Distance Learning and Teaching Earth Science

For the past ten years I have been teaching my students face to face in class and creating videos so they can access important material anywhere and anytime. This is commonly known as blended learning. Now that many school buildings are closed this has become even more important than it has ever been.

student watching a lesson video and taking notes on a paper handout

student notes on paper

online classroom that I used to use in an online learning platform known as Moodle

These notes, handouts, and videos have been created by me over the summer break. I know that a lot of people think that teachers have "summers off" but if you have a teacher in your family you know that couldn't be farther from the truth. Any teacher I know has a non-stop feeling that they have to always do more to help their students. I personally struggle with it daily and doubt it will ever go away.

I am much more productive early in the morning and over the summer I start off my day with a cup of coffee, a breakfast sandwich and I get to work right away. I honestly work around 6 hours a day over the summer because there is so much that I could be doing for my students before the school year starts.

For the past ten years one of the projects I have been working on is making more visually appealing. These kids are life-long consumers of visual knowledge and need info to be properly coded for them to find it interesting. I also create videos of me explaining the most important information and concepts. I live in a house with my husband, two teenage sons, a dog and a cat so when I record the videos I often do so in the quietest place I can find at home....I call it my "recording studio" some call it my car. I find that the acoustics are great in there and early on a summer morning it's a really comfortable temperature and there are almost no distractions.

In my opinion I believe that recording videos is worth my free summer time because it provides my students with a bunch of benefits...her are some.

1. they can be watched anywhere not just in the school building (even if they are absent they don't fall behind, and obviously during a pandemic and/or when school buildings are closed the learning can still continue)
2. students can control the volume (they jokingly have told me that at some times they like that they can control how loud I am 😆😆)
3. students can wear headphones and minimize distractions
4. The student can pause the video and write their notes then press play when they are ready. They no longer have to work at the same pace as the class. They can go back and re-listen to something that they found confusing. Essentially they are able to personalize their own learning.
5. my videos don't have an image of me in them so they aren't distracted by my hairstyle, clothes, expressions, etc. I have had students comment on this and tell me that because I don't include a video of me talking they were able to focus on what was most important.
6. The students can put their notes into Google classroom so they don't need a printer at home and won't be able to lose their notes.
7. The students have all of the materials that they need online and it's organized. They don't have a messy binder anymore.

If you would like to see what I have made you can download one of my lessons here and use it with your classes.

Link to my TPT page with a FREE lesson and many more resources 

that I have created over the summer.