PRESS EDITORIAL: From Fredonia, a high-tech lesson in remote teaching

In-person teaching in classrooms is better than remote teaching via the internet.

That truism has been uttered a gazillion times since schools were shut down in spring.

But it would be helpful if educators and others would refrain from repeating the obvious and instead concentrate on improving the alternative.

Remote teaching is a necessity today—for children whose parents choose not to send them to school for health reasons, for students of schools that offer only part-time classroom teaching, for students who are quarantined and, potentially, for every student in school districts where schools may have be shuttered again in response to a coronavirus outbreak—and it may be here to stay in some form.

So make it better. The key to that is to make internet teaching look and act like the real thing. Live streaming of the classroom experience is the answer—putting information technology to work to virtually transport teachers teaching classes into the homes of students.

It is not an easy answer, however. The technology is tricky and it’s not cheap. But it can be done, which has been confirmed in remarkable fashion by a technology teacher at Ozaukee High School in Fredonia.

Only someone not familiar with the technology achievements of Ozaukee High students would be surprised that a small, rural high school could accomplish what many American school districts, including those in large metropolitan areas, have been unable to do.         Demonstrating what they learned in the Northern Ozaukee School District’s  STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) curriculum, student teams from Ozaukee High have been repeat winners in national competition for robotics and new product development.

Now the school’s director of information technology, Dan Schreuers, has developed an award-deserving system that allows students in their homes to see, hear and participate in classes being held in NOSD classrooms.

Schreuers built 60 learning stations consisting of a flat-screen TV monitor, an omni-directional microphone and a Chromebook laptop computer mounted on a vertical stand with wheels. Set up in camera-equipped classrooms, the devices display in real time what is going on in the room—the teachers articulating their lessons and using visual aids and information on white boards and students asking and answering questions. Students at home view and listen to the classroom experience as it is displayed on the learning station through the free, easily accessed Zoom videoconferencing  platform. Using their own Chromebooks, they can communicate with the class.

NOSD School Supt. Dave Karrels summed up what the program accomplishes, saying at-home students can now “be part of the class, go at the same pace, hear the same lessons from the teacher and be able to do the same work.”

There are other advantages: teachers can take attendance and keep at-home students accountable because can see them on the monitor; teachers don’t have to make separate lesson plans for teaching at-home students; and if school had to be shut down, teachers could take the learning stations home to teach their classes.

The pandemic will end someday, but many of the means fashioned by society to deal with it will remain because they turned out to be better ways of doing things. Corporations and government agencies have learned that videoconferencing in many instances is more efficient and effective than face-to-face meetings and business travel for planning, budgeting and staff training.

Live-streamed, interactive teaching developed as a pandemic expedient will never be a perfect substitute for in-person classroom teaching, but it can certainly be the next best thing, during and after the pandemic.

Thanks to a small high school in northern Ozaukee County, we know for sure it can be done.