The shutdown of Arizona school campuses for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year and the pivot to online classes has been a jarring change for many in the education field, including the teachers who are now tasked with moving their lesson plans for the rest of the year to the cyber world.

While making the move to put classes online might seem like a monumental task, many of the higher grade levels within Fountain Hills Unified School District were already incorporating technology into their daily routines in the classroom.

“Prior to this transition I was fairly experienced with utilizing technology in the classroom. My room is essentially a computer lab and my students operate on several different online platforms including Moodle and Google Classroom,” Fountain Hill High School teacher Matt Keating explained. “For some courses, our work was submitted online. For others we used it as a way to share and work on documents in a collaborative manner.

“Though my class was taught in a face-to-face manner, I provided many of the materials online. This aided in ensuring that students had access to all material as needed, and if students were sick they were able to access anything that they had missed. In total, the students in my courses were fairly well versed in utilizing online platforms for at least some aspect of their coursework.”

Still, the transition wasn’t as streamlined for everyone, Keating says, and even the teachers who had a large online component to their classes beforehand are still working out the kinks of going fully digital. To be fair, the teachers in the district only had a couple of weeks of preparation for this huge change to their jobs.

“When they (the district) first announced that we were taking an extra week off after spring break, that’s when we knew something was coming,” Fountain Hills Middle School teacher T.J. Buckley said. “After they announced that schools were canceled, we got a week to start getting things set up for online.”

Now a teacher’s days look completely different than they did on the first day of classes.

“I teach three different subjects, so each day is broken into working on each of those courses as a group – through grading, assigning work and answering emails – and then working specifically with individual courses each day,” Keating explained. “I offer direct instruction through video tele-conferencing each day of the week and individual tutoring sessions as needed. So, each day is a series of video conferences with my various courses and students, as well as responding to emails and grading submitted work.”

While there are plenty of technical issues giving educators headaches throughout the day, most FHUSD teachers agree that the biggest challenge of going fully online is losing the social aspect of teaching.

“I think, outside of technical difficulties that crop up every now and again, the biggest challenge has been the social component of teaching,” Keating said. “We are used to working with students face-to-face, and a lot is lost through email and even video conferencing.”

It has also been a tough realization that the day before spring break, a break that was only going to last a week, was the last time teachers would see their students this year.

“I feel like I’ve been reading a book and just Spark Notes the end of it,” Buckley explained. “I teach eighth grade and while some of my students will move up to the high school where I coach, a few of them are going to different high schools and that’s been rough; not just for me but for the students who might not get to see their friends at school again.”

Other than the social aspect of school, students seem to be handling this transition online relatively well, according to the teachers.

“In most ways the students are doing great,” Keating said. “Their grasp on technology and interacting online is second nature to many of them. They are also very adaptable, and are taking this in stride. Though in other ways, this is very difficult. They are missing many of the social aspects of school, and having to navigate their courses purely online is certainly a challenge. “