Defunct ECOT Helped Teacher Prepare for Today’s Online Teaching
By: Claire Geary
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AVON LAKE, Ohio – Teaching online has been a fast and unexpected transition for most, but one teacher had the prior experience to make the switch much smoother.
Rob Schofield, an AP Government and Politics teacher at Avon Lake High School, taught for Electronic Classrooms for Tomorrow, better known as ECOT Ohio.
ECOT Ohio has now been closed since 2018, but Schofield is taking advantage of the lessons learned there.
“It helped me adapt to all of the different kind of circumstances that students experience outside of the classroom,” he said.
For the two-and-a-half years spent before being hired at Avon Lake, Schofield
said the routine was very similar: creating online versions of in-person work and giving students opportunities to ask questions via video chat.
But, the time to prepare was dramatically different with the COVID-19 emergency.
“Normally at ECOT we’d do similar things,” Schofield said. “But you’ve got three or four months to get ready for what’s going to happen – preparing curriculum, prepare videos, stuff like that.”
This week is spring break for Avon Lake City Schools, giving teachers the chance to adjust or create plans to teach and prepare students for the approaching AP Tests in May.
“I’m using break as an opportunity, since I teach AP Government, to look into some of the details of the modified AP test,” he said. “And also modify some of the review activities that I would normally do with students in order to better accommodate the newly created AP test.”
Some of those changes include the test being taken online to follow the proper social-distancing guidelines, and only a 45-minute window compared to the typical hours of testing.
Even with the changes made for the classroom, Schofield said he is prepared for the remainder of the school year to be held online.