No More Snow Days?

Through the use of technology, teachers and students can stay connected and recover instructional time even though falling snow has traffic stalled and schools closed.

Hun School teacher holds class via tablet as she sits in Pa. turnpike gridlock
By Alyssa Mease/The Times of Trenton 
on February 15, 2014 at 6:30 AM, updated February 15, 2014 at 6:33 AM

PRINCETON — After missing multiple school days because of snow this winter, Hun School history teacher Lynn McNulty wasn’t going to let a series of chain-reaction car crashes and a miles-long traffic jam on the Pennsylvania Turnpike yesterday keep her from school another day.

“I was probably about two miles back from the big, serious pileup, but there were accidents all around,” McNulty said yesterday. “And I was like, ‘Oh this is bad.’”

After sitting in the stand-still for about an hour at the Willow Grove exit on the turnpike and live-streaming a news program on her cell phone, McNulty realized her chances of getting to school in time to teach her advanced placement European history class were not good. So she posted a message to her class through the school’s internal communications system, telling them to contact her via video chat when they got in.

Bridging a distance of miles through technology, McNulty yesterday used the school’s electronic resources and her tablet computer to teach her class from her car that was stopped on the turnpike, which was shut down for hours because of an initial 25-vehicle pileup around 8:30 a.m. in the eastbound lanes between Willow Grove and Bensalem and Willow Grove, according to 6ABC.com.

“Literally no one was moving, and I sat through a total of four-and-a-half hours,” McNulty said.

All freshman and sophomore students in the school are given tablets, so the classroom was equipped with the technology to support a virtual discussion, McNulty said. The school’s technology coordinator and McNulty’s department chair sat in on the class to make sure everything ran smoothly, she said.

“It wasn’t really out of the realm of possibility,” McNulty said. “I could see all the kids, and could see all the kids discussing with one another.”

The topic of yesterday’s discussion was Napolean III and the Crimean War, McNulty said.

“They were into it, and I think they knew I was serious about being there,” she said. “I flipped the phone around to show them I was really stuck on the turnpike.”

McNulty said she usually gets on the eastbound turnpike at Fort Washington and had just passed the Willow Grove exit when she encountered the stopped traffic. Although her car was not damaged and she was not injured, she said the road conditions were poor yesterday morning and a few cars around her were involved in minor accidents because they couldn’t come to a stop in time.