From virtual band rooms to classrooms in dining rooms, this is how teachers are adjusting to distance learning

Lake County teachers form Facebook group for support as they transition to online teaching

LAKE COUNTY, Fla. – From guestrooms and dining rooms, teachers all across Lake County are showing us how they are adjusting to day two of distance learning.

Thousands of students logged online for district learning on Monday.

“Yesterday was kind of insane,” Tiffany Kendrick said, she is a Eustis 7th grade math teacher. “I wanted to meet up with all of my students, so having 22 students on a conference call was kind of insane.”

In fact, Kendrick is getting used to distance learning for 132 students spread across 6 periods. Lake County using an outside vendor called EDGINUITY, which had some issues on Monday the district said.

[RELATED: How to get your Lake County distance learning questions answered]

Leaders with Lake County Schools acknowledged the difficulties and according to spokeswoman Sherri Owens, part of the problem, including a brief outage, was due to a vendor.

“Every system is experiencing unprecedented usage over the next few days and we are hoping that they scale up to handle the record traffic. The vendor is aware of and addressing those issues, and we expect each day to get better as we go along. In fact, (Tuesday) seems much better, based on the feedback we are receiving from parents, students and teachers,” Owens said.

Kendrick agrees. However, still she created a private Facebook page for teachers to ask questions, collaborate and work together through this transition. In just over a week, the group had more than 800 members.

"I had no clue it was going to get as big as it got," she said. "I knew I had a lot of questions and concerns and I just thought why not start something where we could collaborate."

Within the group, there are tips and tricks, google classroom cheat sheets and memes to brighten up teachers' days.

Eustis High School teacher Stephanie Steele is an admin in the group and is also Google certified she said. Steel said when Lake County distributed Chromebooks to students last year she embraced the idea of online learning, and now is helping other teachers navigate the new way of teaching.

"It definitely helped teachers prepare for this week," Steele said from her virtual classroom. "Otherwise you had teachers that never used these programs before and they only had a few days to learn how to use them."

Like many other school districts, Lake County Schools extended its distance learning through at least May 1, district officials said.


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