meet the target of the day and to continue their learning while away from school and be able to do that online.

Superintendent Godfrey:
This will be curriculum that teachers who teaching in-person in the classroom can also drop in and use to meet the needs of students who have perhaps been missing class or had to be absent because of a quarantine or an illness in the fall.

Ross:
That is a hundred percent correct.

Superintendent Godfrey:
What is the student going to be receiving at school?

Ross:
They could get that same online so that the students who are able to can seamlessly transition between being at school with their teacher and also working online and the teacher will have that curriculum and that content already made online to help them and assist them to best meet the needs of the students and to be able to individualize the instruction for those students based on where they're at on the learning progress.

Superintendent Godfrey:
So in other words, a teacher would not have to create online content for a studen