eNews #2: Learning Tasks, Online Resources and FAQ                        23 April

This week, I shared this quote with our staff as they manage their work in a very unfamiliar situation:

The journey to mental health involves what you put in your body - whether that be food, words, thoughts and actions. So, choose foods that heal, words which uplift and actions that motivate, that are kind, and keep you in the flow (Emily Connell, Nutritional Medicine practitioner).

With this in mind, thank you to everyone who has made offers of support, encouragement and gratitude over the last week. Never have these been so appreciated. These are certainly challenging times for us all, but we will get through them. Most importantly, let’s keep in mind the reason the Victorian Government has declared a State of Emergency: to protect Victorians through stemming the spread of a deadly virus.

Your children’s education is extremely important to us, but not as important as their health. Thank you for understanding the strict requirements that have been placed on schools to contain this threat. You may have noticed our playgrounds have been taped off and now DET has told schools not to use drinking taps or fountains.

We acknowledge the challenges these requirements place on families. Most of our staff are also juggling their work onsite or offsite with their own children at home, or caring for vulnerable family members. Many of our staff are medically vulnerable themselves. We’ve also heard some kids (and dogs) try their best to get their parent’s attention, even though they are in a videoconference with their colleagues from LPS!

In this eNews, we look at how we’ve decided on our Learning Tasks and Online resources, as well as answering some frequently-asked questions (FAQ).

Welcome to those six new families this term who are joining us in Learning from Home, but without the usual transition to our school. We now have 738 students at LPS; 548 families. That’s a lot of different families with different expectations and opinions. Our decisions about Learning from Home have been based on what we know about your families, because we have to try to provide a program that can be inclusive of all students. I summarised our considerations in last week’s eNews #1.

Our priorities over the first six days of Learning from Home, as well as publishing our program, have been:

• providing devices to families who requested those, over last weekend and during this week. We also respect the decisions of families who chose not to accept that offer. Our school will continue to offer a program that is accessible to all students, with a balance of online and offline learning tasks;
• providing teacher mailboxes for Learning from Home questions;
• offering teacher contact with students by email and then phone. These phone calls had to meet DET and Child Safe requirements, like everything we do.

Is there a plan to have more regular contact with our teacher? What’s next?

Yes, of course.

As outlined in eNews last week, our teachers are training in the use of Webex for videoconferencing. Although many parents have suggested other video tools, DET schools have been instructed not to use some of these due to security issues.

DET Webex training started for DET staff over the break. Our teachers are now using Webex for our daily work in teams. We have been working with a very generous LPS parent, Ben, who works for a company that successfully tendered for the Webex contract with DET. As well as working with me over the holidays and providing our staff with fantastic training resources, Ben has been training two of our teachers to use Webex with students. These two teachers have become our ‘staff trainers’, relaying this expertise to all teachers in staff sessions last week and this week. They have also tested their new skills on two ‘real kids’. All our teachers are now skilling up by practising on their teammates, in addition to further professional learning.

We have a proposal for rolling this out to class/group meetings that will be discussed by our staff Consultative Committee this week, as required. After just a week ‘officially’ back at work, we are thrilled with the progress our staff have made, given that we only found out remote learning would proceed when the public were informed two weeks ago.

Like everything else we have done in Learning from Home, we will take the next steps with this when our staff feel confident of a successful and positive experience for your children. We’re hoping to start next Wednesday 29 April.

Unfortunately, some other schools have had disastrous experience with videoconferencing and internet applications, due to the capacity of DET’s technology platforms or the general capacity of the internet, including NBN. On three days last week, there were significant issues. We believe DET systems are being upgraded. In the meantime, our proposed scheduling of class Webex meetings will consider the capacity of the school ICT system to cater for a massive surge of professional users this week and the added load of student access. All DET staff devices must be connected to this system; we have no choice about this.

Although participation in videoconferencing will be on a voluntary basis for families, we look forward to the opportunity of connecting with all your children in this way.

In readiness, our staff have drafted a behaviour matrix for class meetings via Webex. This mirrors what teachers do in Learning to Learn at the start of each term. Providing these consistent school-wide expectations will maximise every child’s sense of belonging and participation in these sessions, with teachers encouraging your children to use these protocols when videoconferencing.

We are also preparing easy instructions for parents that provide details of how to join class meetings, after you receive an email invitation from the teacher. You may have noticed our school website now has an Event Calendar at the bottom of the home page, which will also list these dates and times for easy reference if you have more than one child at school.

How did we determine what we would cover in our Learning Tasks?

Parents are not expected to be teachers! Our teachers have considered the curriculum content that can be addressed with minimal assistance from their parents. Our priorities are in English, Mathematics and Wellbeing (including movement breaks). So you will find, for example, Maths Fluency games, measurement and counting activities (time to learn those tables kids!) and lots of Reading practice and skill-building, especially in Reading fluency at the moment.

As well, teachers include open-ended tasks, which allow for differentiation of learning, for example, a stimulus picture for Writing. Or a word hunt around the house. These kinds of tasks allow students to work at an individually appropriate level, just like at school.

Targeted tasks are directed at either your child’s ability level, or to practise a particular skill, such as My Numeracy, Sunshine Online or Epic! assigned texts. Literacy Intervention also provides targeted tasks for some students.

What about the online resources?

This is an area we gave particular attention. There are literally thousands of options. Our selection process was simple. First, we omitted anything that cybersafety expert Susan McLean, or our technicians, had told us was a security risk for children. Anything with ‘open’ chat rooms, access to unknown persons, or insecure website hosting. As our students are largely using home devices, this step was essential.

