[L.I. Tech Advisors, Managed Service Provider logo. Title card: "Long Island Tech - Episode 1. Ms. Naomi Fredman, Director of Technology, Hebrew Academy of Nassau County.] Anthony: Anthony Buonaspina, um this is one of our uh COVID series
and uh today i'm interviewing uh miss Naomi
Fredman from uh Hebrew Academy of Nassau County. She's the
Director of Technology there. She's a wonderful uh person in general
and uh she is extremely talented in her
profession and i would like to introduce her and uh you know basically
interview her about uh how her school was prepared
for uh this COVID shutdown experience and um
you know and what we're doing uh now and what we're gonna be doing into the
[A split-screen webcam feed of Anthony and Naomi, each in a remote location.] future. um anyway Naomi, Naomi: um thank you so much Anthony it is
really a treat to uh be part of this series
um i think more information is so important uh for us to share with
one another because that's really how we can evolve
and learn um and i thought i'd start by just kind
of walking you through the process that the Hebrew Academy went
through to um switch from
obviously uh learning in person to digital- to the digital platform and
one thing that's really important as a as a Director of Technology
is making sure you have a very strong network of other people in the same
field so toward the end of february um
we've been chatting online with the network i've been chatting with the
network about this possibility of a digital
environment a possibility that like other countries
specifically Italy um there may be a need
to keep kids out. So the first thing everybody was
sharing with one another is what they were what they normally do during a snow
day um and we were talking about it would be
extended in terms of a snow day and i thought to myself um
it was important to develop a classroom that was as close to a real classroom as
possible because the star of the show is
always the teacher. And the teacher would want to teach in his or her
comfort zone. So I looked at three different platforms
in terms of places uh the children would log into and the
teacher would log into to learn. So because we're a Google school
naturally we looked at i looked at Google Hangouts, but what i didn't like
about Google Hangouts was it didn't have that classroom
feel where all the students would be on the screen at one time and it didn't
have the kind of controls that a teacher needs to mute and unmute
and things like that. And i looked at Microsoft Teams as well
and again since we're a Google school the thought
of teaching everyone how to use Microsoft
and bringing Microsoft in didn't make sense either. The Zoom
platform was something that some of us on the administrative level
were very experienced with i knew about the tools Zoom had and
I contacted Zoom at the beginning of March just to inquire if we could buy a
monthly subscription for about 150 teachers
and what that would look like um so i was able to generate a quote
I conferred with our business office and a lot of- a lot of the principals and
the administrators really didn't forecast or didn't really
understand the direction that the schools were going to be moving in
um so it took about a week or so to get everybody fully committed. So by
this by the a week and a half into March, before the
shutdown everyone kind of understood that we
needed to prepare for this situation and what i have at Hebrew Academy which
is so wonderful is the ability to collaborate
with administrators, teachers, etc., and we put our minds our heads together
to come up with the best solution for each campus.
We have four campuses so each campus kind of needed their own
separate model. But, I felt it was important institutional-wide
to model each campus kind of in a similar way because many of our
parents have kids in more than one campus.
So there were two pieces to the puzzle that I felt were extremely important.
One piece was making sure teachers were comfortable using the Zoom
platform to speak directly to their students
and the other piece was making sure teachers were comfortable
posting assignments and worksheets and etc. on Google Classroom
so in terms of Zoom we we um the week of the shutdown
the administrators gave me and other people that work on the ed-
tech side of HANC time to meet with the teachers.
um the high school shut down one day and had the teachers um
trained in Zoom and Google Classroom other campuses had set aside two hours
during the school day and had teachers sub for other teachers
so that we could come in and train the teachers on Zoom and Google Classroom.
But again, it was a situation that needed to evolve
and the administrators were extremely supportive
and they understood - while they didn't understand necessarily the mechanism of
Google Classroom or Zoom - they understood that we needed to have a
very strong uh platform to host the kids
and we needed it to start immediately. We didn't want to have any downtime.
The an expectation uh with our community of parents is
that we will um continuously uh develop a
strong program for their children um either virtually or or in person.
So by the first official week of the shutdown
uh all the teachers had begun to become familiar with Zoom
and all of the teachers had enrolled and created Google Classrooms.
