How Can EdTech Eliminate Snow Days?

Scanlon, E., McAndrew, P., & O'Shea, T. (2015). Designing for Educational Technology to Enhance the Experience of Learners in Distance Education: How Open Educational Resources, Learning Design and MOOCs Are Influencing Learning. Journal Of Interactive Media In Education, 2015(1),

Summary:

  

The main points of this article talk mostly about how technology can be used to make learners experience better. This article is sure to tell you that technology by itself is not a good enough tool, it can enhance learning, but once again it is pedagogy (how something is taught) in conjunction with technology, that will have the biggest impact. The article also talks about how more learners felt motivated when they are made to feel like they are in control of their own learning.

The article mentions how open educational resources, the learning design, and the learning analytics factor into a positive learning environment for these students. These are all talked about in reference to "distance learning", which is teaching someone who cannot get to a school. Which is the basic concept of a snow day in itself.  

So how can these 3 things (resources, design, and analytics) help to eliminate snow days? Well in a sense they can help to make it easier to still teach on a snow day. If we are all using proper lesson design and resources, we can still create properly insightful lessons, and with analytics we can track to see if it was successful or not. Let's take these three points from the article and examine them in the context of a snow day lesson.

Resources:
Using our students existing technology (iPad, chrome book, laptop etc.) we can create online lessons that are designed to keep our students from missing out on a day of instruction and lessons. Things like Class Craft can be a fun example of just such a resource. Class Craft is a game based learning tool that uses your own lessons to give the students the feeling of progressing through an RPG setting while still learning. Other resources include things like RAZ-Kids, STMath, etc. These resources are great to use to keep our students engaged. These resources are also so open that they can give the learners that motivation and control over their learning that was mentioned in the article.

Design:
As I am sure any teacher will tell you, lesson plans are a necessary pain to make sure we are all prepared for the day. Most teachers will also tell you that they have to be flexible, because a lesson rarely goes how they planned it. However, they do have a consistence design to their lessons. Design of a lesson can make or break how a learner absorbs that information, and if we were to use technology to teach on a snow day, the design would be of the utmost importance.

Analytics:
The resources, and design of a lesson are instrumental to a student's success, but what about the data from the lesson? Well that's where analytics come in. Special education teachers are constantly having to take, analyze, and plan lessons using their data. It is important to a successful classroom and it will be even more so if we were to use technology on a snow day. We would need a way to keep our students accountable, we would need a way to measure their success or failure, we would need to analyze all of the things that we give them so as to plan the next lesson with the highest possibility of success.  

So in the end, technology can help to eliminate snow days, absolutely, with these three points in mind that is. With these three points in mind, a teacher can successfully plan, implement, and review any lesson given to their students on a snow day. If a teacher uses these three points to plan a snow day lesson, then they will be able to continue their week without missing a beat, which is a great thing.