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Image Credit: Two Screens for Teachers
EdSurge
A Shockingly Simple Way to Improve Online School
By Betsy Corcoran
Jan 27, 2021
When Nettie Johnson fired up her first online class for her fifth
graders in Topeka, Kansas last March, she knew they were flying by the
seat of their pants. She had her laptop and Wi-Fi “but it was really
difficult because if I was sharing my screen, I couldn’t really see the
kids. So it was hard to interact or see if they were engaged.”
Her fellow teachers commiserated. “We talked about Zoom problems and
the lack of being able to see the kids,” Johnson recalls. “But we
didn’t really talk about how to fix this.”
That challenge—how to connect with students—quickly became one of the
most frustrating aspects of teaching online for most teachers.
Big, audacious problems often seem ripe for big complex solutions. Yet
many fields have found relief in low-cost remedies that may not solve
the underlying problem but still make a huge difference: Placing
newborns on their backs cuts sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by
half. In Africa, widespread use of bed nets treated with insecticide
has dramatically reduced the risk of malaria. Worldwide, wearing a face
mask, combined with other measures such as social distancing, slows the
spread of the coronavirus.
And improving how teachers interact with students in online learning? One simple remedy seems, well, almost too simple.
Give teachers two screens.
A former student of another Topeka teacher offered to send a few
teachers a second monitor and the right cord to connect to their
computers. “It was a game-changer,” Johnson recalls. “It brought a
little piece of the classroom onto the screen. Their smiles! I could
see their faces on the larger monitor and interact through the laptop.
It brought some of the ‘personal’ back into teaching,” she says.
Now, that former student-turned-benefactor, Matt Lerner, is running an
ambitious effort to provide a second screen to as many public school
educators as possible. Called Two Screens for Teachers, the effort has
already delivered almost 22,000 screens to public school K-12 teachers
across the U.S. since September. The nonprofit has raised $3.25 million
to pay for them. And it has a waiting list of 180,000 teachers who
could use a second screen to connect to their classes. (U.S. public
K-12 teachers can request one here.)
“Having a second monitor is the number one thing on the must-have
list,” says Jessica Valera, a district instructional technology
coordinator at San Mateo Union High School District in California, who
spent years as a high school biology teacher. Everything else, she
says, is a “nice to have.”
Prior to the pandemic, many people who worked extensively with
technology often took multiple screens for granted. Lerner, a long-time
entrepreneur based in Seattle, says he’s been using two or three
screens ever since leaving college. When a friend, Carlos, mentioned
that he had made a huge difference in a teacher’s life just by buying
her a second monitor, Lerner’s jaw dropped.
He started asking teachers he knew in Seattle about their work setups.
“I interviewed about 20 teachers,” Lerner says. “Two of the younger
ones had a second monitor. No one else had thought about getting one.”
The teachers had plenty of questions for him: What would they have to
buy? Wouldn’t it be expensive?
The answers were shockingly simple: A new screen costs about $115. The
only other thing most teachers need is the right cable to connect it to
their computers. That was it.
Some tech-oriented teachers and administrators figured out the
two-screen solution immediately. “Honestly, I’m so nerdy that just as
our school went virtual in March, I ordered all teachers a second
27-inch monitor for home use,” says Scott Holcomb, director of
technology at Crosstown High in Memphis, Tenn. “Some were like, ‘Ughhh,
why? I have no need. I have no room.’ But lo and behold!”
Rob McHugh, who teaches math at San Mateo Union High School and
previously worked as a technology product manager, juggles three
screens. One large monitor lets him divide the screen between his
students and the current work; a laptop keeps all his “teacher tools,”
from attendance trackers to lesson plans, agendas and so on, handy. And
he uses a tablet logged into Zoom as a student so he can see what his
students are seeing.
Pro tip: McHugh has lined up his second monitor physically above his
laptop to keep his big picture view of his students eye-level—that way,
they feel he’s looking straight at them. “I feel like this gives me
control over what the students see and yet it’s not just me
FaceTiming,” he adds.
Researchers from the University of Washington’s College of Education
recently reported that teachers who began using a second monitor from
Two Screens felt “nearly twice as connected” to their students, based
on the results of a survey of over 3,800 teachers. Students
“appreciated not having to wait for me to move the gallery out of my
way or have to tell me that they couldn’t see something because I was
off the screen and didn’t know,” wrote one teacher. “It keeps me better
organized with less downtime, so it’s a better experience for the
students,” another said.
To get free screens to teachers, Lerner and a former colleague, Mike
Mathieu, gathered a team of friends, relatives and other acquaintances.
Engineers built a program to source and buy the lowest priced new
screens and the right cables. They also built a simple signup flow in
which teachers could pick what kind of external monitor display port is
supported by their computers.
Shipping is handled by the manufacturers or by Amazon. (Lerner says the
logistics of cleaning and shipping older monitors was daunting). Other
Two Screen team members are raising money or applying for grants.
Lerner’s father won a couple of community grants in Kansas to fund
monitors for teachers there. Mathieu covers other expenses (including
paying a modest support team), ensuring that any donations to the
organization goes straight to pay the monitor bill.
Demand keeps growing, and Lerner is trying to deliver monitors within a
month. That’s increasingly a tall order: Two Screens has amassed
180,000 requests, which translates into needing another $20 million.
The nonprofit only fulfills requests from teachers with a school
address from U.S. public K-12 schools. It has partnered with
DonorsChoose to broaden its fundraising efforts, but it needs every
donation it can get. (You can donate here.)
“As a techie, I understood the productivity improvements of using
multiple screens,” Lerner says. “What I didn’t get was the power of the
human connection.”
Read this and other EdSurge article by clicking here
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