Dive Brief:

• After St. Mary’s Academy in the Pacific Northwest had its fifth snow day of the school year, toward the end of the first semester, teachers and administrators created a Digital Learning Day Protocol that has governed the last five snow days.
• With teacher and researcher Ellie Gilbert, Alyssa Tormala, instructional technology coach and information science department chair at St. Mary’s, writes for Edutopia that teachers post instructions and virtual officer hour schedules by 10 a.m. on their learning management system, and students are expected to spend 45 to 60 minutes on each class period activity and submit a deliverable through the LMS.
• Tormala and Gilbert say the digital learning platform and access to devices are part of their successful Digital Learning Days, but learning objectives and a clearly communicated, proactive protocol developed by faculty and administrators are most important — and communicating with students through smartphones or email can work just as well as one-to-one devices and communication via LMS.

Dive Insight:

Even though snow days generally get made up at the end of the school year, they can still be disruptive, especially when it comes to preparing for exams. At St. Mary’s, the motivation for developing the protocol came to help students continue studying for their finals even when school was out.

For most schools, a critical element of the protocol has to be accounting for students without internet access at home or devices on which to work. The lack of internet may be because of the snow or a standard part of their lives. Either way, teachers should be developing offline activities for student to do and demonstrate completion of once school is back in session.