Taking Tar Wars Virtual

Get started before end of the school year, if you can:  Contact your teacher friends and get on the calendar for 4th or 5th grade. Or check the website of your local elementary school. Don’t forget about private school options, too.

  • Once you’ve connected with the teacher make sure you send the link to the parent information sheet and also give the teacher the poster contest information link. The actual Tar Wars guide is available if they need more information to decide if they will accept your offer to present or they may want to review the slides if they haven’t had a presentation in their classroom (I’ve presented to the same school for 12 years now, so they know the program well!).
  • Other options could be summer camps this summer or you may have to wait until school resumes, depending on the district schedule.

Technology Considerations:

  • Schools will likely need you to be an approved guest on their platform. For example, Chicago Public Schools use Google Classroom. You would need to be approved by the teacher. In my case I used my daughter’s CPS email account and the teacher “invited” my daughter to join the class. Therefore a school might need to give you a guest email or other access.
  • Or if the class uses a different platform such as Zoom or GoTo, you again may still need to be a guest on their platform controlled by the teacher or school staff. In which case you’ll join their meeting with a password protected link with meeting ID and/or passcode to use.

If you are a guest on their platform, it is advised to email the slides to the host/teacher and remain on the platform as a guest. Sharing your screen/presenting on Google Meet proved difficult as I was restricted on what source I could share (they wanted me to share from a Google drive or google chrome tab, rather than “Sharing my screen” and choosing the Power Point application to put up full screen.
Also, I couldn’t change my view to see the class/students and the video lagged when we tried to show it from my computer on the Google Meet (I could ONLY see my power point, nothing else like the attendees or the chat). Therefore, it may be easier for you to see everything if the teacher advances the slides for you and calls up the video from his or her computer.
If you have the chance to login with the teacher the day before or the morning of the presentation before the students are onboard, please try that out to make sure everything works as anticipated.

Presenting the Program:
Because online learning is a bit more painful for everyone than a live visit, keep it shorter and keep it moving.

  • With Q&A my total time was about 40 minutes (after accounting for some of the tech hurdles we had to troubleshoot live on the Google Meet with the very accommodating teacher).
  • I pared down the lesson and total number of slides to this updated version.
  • The cigarette slides are a good science and history lesson because rates of smoking traditional cigarettes has decreased significantly among all ages, especially kids (slide 11 – from IDPH data). This is mostly because of Tobacco 21 laws, Smoke-free Illinois laws, and the very high cigarette taxes that make cigarettes very expensive in Illinois, and especially Chicago.
  • The slides about smokeless products are to show that these products are marketed with flavors to attract kids to this “smoking” alternative that is also hard to detect. And also that these products are not safe, and have their own proven health consequences.

Unfortunately VAPING has increased dramatically and those products have nefarious tactics to deceive, infiltrate the market, and target their ads to young people. I added slides about EVALI and the video from the Georgia Tar Wars program as new tools that were not available at the beginning of the school year. We now have evidence that vaping products can pose immediate serious health risks to the lungs. The video made an impact.

Recent info about COVID-19 was added to give a very current events aspect to this virtual program.  Here is a link to more info you can use in your conversation. 

Keep the chat feature open so that kids can react (they do!) and also pose questions along the way. Then use the chat to read and answer the questions. The teacher can also assist by un-muting students to ask you questions verbally at the end.

Good luck and thank you!