Another piece to the puzzle that really worked was
hosting the Zoom links and the Google Classrooms
on Google sites so the two major, campuses the two major elementary school
campuses, uh created Google - I created Google sites
with them so that a first grader would click on
the first grade page and then the first grader would click on
the link next to 9 a.m, and the link next to 10 a.m, because we really wanted
the kids to be independent from the parents. We
knew that that a lot of our parents have more than
one child and we wanted to empower the children
to be able to manipulate this digital environment themselves.
And what's kind of exciting is even our youngest
users - those would be our four-year-olds in our early childhood centers -
have become capable of clicking on the links and joining the
classrooms. um we also made
it a uh for Zoom we had it so they would just simply click
and enter the waiting room. We began the process
by keeping our uh security on Zoom lighter because we felt that in the
beginning of the process if we put in all the security measures
for the first week or two it would be it would be a little more difficult for
the kids to log in and we wanted them to get familiar with
the environment and then we were going to start to put the
restrictions in place. Google Classroom we we sent out join
codes so that the safety of Google Classroom
was in place right away where students would have to sign into
Google Classroom through a join code so those weren't
open publicly either. And then, over the course of the the next
few weeks, we started to implement the waiting room
in Zoom so teachers would have to let the students in one at a time.
We mandated that students had to name themselves so that the teachers knew
who they were letting in and then as the quote Zoom bombing
you know infiltration became apparent in the media we
went immediately to authenticated users which limited anyone joining our Zoom
to being a member of our organization. um this whole process, as i said,
was uh successful because of the collaboration of the administration
and the collaboration of the teachers. However a huge piece of our success
was the support we received from our technology support.
And not to toot your horn, Anthony, but without the support of L.I. Tech,
we would not have succeeded. L.I. Tech created
a helpline for our parents so this way not only did our teachers have a
helpline should they have any issues with their
technology, the parents on their end had a place to go to resolve their
issues. um and this took a tremendous amount of
effort uh and it continues to do so uh from L.I.
Tech but um the um the piece that's so
important is that our technicians are evolving with the
situation. um so that also lent to its uh its
success. um the teachers and the teachers, again,
just to go back a little became very comfortable with the Zoom environment
with Google Classroom. But what started to need to evolve was
moving away from more of a traditional style of a teacher presenting
information for the children and the children completing assignments.
We needed to kind of start to structure the lesson
in more of a collaborative style - small groups,
project based - and that's really where we are right now.
um the teachers a lot of teachers are very comfortable with more of a
traditional style, but we're we're training them on using
breakout rooms and using other Google apps
to uh give their students other platforms
to uh you know to learn skills and content
and the hope is over the summer for the teachers to participate in more
professional development so that when they start in the fall
- depending on what the picture looks like - they'll have more um
they'll have more resources available to them in terms of how they want to
structure their curriculum. And, as the Director of
Technology, my role has gone - it has
has really um been a huge i i've been uh supporting the
teachers in that many of them need individualized uh
attention based on their level of comfort with
technology. So my schedule is really designed
to support the teachers uh for the teachers to
schedule time to work with me one-on-one and of course our building level ed-tech
coordinators have been instrumental in working
individually with the teachers. So I've hosted both a series
of professional development with groups of teachers
but also with individual teachers and um again we- we troubleshoot
and we move forward um with the best practices for our students.
Anthony: Sounds amazing. I mean you did an amazing job in a short time.
And uh the fact that you've gotten this far i could say
personally i said you're ahead of many of the schools um i've been uh
hearing about and so on and you know it's
truly amazing what you've done in such a short period of time.
Now that we've going forward like you said you can have some professional
development teachers and everything's excellent training is always so
paramount and so important uh beyond that what do you think
next year is going to look like if we can have a you know
what is it a mix of things? On-site, remote? I mean the other thing I look at
this is we just we given an opportunity of looking you know
doing something we never would have done before
ourselves. Taking the opportunity of uh you know trying all this technology out
and trying to go remote we kind of forced our hand was
forced on this so what have we learned from this and
what can we use going forward that can benefit us?
Naomi: well um in general um looking at the fall we need to be
prepared for a very for various um scenarios.
um in my in my uh vision Ii foresee that uh should the buildings
be open,
based on what we're seeing in other countries
there's a strong possibility that we'll be running an "A"
day and a "B" day where half the population
will come to school on Monday and the other half will be learning remotely on
Monday, and then vice versa on Tuesday.
