eNews #1: Learning from Home and Communication              15 April

Hopefully this lengthy eNews will answer some of the questions we’ve been emailed. Please appreciate that yesterday was our first meeting with staff since the government’s decision to move to Remote Learning. To this point, all schools have been preparing for the possibility of Learning from Home, which has now become a reality.

Now that families can access our LFH program, the following information should have a context. Please read this carefully.

As a school, we made decisions very early to initially focus on:

• Supporting our staff to learn ways of managing Learning from Home, through continuing to work collaboratively in their PLC year level or specialist teams (now via videoconferencing). We are taking a team approach, not only because we are a collaborative workplace, but in case any of our staff are unable to work. We are very proud of our teachers as they learn a completely new approach to teaching, learning and wellbeing.
• Determining a suitable platform to deliver the learning. This needed to consider limited family access to devices, especially if parents are also working from home, a translation tool for families and the option of printing hard copies to work offline. Our website, which is also mobile phone friendly, provides this.
• Selecting learning tasks and resources that can be accessed by children with minimal assistance. We have deliberately chosen to include a balance of ‘written work’, specialist areas and online resources and programs. To build familiarity, the online resources will remain consistent this term. We are mindful that, just like at school, it would not be healthy for students to be on computers all day.

Our next steps are as follows:

1. Publish Week 1 Learning from Home (LFH) programs. These have taken almost four weeks to research and compile. Done!
2. Prepare Week 2 LFH programs. Our teachers have four days to finalise these.
3. Allow time for students (and parents) to set up learning spaces and routines, be curious about the tasks and resources, understand what is required and ease into a ‘full week’ of work. This will be the Learning to Learn aspect of LFH, which will happen by the end of Week 2. As you know, we do Learning to Learn at the start of every term, but not quite like this. Teachers will gradually introduce the online components, and not all in the same week.
4. Set up protocols for teachers to communicate with their students. We are aiming for all class teachers to try to touch base with students by the end of Week 2, both by phone and/or email and in teams or individually.

Our focus now is to get these ‘essentials’ working as a firm foundation for your child’s learning this term.

How will the school communicate with families?

We think we’ve done a good job so far! Our communications will continue to include emails and this LFH e-News (instead of our usual newsletter), as well as updates on our website parent pages. As well as the Covid-19 Resources page, there is also a LFH for Parents page, with additional learning resources for those of you who are really keen.

To maintain the integrity of school-wide communications about LFH, these emails will be sent from Kathy Verbi, Jo Braden and me. It is critical that parents read these, as we are getting questions that have already been addressed.

How will the teachers communicate with students?

This is a challenge facing all schools. In the beginning, you can expect that teachers will either email or phone your child. As we have a legal obligation to maintain teachers’ privacy, any calls will come from a ‘NO CALLER ID’ number. If there is no answer, the teacher will leave a message. Parents will be unable to return calls to these private numbers. The initial calls have a 5 minute allocation to touch base, as our teachers are focussed on planning the next week’s program. Please understand this is teacher-student time, not a chat with parents. You are welcome to use speaker phone, but let your child do the talking. Teachers need to get feedback from the students who are using the LFH program.

As we move forward, some of our selected online programs allow teachers to assess learning, target and allocate tasks, and track and monitor your child’s progress. We expect students to use the school value of integrity when completing assessments or tasks online. 

How will the teachers and parents communicate?

Our office staff are working remotely as well, so the school phones remain on vacation mode. Parent emails will be forwarded to both the class teacher and a ‘back up’ person in the same team. As usual, teachers will continue to respond to your emails. They are timetabled to check their school emails every day and either respond to parents individually, or send a Sentral message to the class/level with answers to common questions. We anticipate responses should be within 48 hours, as usual. We suggest you ‘save up’ your questions to be kind to our teachers, rather than sending a stream of emails each day.

We are currently arranging a more direct system for this communication; again, please be patient.

DET has been very clear that when working remotely, teachers must still work within their allocated working hours and are not available or working outside of these.

