Summary for Classroom Guidelines
When creating my guidelines, I focused on my background of speech therapy and created guidelines for students participating in virtual speech sessions. Since COVID, teletherapy has been a practice that is now incorporated into our services, and it was not something we had prior to COVID. We no longer have snow days in the department of education and if there is snow, we transition to virtual school and my speech therapy sessions take place on the computer. I created these guidelines for my older students, grades 3-5, as they are more likely to be browsing the internet and not fully focused if on virtual sessions. Since I service students from kindergarten to fifth grade, I wanted the guidelines to be applicable for multiple grades. I created a handout that can be shared with the family as well and the parent can then reinforce the rules of online sessions. I included a reminder of a digital footprint in these guidelines because students during in this age group are more likely to start browsing the internet more. I think it is important to remind these students about how they act online because they don’t realize it stays with you forever. During sessions, they may be asked to engage in group work that involves searching the internet which is where this guideline comes in. Taking a mentor vs. monitor standpoint I think these guidelines help them to make better choices on their own. Other aspects I put into the guidelines included standard ideas such as having the device charged so students are ready and keeping passwords safe.
I hadn’t considered how guidelines like these should be different for different purposes like Virtual Speech Therapy instead of a classroom! I think it’s great that you took a mentorship approach and they are all phrased positively.