This school year has been the most challenging year for teachers, students, and families. It seems every day there is a new change, new challenge, or new piece of technology to learn. Of course, that means we have to be creative and flexible (like more than teachers already are!). For me, that means moving my virtual classroom my physical classroom at school to my home. This change was necessitated by a 14 day required quarantine due to our daughter having close contact with Covid. (We are all ok!)
NOTE: Our district was 100% virtual from August-October, then we went in-person for 6 weeks and we have been 100% virtual since December. Teachers have the option to teach from their home or from school.
Teaching From Home: My Set-Up
After teaching virtually from my classroom for most of the school year, I wanted to make my teach from home set-up as similar as possible to give my kids consistency.
The set-up is very similar to what I have in my classroom. I have two laptops: a personal computer and a school laptop. The school laptop is hooked up to the TV with an HDMI cord.
The school laptop is only for displaying stuff on the TV. We don’t do any screen sharing so everything is displayed on the TV. Including videos, document camera, songs, etc.
The personal laptop is only used in our live meeting. We use Microsoft Teams as our live platform and that’s the only thing that my personal laptop is used for.
In order to teach from home, we needed an easel. I searched Amazon for an easel that would hold my chart paper but also was small enough to use in my home office. I found this easel and loved it because it was small and on wheels so it’s easy to move. It’s also a dry erase board so I can use it for a whiteboard too! After 2 days of using it, I am very impressed! CLICK THE IMAGE TO GO TO AMAZON!
We’re also using the same laptop stand that we have in my classroom. But for the one for home, I ordered a pink one!
I love this laptop stand because you can adjust the height, it tilts and rotates! It’s been amazing in virtual learning and it’s been great for teaching from home! CLICK THE IMAGE TO GO TO AMAZON!
Since I’m working from home and don’t have all the supplies like at school, I was able to get into my room and grab stuff. I want to keep it organzied so the office stays somewhat clean (somewhat…being the key word). So I am keeping everything in this plastic tub. I know where everything is and if I need to clear off desk space, it’s easy to move.
Here is a video of one of our lessons from our home classroom! In this video, we kick off our Penguins Research Project with a schema map, read aloud, and a song!
For more on virtual teaching, check out these posts:
