Covid 19 and the new classroom.

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Prompt - Reflect and share how the current situation related with COVID-19 outbreak has been impacting you and your classwork.  What are the challenges? Any positives? Any visions of how the situation may impact your project, classwork, and career?

Covid-19 has changed the way I work,  how I interact with friends, and how I spend my leisure time.  My wife and I are both teachers, and this year our spring breaks fell on different weeks.  Mine was two weeks ago (the same as UNT's) and my wife's was this week, so I have been kind of social distancing for about 2 weeks. 

This first week back has been all about setting up what online instruction is going to look like for my district.  We have had trainings on google hangouts/meet, google classroom (our LMS of choice) and I have been asked to write some virtual curriculum for a couple of classes I teach so we can have take some pressure off fellow teachers next week when kids come back. 

It's bee interesting to say the least.  My wife has been home all this week and she is in the "high risk" category of people, so that has been stressful.  But we have managed to stay in side and away from people as much as possible so far. 

I'm glad I have chosen this career path in grad school, but I think online curriculum and design will be more and more important going forward, because I think this whole experience will allow many people to look at the possibilities of what a blended online/in person school system will look like. 

It's also interesting to think that jobs that people never thought could be done from home, will be proven to be able to work from home. 

I don't know how this will effect this class yet.  The mental space to focus on this has been lacking this week, but I think it will return once I get a little more used to working from home.  It's going to be more difficult to find a new client to design a course for, seeing as many of people I would ask to be a potential client, are now pretty busy with figuring out how to navigate this new world we live in.  But I will think outside the box and come up with something! 

I hope this all passes quickly, but I fear this might be a new normal for at least the rest of the spring. 

I miss sports :) 


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