Vicki Davis Sherwood’s secret weapon for distance learning

ALBANY – While many school systems across the nation were blindsided by COVID-19 and the resulting mandated closures, Sherwood Christian Academy in Albany had a plan.

Vicki Davis, the school’s technology director, said it all started when Brian Dougherty, the school’s headmaster, called her in at the beginning of March charging her with creating a distance learning playbook for the school. The goal was to develop a brick-to-click transformation transition without any downtime for staff or students.

“Honestly, at the time COVID was not really on the radar,” Davis said. “I immediately joined a Facebook group, and as I was talking to teachers in China I realized what very was likely going to happen.”

Dougherty could not have found a better person to take on the task. Davis has been involved in educating educators for more than 20 years and started blogging in 2005, learning the skill so she could teach her students how to do it.

She has been podcasting since 2013 and launched the “10-Minute Teacher Show” in 2017. This blog is broadcast in every country except North Korea. Her blog “The Cool Cat Teacher” currently has more than 6,000 followers, and she has more than 700 episodes on her blogcast.

“I took all the information from my network and input from around the world to create our playbook,” Davis said of Sherwood’s distance learning program. “But this is not a story about me because our parents have partnered in this, our students have worked very hard, our teachers have worked very hard. It took a lot of teamwork.”

The school decided to use Zoom as the platform for its distance learning program and spent the week that the campus closed not only training the students and staff but testing them as well to ensure that they were able to use the program. Davis said she implemented this step after realizing that one reason Italy and China had problems with distance learning was that they did not onboard the students before closing their schools.

Sherwood, however, achieved Dougherty’s goal of having no down time in the transition.

“On Friday the 13th, we closed the campus, and on Monday we started back up on our cyber campus,” Davis said. “We actually had more kids in attendance Monday than we had on the previous Friday. We did not miss any days of instruction.”

Every aspect of the physical campus is represented on the cyber campus. Librarians are reading books, music and drama classes are going on at the same time regular classrooms are providing academic instruction. Chapel services continue on a regular schedule, and the school’s Learning Enrichment Center is helping students with learning differences. The cyber curriculum is available for students from K-3 to the 12th grade.

For student enrichment, a Minecraft building option allowed students to go to Wonder Island and build scale models of the wonders of the world, from the Colosseum of Rhodes to the Sphinx. A four-week course in artificial intelligence was offered with some of the top experts in this cutting-edge technology being interviewed by the students.

“We had an administrative dashboard with a massive data base,” Davis said. “Technically, we had about 106 Zoom rooms running at any given time. For the students it was easy; they just logged into the appropriate classroom. They could also watch the recorded session if they missed the live feed.”

Davis acknowledged that parents play a critical role in the program’s success. Some families had to upgrade their internet services. Zoom allows access through Xbox, iPad, iPhone, PlayStation or computer. Parents also act as cyber hall monitors, ensuring students are taking advantage of the cyber classroom. She also credits the academy’s security director, Chad Evans, for establishing security protocols that prevented the site from being “Zoom bombed,” or disrupted.

The school implemented No-Zoom Wednesdays, allowing staff to focus on how things were going and what needed tweaking. This professional development day consisted of mentoring and mastering groups, allowing staff to master all aspects of distance learning, with the end goal of having all teachers certified as distance learning instructors.

As word of Sherwood’s success spread, other schools and school systems reached out to the school for assistance.

“Dr. Dougherty has allowed me to help educators around the world, so I had a number of school districts contact me with issues that were preventing them from doing distance learning effectively,” Davis said.

Teacher Cathy Rubin asked Davis to provide a three-minute video for her popular blog, “Cathy Rubin’s Global Search for Education.” The two bloggers met on a conference in Dubai. Davis reached out to the Sherwood team to create the “OVERCOMER” video, named for one of Sherwood Baptist Church’s outreach movies.

Special Photos: Vicki Davis