HOW TO PREP FOR A SUB DURING DISTANCE LEARNING
Updated: Mar 3, 2021
As a learning strategist during this crazy 2020 year, I have the opportunity to talk to many of the teachers at my school and one of the biggest challenges that comes up is how to prep for a sub during distance learning.
Prepping for a sub during distance learning seems extremely daunting. There's so many links that are needed throughout the day and trying to figure out how to share them and organize them in a way that the sub can easily follow the plan is tough. Sometimes it feels like it is easier to just work through the day than to request a substitute at all, am I right?!
So then I got to thinking of ways to solve this problem. It seemed to me that the easiest way was to somehow put all the links in one central location so that the sub doesn't have to be searching everywhere for what they need. This central location also needed to be easy to understand at a quick glance. This is when I created the "Digital Sub Plans Dashboard" and it has been a huge success!
This dashboard view was born out of necessity. A couple weeks ago, one of our admin told me that one of the teachers was absent and that the sub was having a hard time following the sub plans. I quickly created a much simpler version of this dashboard, inserted all of the links they were going to need for the day, created a PDF (which keeps the links active!) and sent the revised plans to her.
At the end of the day I received a super nice email thanking me for deciphering the original plans and for helping her get through the day! I knew that if it helped her, it would probably help others as well so I updated it and now we have version 2.0!
This Digital Sub Plans dashboard is completely editable so you can organize it anyway that fits best for you. In our case we filled it out by following our daily schedule but if you teach in the middle or high school grades you could organize it by different periods, class blocks, or any other way that makes the most sense for you.
The best part is that once you have filled it out, Google Slides let you download it as a PDF which you can then easily email to your sub. All of the links you embedded are still active so the sub can easily get to all of the tools they need throughout the day. Trust me, they'll be so happy to receive a simple to follow infographic vs a long and boring Word doc!
WANT TO GIVE THE DIGITAL SUB PLANS DASHBOARD A TRY?
The Digital Sub Plans Dashboard is super easy to create yourself but you could always click here and grab my version if you prefer. To make it more fun I've even created different seasonal versions of the dashboard! Please feel free to share any questions you have about implementation in the comments below. I also really love to see these products "out in the wild" so if you found it helpful, please tag me on Instagram!
