Homeschooling at Steinmühle, or the Benefits of the StoneApp - Steinmühle

Homeschooling is currently posing major challenges for many students, but especially for parents. This is particularly true when parents still have to go to work or work from home while also caring for their children.

However, parents do not always complain about the additional workload caused by the assignments; many feel helpless because there is a lack of adequate communication between the school, the home, and the teachers. And still others are surprised that their daughters and sons have very little to do. Apparently, not all teachers feel obligated to assign homework, or they lack the technical means to get it to the students.

At Steinmühle, they’re unaware of these problems. The reason: this privately run school has made enormous efforts over the past two years and is years ahead of public schools when it comes to digitalization. When it comes to homeschooling, the so-called StoneApp is particularly helpful; it was initiated a few months ago by Steinmühle’s upper-level computer science class and was largely programmed by current Steinmühle senior Aaron Stein. The StoneApp, which all Steinmühle students and their parents have been using for a year and a half, displays individual class schedules, the substitute teacher schedule, the exam schedule, and the school cafeteria menu, and it is linked to the Steinmühle website. During the school closure, it is of the utmost importance that the StoneApp also serves as a communication and data platform between students and their parents, on the one hand, and teachers and the school, on the other:

Each class and each course has its own group, to which all students and the respective teachers are assigned.
Teachers and group moderators can post messages in individual groups, create subject folders, and upload assignments to them.
Because StoneApp is a web-based app, it can be used not only on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, but also on any computer with internet access. This makes downloading and processing orders particularly convenient.
The StoneApp contains the email addresses of all Steinmühle teachers, so users can send questions, comments, and assignments to the teachers.

When the school closed, the Steinmühle faculty were required by the school administration to do the following:

Assignments should be created that roughly cover the amount of time the class would have taken.
Teachers are required to document assignments: They must enter into a teacher’s lesson plan spreadsheet the information that would otherwise have been recorded in the class or course log.
Students are required to send their work to their teachers via email. Assignments should be given on a weekly basis, and the work should be collected weekly. This allows the students’ work to serve as a basis for the teachers’ further planning, and enables the teachers to provide the students with feedback on their work.
Facts can be researched using appropriate online resources. To this end, many skills have been acquired in recent months through in-school teacher training sessions held as part of the introduction of tablet-based instruction at Steinmühle.
Teachers who wish to create their own so-called tutorials or who require their students to create video content are granted access to the Steinmühlen Cloud, where large amounts of data can be uploaded.
The requirement to assign learning and work tasks applies not only to major subjects but also to minor subjects. The only exceptions are elective courses, physical education, and swimming. In the subjects of Drama, Musical Theater, and Theater Workshop, students should be assigned tasks to memorize texts.

To ensure that all of this could be done successfully, the students were given three days—each day consisting of eleven hours—at the start of the school closures to retrieve their school supplies from the school. This helped prevent large crowds from forming.

The students in emergency care and the boarding students who cannot go home are working on their assignments at the Steinmühle.

The feedback provided by students and parents to homeroom teachers and school administrators during the first week mostly reflected great gratitude for the excellent organization and the teachers’ strong commitment. The only critical feedback concerned the sheer volume of assignments. In this regard, the school administration had to urge its teachers to exercise restraint and to consider that completing assignments independently at home is more challenging than at school, where classmates and teachers can more easily offer help or provide specific guidance. This remains the case even with StoneApp, which is why the volume of assignments for Week 2 was reduced slightly.