Once we had narrowed the field, and then considered other DET limitations, we carefully scrutinised educational content. We found programs or sites with content that aligns with our curriculum and is engaging.

We continue to use some programs, or online versions of programs, that your child uses at school (e.g. Sunshine Books, Story Box Library, Essential Assessment, Sunset Maths).

These are augmented by a ‘LPS list’ of quality resources so that families don’t need to access dozens of different programs. So, Epic! can be used by all the children in your family.

Over the coming weeks, teachers will introduce other online resources for families who choose to use them. Our  ‘LPS list’ of resources and Apps that teachers could select includes ABC Splash, ClickView, Khan Academy, FUSE, TedEd, Libby, BorrowBox, Literacy Shed, Australian Science TV, Languages Online, Headspace, Smiling Mind and OliverJeffers. There are more on our list, but these are the main quality online opportunities teachers could be utilising for our Junior, Middle and Senior students.

Obviously, like any other learning tools, these will be used if they are relevant and when students are ready for another resource. Definitely not all at once or as a ‘time filler’. Our LPS list of resources has been shared widely with other DET schools.

There are further learning options, should you need these, on the LFH for Parents page.

Will we have an opportunity to upload work for teachers to review?

As was relayed in last week’s eNews #1, this is one of the challenges for schools. No matter how we look at remote learning, your child’s teacher cannot be ‘in the room’ with your children all day. Learning from Home is different to learning at school, as the Minister for Education has clearly communicated.

Many of the Apps suggested by parents via email had been explored and largely discounted, either on security grounds after discussion with Susan McLean or our technicians, or because they can’t meet other needs, including translation and access for all students.

Nevertheless, our teachers are already providing feedback to students. They have received some delightful student work photos and are happy to see these. If your child wants to do this, we suggest, like at school, that your child emails a sample or photo of the work they are most proud of to the teacher's mailbox, so our teachers can be specific. We expect that Webex class/group meetings will open up more possibilities for sharing and feedback than we have at the moment.

Some parents will also have already overheard some explicit teacher feedback to students by phone. Our teachers are monitoring online engagement for key programs. They have shared their feedback with some students, for example, on the quality and quantity of their reading, the time spent on each book and whether they flicked through the text or read it as intended. We have some surprised little people out there! Similarly, Essential Assessment – My Numeracy provides teachers with detailed information on maths tasks for students using that program. It is amazing what teachers can ascertain from the administrator perspective of these resources.

How are we recording attendance?

As well as having a record of online engagement, teacher phone calls this week have targeted any apparent lack of engagement in these programs, unless we had been advised of online limitations or absences. We are working within the recently modified DET attendance guidelines for schools in these unprecedented circumstances.

If your child is not participating in Learning from Home, please record their absence on Sentral, just as you would if they were at school. Thank you to those parents who have done this already.

When we move to Webex class meetings, these will augment our attendance information.

Is there a plan for the learning program to be sent earlier than each Monday morning so working parents can plan their week?

In our original LFH plan, we said that Learning from Home pages would be available until 12 midday Fridays and the next week uploaded by Monday morning. At that stage, we had never done this before…and we have learned so much in these past few days.

Last week was really challenging. We had one day to finish LFH pages for Wednesday and we got them published, thanks to the work our teachers had done! Some schools had no remote learning program last week, and we completely understand why.

Our teachers then had three days to prepare Week 2 LFH.  We had most of these by Friday, but not all modifications until Sunday evening. Specialist pages were also uploaded and finished off very early on Monday morning.

Although our teachers are working flat out both onsite and offsite, we have five days to prepare Week 3 - great! With a full working week, we’re hoping to be faster and more streamlined this week. Please understand we’re not holding back LFH pages; we simply can’t publish until they are finished! We will try our very best to get them to you as soon as we can. And we think it will get easier for parents as LFH becomes familiar.

Update on Music Tuition

Along with some other schools, we have been expecting DET advice on how the current State of Emergency impacts our Music tuition program. The school tuition arrangements are longstanding and based on the physical presence of tutors to take students for their lessons.

The DET advice has now been received. Unfortunately, unless your Music tutor is a Victorian Institute of Teaching registered teacher, teaching remotely via video places tutors in a vulnerable position, especially under the Child Safe laws. VIT registered teachers have a 2020 registration card.

We know this advice will be hugely disappointing and affect most of our tutors. I apologise that this is one of the current challenges we are facing. We highly value this program with our students. However, as a school, we cannot knowingly put tutors or their students in a vulnerable position. We look forward to resuming our full tuition program, along with other extracurricular programs, when school returns to ‘normal’.

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It’s Day 7 of Learning from Home. Yes, we have plans for rolling out additional elements of our program. We are working through these one day at a time. DET acknowledges that schools cannot be expected to flip their programs, skill up all staff and then cater for every student in a remote learning environment, in the four days that teachers were allocated for preparation. All schools have permission to ease into remote learning.

DET principals have had ongoing Webex meetings since last term. During the holidays, these became daily. This week, we continue to meet every couple of days. We all share what we are doing and provide support for our principal colleagues across the state. Kathy, Jo and I have knowledge of what is actually happening in other schools; their successses and challenges, as they do with Laburnum.

There has never been a DET expectation that everything would be perfect at this stage and we wish we were all back at school like normal with your children. However, we are really happy with our teachers and the learning tasks in our LFH program. In these times, it is certainly a privilege to be in such a professional network within and beyond our school.

We are determined to do this as well as we can and take all our staff on this journey with empathy and understanding. In this way, we can best support your children and our community.

Please be patient, but more importantly, take care.

Next time: Muuum! Daaad! Suggestions to promote independence while Learning from Home.