Taking the Classroom Online

Happy Salmon Season, folks! My name is Annika Brinkley, and I’m the Education Intern for SFEG this fall. I’m thrilled to be helping out the Skagit Fisheries team with their educational programming. 

Like everyone else in the time of COVID-19, SFEG has been making creative adjustments to continue our regular programming with safety in mind. Typically, SFEG would be putting on educational salmon programs in school classrooms around the Skagit Valley. These programs are designed to engage 3rd and 7th graders in hands-on salmon learning, and usually would involve field trips, dissections, and water quality sampling throughout the year. Fortunately, many teachers in the area still want to engage with these programs in a virtual format this school year! This year, Americorps Education Associate Olivia and I have been redesigning that curriculum to be distributed to classroom teachers in the form of videos.

Teaching students with pre-recorded videos instead of in-person interaction was something completely new to me. I’m used to speaking live, not taking a video and having to watch myself talk! Sometimes, I wonder how students ever put up with my voice, because hearing it in recordings is painful to my ears. Olivia and I have also struggled with ways to keep videos interesting, since we can’t engage in conversation or hands-on activity with our students. The process of editing videos and recordings is also tedious and involves lots of computer time. All of these limitations can sometimes be frustrating. 

Thankfully, this pandemic is a time of flexibility and creativity, not just frustration! Olivia and I have had a lot of fun coming up with solutions to the struggles of online learning. Through creative thinking and corny acting, we turned our salmon dissection video into a spooky murder mystery complete with an interactive escape room. Our water quality video became a breaking news report on “KYPE 7 News”! We’re learning to laugh at ourselves, and we hope the students we reach will laugh with us too.

As much as I enjoy getting creative with videos, my favorite parts of my internship have been the face-to-face interactions. I’ve been able to help with a few planting parties around the Skagit watershed this fall, and they bring me so much joy. Getting down in the dirt and mud in the morning, when my typical day is primarily screen time, is a blessing in my life. I love to see other people get as excited as me about that dirt and mud, and the trees that are going into it. I’ve also been able to teach a thing or two about salmon and the Skagit to the students at the Salish Sea School! During these last months, I’ve really learned the importance of being thankful for what I’ve got. I’ve been able to slow down and appreciate the people that I see and the place that I live. The Skagit watershed and the people that live in it are very special, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it through this internship. I can’t wait to see what the rest of my time with SFEG has in store for me!

Thanks for reading!

~Annika