Still With Us? Good.

It has been an eventful week for us at Gateway Public Schools, as it has certainly been for most of you as well. Monday marked our first day back from Spring Break and the first day of our formal Distance Learning program, and with it the joy of “seeing” students again coupled with the anxiety of piloting a whole new way of teaching and learning for our community. Then Tuesday brought news that San Francisco would be joining the rest of the state and Bay Area in keeping campuses closed for the rest of the school year, meaning we are officially all-in on distance learning for the long haul. While this wasn’t entirely a surprise – in fact, it was the contingency staff were already planning for – the thought of our halls remaining silent for the rest of the year is, well, a bummer.

There is tremendous joy, however, to be found in the evident truth that we really are all in this together. Every museum that virtually opens its doors for students, every tech company that takes a hit to offer teachers its services for free, and every neat idea that a teacher shares for colleagues on the other side of town or the other side of the continent makes it just a little easier to imagine what it would look like for educators, students and families to survive and thrive until campus life one day resumes. It might not be as soon as we’d hoped, but that day is coming; we hope the resources in this issue of HomeRoom help you get there all in one piece. In this week's issue:

• Bringing Your Instruction Online
• Questions to Guide Teacher Planning
• How to Make Video Tutorials for Students with Screencastify
• Bolster Executive Functioning and Support Visual Learners with Video “Orientations”
• Student/Parent Roles and Responsibilities for Distance Learning
• Yoga for Teachers (and another treat if you're not into yoga!)