STARKVILLE – When kindergarten teacher Vivian Spears, who teaches at Sudduth Elementary in Starkville, learned she would start the spring semester teaching without access to the internet, she was admittedly anxious.
All of the lesson plans she had made before Christmas break were no longer useful without access to her PowerPoints, the online curriculum or even printers.
“It’s a little frustrating when you already feel like you have everything together, and then at the last minute, you’ve got to change,” she said. “… Just trying to get it all together at the last minute (was challenging) because you had to do it at home.”
Spears said it was easy for her to incorporate more hands-on learning activities for her students to keep them engaged. She used teacher edition textbooks instead of the online curriculum. Instead of watching Youtube videos for “brain breaks,” Spears broke out a CD player, which the students had never seen before.
Now that she’s on the other side of it, Spears said she enjoyed going through the experience with her students – one that she plans to incorporate into future lessons.
“Our next unit … is going to be about the past … and how things from long ago have changed to the present,” she said. “Our big unit question is, how can we learn from the past? It was just fun thinking we just kind of went through that without technology, using the things we used to use.”
For the first two weeks of the semester, Spears and other teachers in the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District had to adapt to teaching without access to the internet when the district’s network was compromised in an apparent ransomware attack.
“Our network is fully functional at this point, and we have access to the internet,” Communications Directory Haley Montgomery told The Dispatch on Tuesday. “I think some of the issues that we’re dealing with are mainly just related to login issues, individual devices and that sort of thing. We’re just troubleshooting some things.”
Montgomery said the district is still working with third-party consultants to investigate whether any student or teacher data was accessed during what the district has characterized as a “malware encryption event.”
PowerSchool, a K-12 software provider used by SOCSD, was impacted by a data breach in December. Montgomery confirmed the district was affected by the breach, but she said there is no evidence the two events were related.
“We’re still looking at any kind of data impacts or information that may have been attained,” she said. “We’re getting closer on that and looking at things, but I can’t really share any other specifics since the investigation is still ongoing.”
Montgomery said Tuesday the district has not paid and has no intention of paying a ransom.
Making adjustments
Morgan Hannigan, a second-grade teacher at Henderson Ward Stewart, said her biggest concern was starting the semester out of the normal routine.
“We do have computer programs that I use specifically to work on (math) and they do it every morning,” she said. “I was more worried about the routine of things that we were doing being off.”
Hannigan said her class went back to the “old school way of doing things,” relying more on textbooks and whiteboards. Being flexible with scheduling and keeping students engaged without computers was a challenge, but she found her students were better behaved and participated more without technology in the classroom.
“Even now that the internet is back up and running, we are not using technology like we were,” she said. “I’m using some of those things we did without technology, and I’m doing it every week now because I saw it made a difference.”
Brittany Mosely, who teaches third grade at Henderson Ward Stewart, was mostly concerned about how she could keep her students engaged without technology.
“It was more so trying to get the kids to be okay with it because mostly all children are raised with a tablet in front of them,” she said. “… They’re used to doing assignments on their Chromebooks. So when there’s no Chromebooks and you have to do everything on paper, it’s like, ‘Let’s see how y’all are going to react.’”
Most of her teaching tools changed, Mosely said. She went from projecting pictures of shapes for her math lessons to drawing them on the board. Usually, after going through a lesson and worksheet, her students would do online lessons, but without the internet, she had to adjust her plans.
“Luckily, I had some old math books, and so I found some math pages about area or other areas that they may struggle in, and I put them in groups,” she said. “So they also got practice with working together and having to share one book.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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