As many of us in this class know, COVID accelerated the rate at which many of us integrated online teaching into our careers. There was a mad scramble to create an efficient, EFFECTIVE way to help our students continue to receive an education during a very uncertain period of our lives. There were mistakes made; trial and error, and plenty of frustration for teachers, parents and students. This class helps us to reflect back on the technologies that worked well, and maybe the odd one that frustrated us.

I was a little luckier than some, since in the year previous to the pandemic, I had been given the opportunity to attend PD on technology for educational use. I spent time at a Google Summit in Saskatoon that introduced me to Google Classroom. After that week, I was convinced that this was the way to make education more accessible, and I worked for weeks to set up my online classrooms. They were always evolving, and still are. I have continued to use them in the right situations and I found it depended on the group of students that I would be teaching.

I also added other technologies to my classroom. Kahoot was an app that I tried and I occasionally used it over the years. This year, however, there has been less of an opportunity with the new cell phone policy in place in Saskatchewan. We can use some of these technologies with Chrome books, however, not every classroom has access to that technology either. This is one disadvantage some schools have when it comes to online use of technology.

In my experience there are some limitations to the use of online learning, other than the fact that parts of the province where Wi-Fi is limited. The fact is that many students do not do well in an asynchronous class. Even during Covid, I set up online scheduled meetings for my classes, taught with the use of technology, and still had a low level of success. Our provincial online learning program, the Sask DLC , offers students a wide variety of classes, but since it began a couple of years ago, only 70% of the students I signed up for classes successfully completed their courses. Students that need direct, one on one, instruction are not successful.