At the moment, the role of the Class Reps in liaising with teachers is ‘on hold’, as we have no incursions, excursions or classroom helpers. Of course, your Class Rep might still be communicating with families to keep you all in touch with each other.

What are teachers doing when they work remotely?

Our teachers have a scheduled timetable, as they normally would. It includes our usual team and staff meetings, although they now have lots of additional meetings with their team each week. They will touch base with students and communicate with parents. Teacher professional learning will support their efforts in developing new skills for Learning from Home.

Like other schools, we have never worked this way before. We are mindful of the mass of new information teachers are using and receiving. Our focus for the next few weeks is on building their videoconferencing capacity. DET began widespread staff training in the holidays, which our staff are accessing, and one of our parents is also assisting (thanks B!).

As a community, we all need to understand the LFH program will be very different to learning at school. As DET Deputy Secretary David Howes and Minister Merlino have stated, “It won’t always be perfect and we will learn as we go.”  “There will be things that will work and things that won’t work. Be patient, that’s a message for parents and students.”

We are already finding, like parents may be, that working remotely is more time-consuming and has its own challenges.  Importantly, the time that teams need to spend planning consistent remote learning programs has proven to be far more extensive than when organising a face-to-face program at school.

My house has more children than computers. How can this work?

Students do not need their own device. Simply, your children will need to share (like the olden days!). Sharing is a consideration when setting up their LFH routine. Just like at school, they won’t all need to be on a device at the same time, due to the range of learning tasks each week. You can understand this now that you have access to the LFH pages. Parents may wish to print the week’s tasks for students to spend more time offline, as some of you have already requested.

We have emailed parents who made requests for support for internet or devices and would like any further requests by Thursday 16 April at 5p.m. Please be patient as DET prioritises these, as well as organises documentation for the loan of devices. This is out of our hands.

What about students on special needs programs?

• Students in Jenny Simmon’s Literacy Intervention Program will have a weekly program sent via email. This takes precedence over the LFH class Reading program.
• We anticipate that Student Support Group meetings might be scheduled for later in the term and held remotely, for those families who had SSGs in Term 1.
• Unfortunately, Play Therapy, Social Skills and Speech Therapy Assistants (STA) program are ‘on hold’.

Can I print or save the week’s learning tasks?

Yes, easily. Instructions below are for PC’s.

1. Log into LFH and go to the page you want. Highlight and copy the page name.

2. Put your cursor anywhere on the page and press ‘Control P’ to print. Make sure you select ‘Save as PDF’ when the print window opens. Then click on the Save button at the bottom.

3. Paste the name of the page into any folder or location you want and press Save. e.g.

4. You should now have a pdf of the entire page (not just part of the screen) and your child can use the pdf instructions offline, or print to a paper copy.

Additionally, one of our parents has suggested this tool (thanks J!):

https://www.printfriendly.com/extensions/chrome

What about extracurricular activities?

These are ‘on hold’ at the moment. We are one of eight schools awaiting advice from DET around music tuition and will let parents know of any developments.

I can assure you that teachers are skilled in building inclusive programs one step at a time, developing predictability and focussing on the next steps in learning. This is what our teachers are doing as we put ‘the essentials’ in place for Learning from Home.

We do have some legislation, Ministerial Orders and DET guidelines that we must work within, including the Child Safe Standards. Additionally, our staff Consultative Committee continues to have a voice in any decisions that affect teacher work, under the Victorian Schools Agreement 2017.

Finally, we will continue to communicate responses to your common queries via LFH eNews. There is a separate page for LFH eNews under the Learning from Home tab, for ease of translation. All LFH eNews will be stored there and we’ll alert you when it is published.

Please understand that, with so many families, I am unable to answer all your emails individually; we have been flat out this week! Our focus at the moment is on supporting our staff to support your children to get started with LFH, whilst keeping parents informed.

Take care and enjoy LFH with your children.

Next time:           Learning tasks and online programs