Hearts & Minds at Home

AOS made a significant investment in Swivl technology for every classroom in the school. This technology, combined with the Zoom platform, will allow students to follow their teachers’ lessons and interact with the classroom.

Swivl will follow teachers’ movements and capture what the teacher is saying regardless of where the teacher moves in the classroom.

Because Swivl utilizes the Zoom platform, there will be two-way interaction between the students at home and the teacher in the classroom. What this looks like in practice will vary according to grade-level and content area. Our teachers will do their absolute best to involve our at-home learners wherever possible, but we ask for patience from our families, as this is a brand-new technology and way of teaching. Even our most experienced teachers will have a steep learning curve - and there may be in-classroom activities that do not lend themselves well to a virtual interface.

Learning materials for Hearts & Minds at Home will be disseminated through the same platforms utilized for Dolphins at a Distance.

The daily schedule for Hearts & Minds at Home will mirror that of the on-campus schedule.

Lessons will not be recorded during Hearts & Minds at Home, as students will have access to classroom video streams throughout the day.

Anticipating that AOS will use a combination of on-campus instruction and distance learning for the 2020-2021 school year, assessments may look different than when in a typical school year. During Dolphins at a Distance, teachers will place emphasis on administering formative - rather than summative - assessments that gauge what a student understands and evidence of knowledge. Understanding of concepts may be demonstrated through performance tasks designed to engage students versus a quiz or test. Feedback is key for improvement and given in narratives to explain what a grade measures. For example, the Summer Math Skills Sharpener workbook that we sent home last spring is a formative assessment. When students returned their workbooks, their teacher reviewed what was completed to gather a better idea of a student’s strengths and weaknesses. This information assisted the teacher in planning instruction for students.

To measure student growth, we administered content specific assessments such as the DRA 3 (Developmental Reading Assessment, 3rd edition) in Kindergarten through 4th grade a couple of weeks after students returned to campus. We updated to the online version so students can be assessed even if utilizing Hearts & Minds at Home. This assessment is administered two to three times per year as needed. In cumulative content areas where knowledge is sequential and builds from one year to the next such as Spanish and math, teachers also utilized self-created assessments or curriculum-based assessments to gain additional knowledge about their students.

AOS also administered the new Milestones assessment from ERB in 3rd through 8th grade in late September. This assessment consists of forty-minute tests in both reading and math. AOS students will also take the ERB CTP online assessment in the spring. Test results for the Milestones assessment are relayed using the same familiar score interpretation found on the ERB CTP.

All of these assessments aid us in understanding our students’ current knowledge and skills - as well as any potential learning loss that occurred as a result of distance learning in the spring or summer vacation. We are confident that these assessments will provide us with the knowledge we need to effectively plan additional review on missed concepts and aid our students in their continued academic growth.

For any families taking advantage of Hearts & Minds at Home, please stay in close contact with your child’s teacher or advisor. We want to know what is working well and what is not so we can provide the best experience possible for all of our students. 

Since we will be recording and broadcasting from live classrooms, it is important to remember that students in the classroom may appear on the recording or broadcast.