Today was the first day of Term 2 for all our teachers and learners at St Francis in quite different circumstances than we possibly could have imagined a few months earlier.
Covid-19 - A pandemic, Alert Level 4, School site closed.
We have had to reimagine how school would look in a very short timeframe. Or did we?
Today we launched our Distance Learning Programmes. Today at 9am we had 230+ Year 3 - 8 students on google meets with their teachers. By lunchtime we had also held google meets for our Kākano Hub (Year 1/2) with a really high percentage of attendance as well.
The high percentage of "attendance" was really heartening. We learned very quickly that our learners wanted the connection with their teachers - and their peers.
2 Weeks Earlier
Prior to school closing - we were aware of what was coming and had like most schools a couple of days to work as a team and prepare for how we would manage the school closure. We are fortunate to have great team who lead Digital Technologies in our school. When we sat down to start to plan for this we realised that actually we had been planning for this over the last couple of years.
We already had:
- Year 5-8 students that were navigating and using sites independently
- A commitment to the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy
- At least six of our staff had already completed a Digital Fluency Intensives (DFI) and two doing this currently (myself included)
- Education Programme Leader who had been working alongside teachers in our school over the last two years
- Education Programme Leaders who have facilitated Professional Learning for our staff
- an increasing percentage of parents purchasing Chromebooks for their children each year
- a clear vision to be innovative in our practice
We were well set up and in a really good position to move forward, and move forward quickly. We spent the two days before Alert Level 4 collaborating and planning together onsite and the next two weeks by distance.
We knew if we kept a lot of the same formats it would be easy enough for the students to keep accessing their learning from home. Our Year 3/4 students were using all the same tools and although not 1-1 with Chromebooks yet - they were becoming familiar with using docs and drive. These students were not blogging yet but we had a plan to get this moving quickly as well. The Student Blog Hop (a topic for another post) was introduced in the new holiday time and this meant that those children who were blogging over the holiday time became very familiar with blogging. We had over 150 children register for this. This was a great lead in to online learning for these students.
Some Learnings
One of the things we have tried hard to do is "Limit the LInks" on advice from our Manaiakalani whānau. We created a slideshow that held all the information and embedded it on our website on the Distance Learning Link. All four Hub sites link off the same page.
We have also opted for exactly the same layout in the Hub google sites, therefore simplifying navigation for students and also parents who have children in multiple hubs.
All planning is visible and uses the same format of Learn, Create, Share. We were using this format in some areas of the school however we have now got consistency across the school with the planning format created by one of our teachers.
We have learned that the systems we use are very important and need to be thought through from all perspectives. Every decision we made led to another question - but taking the time to talk about what was best for the learners, made the decisions easier.
We have also learned that the capacity of our staff is so much greater when we work together with a common purpose.
"The strength of the teach is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team." (Phil Jackson, author)
Today
So what did today bring?
Today we launched our Distance Learning Programmes.
Today we had 230+ students online with their teachers without a glitch.
Today we saw motivated students who wanted to connect with their teachers and peers.
Today we saw the fruits of our labour over the last couple of years, with independent students managing their own learning, totally familiar with the google suite of tools that they needed to manage their learning
Today our teachers excelled themselves and our parent community celebrated this.
Click here to read today's article on facebook #leadingtheway
How did Distance Learning play out in your school today?
