There’s a room at North East ISD’s Career and Technical Educational Center (CTEC) full of emergency supplies, hospital beds, learning mannequins and a Nurse Aide Instructor named Julie Reynolds, teaching the next generation of nurses through her laptop.
“It’s hard socially,” she said.
Reynolds is a Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN) and has been teaching nursing programs to NEISD students for 5 years, but this year it’s different.
“If they were here in the class physically, they would be interacting more with each other,” said Reynolds. “Hands-on training it a big focal point of the nurse aid program.”
Like every teacher in the District, Reynolds has had to adapt her classes to the virtual learning environment. But how do you do that with such a hands-on class?
“I am trying to integrate technologies to really help the students feel like they are in the classroom,” said Reynolds. “My students are using my YouTube videos. I am uploading them to my Google Classroom so that they will have immediate access to them.”
She’s got three cameras going: one on her computer, another from her phone and a Go-Pro she wears so that students can see things from her perspective. She just completed a video about hand hygiene before logging on to Zoom to greet her students.
While Reynolds uses every digital and virtual option at her fingertips, she knows nothing replaces physically “getting your hands dirty,” so she put together skills packets for her students to pick up.
“Because one goal of the training program is to prepare students for their certification exam, it is vital that students are afforded the opportunity to practice these tasks while at home,” said Reynolds. “They can practice with the actual supplies used while watching my videos. Then I can evaluate them virtually because they have the essential supplies.”
It is that kind of initiative that helps her students get the most out of her class during virtual learning, a course, Reynolds knows, is saving lives.
“I’ve got students who work at McDonald's or Whataburger,” said Reynolds. “And they have encountered people having a seizure, and they are the only ones who know what to do, because of what they learned in my class.”
There’s no greater takeaway from class than that.