In that case, what we're going to need to prepare
is cameras in each classroom - mounted cameras - and the teachers will
live stream their classes on specific channels
uh so that the children that are learning digitally that day
will be able to easily easily be a part of the lesson
because it wouldn't be Zoom since the teacher would be
managing students in the room and virtually
we would also have to set up a mechanism for the students that are watching via
live stream to be able to ask the teacher questions
and participate as well. So there's a number of apps that we
can use to do that um so the teacher would as she or he
are teaching would have their own device open
which would be streaming the questions and that the students may have
uh during the live stream. um the um students um
the live stream situation would and the live stream channels
would be set up in such a way like we're doing with Zoom right now
where it would be easy for the student to manipulate from one channel to
another based on where they need it to be. Now in
our smaller classrooms or our small group work for example
if a teacher has a math group that meets at 11 o'clock every day
and she has only five students, the need to live
stream uh wouldn't necessarily be- wouldn't necessarily be necessary and
for that we could use Google Hangout or Zoom or Facetime. We would probably
need to individualize depending on the classroom.
Another change that we need to implement for the fall
is the schedule of the school day. Our high school and our middle school
for the most part continued with the regular scheduled day
a nine-to-five you know or eight-to-four day where the
students would were the students because they were
older were able to participate in many many Zooms
throughout the day whereas our elementary schools um
shortened the school day. Looking forward in the fall,
I think it's going to be extremely important to have small class sizes
so that the students are given as much attention as possible.
Whereas right now, because we were kind of- because the
whole situation evolved and we didn't know how long it would be for
and we have child care issues with the teachers,
uh students were grouped not just with their regular class but
with an additional class so given any given time we may have a
teacher teaching more than 30 students at a time. So
that's not a realistic model in terms of teaching uh
in terms of teaching. So that's going to be a big
part of the process in terms of how to schedule things in the fall.
The other piece in the fall that's going to be very important
is always having um office hours or support hours
so that those students learning virtually will have a time
to come face-to-face with the teacher so the the actual
day itself will need to look different. um there's going to be i there's going
to be people regardless of if the school is open
for children to come in that will opt to only be virtual.
So to have the strong virtual program in place
with the actual going into school program
is going to be very necessary and decisions
on this need to be made within a very finite amount of time so that we
can propose a concrete plan to our parents
um ahead of the school year. Anthony: I see all right yeah
again we're going into the unknown right now but it looks like you
have some foresight as far as uh how you're going to be approaching this
um and we're going to have to be able to be moving and changing on a
moment's notice depending on what kind of regulations we get hit with and so on
going forward. And from a technology standpoint,
i mean uh it looks like you know even with the
Zoom and Teams and so on, technology has been evolving to
accommodate us which is great as well because we we definitely need those
tools and those those tools need to be enhanced in order
to accommodate this new quote-unquote norm. Naomi: yeah one one
issue one issue we um foresaw
or we forecasted was a need for our parents, students to have mobile
devices. Most families have a computer and an
iPad but they don't necessarily have a device for each
child. So because the schools have several devices in the buildings
we came up with a system to loan devices to families uh on it on a need basis
as well as teachers so we we've collected the mobile devices from the
buildings, housed them in the business office and
developed a checkout system so that um parents had a way to
bring- to bring in devices to their homes uh to best serve their
their children.
Anthony: Yeah, that's so important because
some of these kids don't have technology and some you know parents have multiple
kids at home and maybe only one or two devices and
that's not enough so it's good that you have that program in
place so i'm assuming going forward next year you may be you know purchasing
or working out something where you have
more of those types of devices going forward Naomi: Right right Anthony: that would be
an awesome thing to have for the parents Naomi: Yeah Anthony: All right
I am I think that's about you know everything i have at this point
um i want to thank you very much for this interview
uh this was very um informative and uh i think uh a lot of people are gonna
get a lot out of this uh before for what you've done alone and
what your plans are going forward. I mean it's thanks for sharing that i Naomi: I really
appreciate having the opportunity to share that
and um i think um as the enviro- as you know um people in the in the
education field work together we can all come up with
the best plan going forward for our children.
A key to the plan is flexibility and the importance of allowing a
situation to evolve in real time. um that's um very very important.
uh navigating through this uh difficult uh time we have. Anthony: Great
all right thank you very much all right um this is
Anthony from L.I. Tech Advisors um you know again this is a
you know COVID series we've been running and um thank you for tuning in
Naomi: Thank you [L.I. Tech Advisors, Managed Service Provider logo. www.litechadvisors.com. (631) 212-8377. info@litechadvisors.com.]