Full blog post and show notes available here. Let's get real, y'all! While the world is battling the coronavirus, teachers and schools are scrambling to figure out what this home learning thing looks like. I've put together 12 practical tips for remote learning during school closures. To be clear, this is about this particular crisis situation. These are not the same tips that I would share for a normal school day. Let's keep this practical. Let's prioritize what's really important right now. Let's share and collaborate to make the best of this situation. 12 Practical Tips for Remote Learning During School Closures I wish I could do this for you. I wish I could take this burden off of the many teachers who are in a panic right now. Take comfort in the fact that we are all in this together. Here's some practical advice to consider for home learning during school closures. 1. Grace is Greater Than Grades We’ve never faced this problem before, and we need to make sure our priorities are in the right place. While many are focused on the tech, and how to deliver lessons electronically, we must face a harsher reality. This isn’t just an eLearning day. This is not a snow day. This is UNPRECEDENTED. Students, teachers, and parents are scared and suddenly balancing fears and anxiety with working and teaching from home. All of us, including you and me, need a little grace right now. Under normal circumstances, I would never recommend completion grades, but right now, they may be the best we can get. I wrote more about grace in this post. 2. Prioritize Emotional Needs For some of our students, we are their only safe place. They miss their teachers and the safety of school. Even our students that have safe and loving homes miss their classmates and teachers. Let's prioritize the emotional needs above the learning needs. I always come back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and meeting these basic needs is more important than a worksheet or checklist. If you can, schedule a daily or weekly office hours check-in with your class. If your school has enabled a video conferencing tool like Zoom or Hangouts Meet, set aside a couple of hours to be online for any students who want to chat. Record a good morning video for your students. Show them your workspace, your family, your pet, anything to connect on a human level. Everyone is missing connections right now. Keep interactions light-hearted when possible. Try having a joke of the day, funny video of the day, or playing a game. 3. Choose a Platform and Stick with It! As I learned many weeks ago from my interview with Jennifer Pearson, a teacher who had been teaching her students in China remotely for many weeks, this is NOT the time to throw a bunch of new tools at our teachers and students. If you were using Google Classroom, or another LMS before your school closed, great! If not, you may be scrambling to figure this out--and that's okay. (Here are some cheat sheets to help with Google Classroom.) But as a campus, and as a teacher, choose your platform and stick with it! Consistency is your best friend right now. It doesn't need to be fancy. It doesn't need to be innovative. Create a one-stop-shop for your students--something I have always recommended. Whether that is Google Classroom, a Google Doc, a Google Site, SeeSaw, Microsoft Teams, whatever, keep it simple! Only use new tools if you haven't been using this kind of technology at all! We are in survival mode. If we can get kids to engage in any kind of learning right now, we should count ourselves lucky. 4. Prioritize Offline Activities for Equity We need more offline activities than online activities for multiple reasons: Digital equity is a significant problem in most areas, so we must give students offline options. Even students with devices and an Internet connection, shouldn't spend all day in front of a screen. The distractions online have always been an issue, but now more than ever, as coronavirus talks dominate every media. The s