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Virtual School Days are virtually hard to start

    Jubail School is part of the International Schools Group district. We are also member schools in the Near East South Asia council of overseas schools. (Note that Woodstock is also a member of NESA) NESA schools cooperate to develop ways of continuing education even when a school's population must be evacuated. Online learning can continue. We scheduled three Virtual School days in October to rehearse: students stayed home, teachers came to school, and education continued.

    Our district arranged a contract with a company in the U.S. to host our online coursework, using Moodle -- I implemented Moodle at Woodstock in 2007, as a local help for teachers and students.  Unfortunately the first day online was a disaster, with impossibly-long response times.  Perhaps the U.S. company was not prepared for 3000 users to login at 1am on Sunday morning (yes, the work-week in Arabia is Saturday-to-Wednesday!). The second and third days went fine, with little trouble and quite acceptable response times.  Most students logged in and completed their assigned tasks -- some of the teachers set up chatrooms to communicate in real-time (though that's not very efficient, frankly).  Our school, and most families, have rather slow and unreliable internet connections compared with more industrialized countries, so we dared not try any video, or even real-time audio.
    My attempt to get my high school class to participate in a webinar presentation online led by an advanced student was problematic.   We soldiered through it, but had to abandon the audio portion early on; rather, he showed his powerpoint slides to the class -- half of the class actually participated -- while speaking with me via Skype.  We will have to be assured of generally faster and more reliable internet connections before using audio or video technologies.
    Another touchy issue cropped up, that we finessed:  what of those students who did nothing?  There are any number of possible excuses, and it's difficult to contact parents consistently.  Probably 10 percent of our students showed no participation.  In my case, I frankly designed my lessons to avoid that point -- students had to finish their assignments by the end of the week, so they could have done them all on the last day of the week when we met in school.  We all learned a lot during our 3 Virtual School days, and will definitely be better prepared in case of any emergencies that prevent students from coming to class.  (note that last October during the Swine flu epidemic, the king suddenly declared the schools closed for 2 weeks, forcing an emergency Virtual School )

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