Lockdown 5.0 -Remote Learning 5.0

Initially our fifth lockdown was to be for 7 days, but due to the nature of the Delta variant of COVID-19, it has been extended to 14 days and although community transmission is zero at this stage, new exposure sites are being announced from those who are known contacts of patients.

Much to the delight of students and on their first week back, students no longer needed to wear masks inside the classroom. However, this will all change again once we return to school. Our assistant principal reminded us “that we have done this before, and have done it well. Keep in mind the learnings of past periods of remote teaching: keeping things short and simple, making things fun and relevant, reducing usual workload expectations, the importance of checking in with students to monitor their wellbeing, the need for breaks and time away from screens etc”.

Staff at school again embraced MS Teams to connect, communicate and deliver online classes with students. For the first time, years 3 and 4 students were placed in a Team. It will be interesting to see how this goes.

As ICT is an elective at year 9/10, the focus for them is concentrate on the more formal subjects. Therefore, I tend to make the classes as interactive as possible and give them a sense of connectedness and community.

playing a fun song or a happy type song on youtube as students enter the room
discussing some of the latest news,
asking how they are feeling in an animated gif, emoji or text
checking out what themes are being celebrated around the world See Days of the Year This has been a great site to trigger further ideas for my ICT classes eg one day it was Tesselations Day which led us to look for a free online tesselation maker. Students had fun designing their own with Tesselation Maker
insert a picture of your last meal
would you rather……… and more

Students love to bring their pets to “school” – some are indoor pets and are easily shown via the webcam to the rest of the class. Some are outside, and it is not so easy to show them but some students do it with great flair, using their webcams or phones effectively. Some, like me shared images of pets in the meeting chat – mine was of one of our pet lambs!

The one formal activity that we all completed was “My winter holidays in Wordart” Students submitted their wordart in MS Teams. For the second class of remote learning, I shared my screen in the live meeting and got students to ask questions of each other of share a little more on some things that they did. One year 7 boy had the word Lua in it. When asked he was given permission to share his screen and showed us the world that he was creating in Roblox. Students gave him a virtual applause when they saw it and there were many ‘wows!’ in the chat.

The lockdown continues this week and it is hoped that most students attend the live meetings as part of their virtual classes.