Newsletter
April Week 4
Friday 24th April
Firstly we hope that everyone is well and if there is anyone known to you or your family that has suffered the consequences of Coronavirus, our thoughts are with you.
We are now entering our second period of Lockdown and although I cannot tell you how and when this is all going to end, I can let you know what has been going on behind the scenes.
Like everybody, all the staff are under lockdown; some have had to self-isolate for themselves or for family members which has resulted in quite significant staff shortages
Whilst under the associated difficulties of the Lockdown, all members of staff have continued to work, preparing and posting learning materials and responding to pupil, parent and professional communications.
As the lockdown has been extended, we have added more and more content to the learning grids and added resources for pupils to access.
This week, we have added films by the teachers. Though these films are short, the time, effort and technological skills that have gone in to producing them has been amazing. We will continue to send out new films, however they will be limited to core learning. We will signpost families to the video lessons that have just been introduced by the government via Oak Academy
https://www.thenational.academy/ and the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/dailylessons
The success of the VLE and Office 365 has been amazing and within a few days, the use of technology to underpin learning has been incredible. The response has been very positive. However, just as we are getting messages looking to increase the amount of output through technology, we have parents who are telling us that they are struggling with the amount of content for many reasons such as home working, limited access to online technology and limited subject knowledge.
Therefore, instead of adding more content to our learning grids, we are going to spend some time collating data to see the effectiveness of what we are offering and the number of children who are using the resources. We will be recording the number of times the children go online, access programs, post and email work completed from the learning grids.
To help us understand what is working and how we can improve, please ensure that your child/ren complete as much of the work as possible and let us know if you have problems accessing the work.
When we have this information, we will use our findings to provide better, more effective content which is accessible for everyone. The expectation is that if the lockdown is extended again, we will place a compulsory expectation on key learning so that we can continue to learn and progress.