CCISD holds Virtual Teacher Institute prior to start of classes

By PAMELA GRANT

Cove Leader-Press

With COVID-19 creating a new “normal” and nearly half of CCISD parents opting for their children to learn from home, this year’s Copperas Cove ISD teachers have worked hard to prepare themselves to teach both in the classroom as well as virtually.

CCISD has worked to make sure that their staff is as prepared as possible for school’s start. 

To that end, CCISD held a Virtual Teacher Institute Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. and a separate planning and creation workday on Monday.

Teachers were separated into elementary teachers and secondary teachers with instructors moving from one group to the other. Everyone in attendance wore protective face coverings and maintained social distancing while working to understand the lessons presented. 

Thursday’s lessons ranged from virtual formative assessments and learning how to use Zoom for tutorials to learning how to plan and prepare asynchronous course materials. Friday’s lessons covered how to create and upload videos, paperless assignments, how to take attendance for at-home students, and more.

“Our challenge is to make this as paperless as possible,” said Danielle “Danni” Patterson, Copperas Cove ISD Director of Digital Learning and Innovation. “We hired the best teachers at Copperas Cove ISD, but now we’re taking their tools and turning them into virtual tools, and we hope this institute will provide them with what they need.”

She said that they were working to provide their teachers with a virtual toolbox to make them as successful as possible in the upcoming year. They are working to make everything 100 percent virtual. Students have been provided with laptops embedded with webcams and microphones. Teachers are working to become proficient in programs like Nearpod, PlayPosit, Schoology, and Edunuity.

“We’ve been learning how to utilize Schoology…We’ve been learning how to create lessons for students, instructional videos, and planning collaboratively because we’re going to work as groups. I feel like it’s bringing everyone in our district closer together,” said Amy Jellison, a 4th grade teacher for Hettie Halstead Elementary. This year is Jellison’s 31st year of teaching. 

Jellison will be teaching all subjects for the students in her 4th grade class. With the asynchronous learning, Jellison will be recording a 5-15-minute mini lesson for each subject per day for her at-home students. She said that it’s difficult because it takes a lot of planning, but in some ways it will also be easier because she will only be teaching one set of students. She is looking to find ways to translate some of her favorite games and workshops from previous year’s classes into a virtual format so that they will be able to play them with family members or maybe other students.

On Friday, Jellison taught her peers how to design virtual mini-lessons. “I’m not only teaching my students, I’m also teaching my peers,” said Jellison.

Jellison said that some of her peers are nervous about the upcoming year, but they are also very excited to be able to teach and interact with students again. Jellison said that she is especially looking forward to seeing some of her students from last year and seeing how much they have grown. She said that she has missed the connection that she and other teachers have with the students.

“We’re all super excited. This is what we live for,” said Jellison. “We have a strong community in our schools.”