State College Area School District

Synchronous In School and Remote

Our elementary plan for returning to school in the fall has shifted to allow for both our in school and remote students to come together as a classroom community. Although this plan was not originally a part of our model, given the number of families who selected in school instruction, we needed to move to a synchronous approach to be able to meet our health and safety plan's physical distance requirements. An added advantage of this model is that if/when we move to a fully remote experience, students will remain with their same teacher and classmates at their home school with their home school teachers.

In order to more clearly understand the perspective of students in each model, the following information describes students' experiences.

In school Synchronous

Students attending in school will not be on their computers all day long. Teachers will teach live lessons to students who are in our brick and mortar schools, but they will need to remain at the front of the room to follow our health and safety plan. After the live teaching lessons, students will work on independent tasks that reinforce the objectives of the lesson, just like they always do. Some of these tasks will be paper pencil and some of them will require the use of their Chromebook. In addition, there will be times throughout the day where being logged into the computer will be necessary including intervention, enrichment, and other supplemental learning including, for example, independent projects, reading books or practicing skills, etc.

Remote Synchronous

Students attending school via our remote option will video conference into our classrooms through Google Meet. They will experience the same live lessons the in school students experience through the use of a web cam. They will participate via Google Meet so they can share their thinking and ask questions. The Google Meet screen will be projected so the in school students can see them and the web cam will allow for the remote students to see the in school students. Lessons will be recorded if students are not able to synchronously attend the live lesson.

All Remote

If/when we need to move to an all remote mode of instruction, students will remain with their teacher and their cohort of classmates. We know that many families desired this connection to their home school so this option allowes for those continued connections.