Swine Flu!

Here is a great opportunity:

All of the schools in Qatar, including The American School of Doha where I work, have been closed for a minimum of one week because of the swine flu. Other nations in the area such as Bahrain have closed all schools until November. There is no certainty when we will start up again.

So, this means our school has become a great experiment in integrating technology. We have our own Blackboard system. Teachers are required normally to always post homework and other such announcements on the site, and students are required to check it regularly. This is occuring when school is going on normally. The real reason for having the system is for this type of emergency. As we are in an area of the world prone to war and other such emergencies our school needs a backup so we can continue teaching while our students are at home. We are now officially a pre-k through 12th grade school that is entirely online until we are allowed to reopen our schools. Our teachers and faculty are the most professional educators I have known, so it will be interesting to see how well they work in an exclusively online environment. Many of us did not know that students were at home until this morning when we arrived for work, so there is a ton of work that is being done to set up full instruction through Blackboard. I am instructing many people on how to best use podcasts, some other teachers are teaching others about Google Docs and various teachers are offering instruction in whatever technology they happen to be proficient in. It's all incredibly inconvenient, but exciting at the same time. There will be a lot of fun experimentation this week.

What is my job now that the facility where I work is no longer available for students to use? Where should I be focusing my efforts?

Please comment below to help me answer this question.

I'm going to post regularly this week on this topic so that I have a place where my experiences and thoughts are recorded. This is not a common situation, so I sould take advantage of it.

-Jason