Learning in an Upside World
A few short weeks ago, you would ask your children ‘How was school’ and they would grunt and answer ‘fine’
A few short weeks ago, teachers were at College with their classes asking them to be quiet, get on with their work, follow instructions...
Now with children at home, doing their lessons online while parents are trying to work, it is parents asking children to be quiet, get on with their work, to follow instructions and it is PC teachers at the Check-ins asking ‘How was School’ and getting monosyllabic typed responses. The world is upside down at the moment, isn’t it?
Thankfully, despite the differences in some of the roles supporting the education of our young people, quality learning is still occurring! We are thankful to have spent the last 18 months with staff learning about the features and the power of our Learning Management system, CANVAS, so that when the time unexpectedly came to move to online learning, we were ready. Have you ever heard the word Canvas more in your life than in the last month?
We have seen some new skills learned and implemented by our adaptive staff: preparing videos to explain new concepts, running tutorials to answer questions using Zoom conferences, working collaboratively with their students live on Google sheets, creating quizzes and assignments on Canvas, Mathspace and Education Perfect to measure student knowledge of given topics. Emails have been flying between teachers and their students to keep them on track and parents have been kept in the loop if their children have been underperforming.
Blended Learning reports have been developed, implemented, and made available to parents to give a snapshot of their child’s learning throughout the Program. Video messages have been going out from the Principal, Deputy Principals and the Junior School Chaplain to keep students and families in the know. Our dedicated Year Advisor teams have held virtual Year Meetings and our Learning Support unit and our College Counsellors have offered amazing support services. Regular updates have been provided and surveys have been undertaken to keep our community on the same page. I think we can be proud of what has been achieved by our College in these testing times.
I really want to thank you for your support of what we have been doing. It has been a wonderful blessing for our staff to receive messages of thanks from the parent community via Facebook, through care packages being delivered to the College reception, or through the kind words offered in many emails to teachers thanking them for their efforts. Our staff are mindful that this has been a difficult time for many families in our College and have been praying for them regularly. The partnership between teachers and families has never been more important than in this time of operating in an upside-down world.