Newsletter – 17 April 2020

It has been wonderful to see students engaging daily with their online learning tasks via Seesaw. This shift to Remote Learning has been a significant challenge for staff, students and parents and we are so pleased with how everyone is travelling under such difficult circumstances.

A reminder that teachers release daily tasks on Seesaw at 9am, however these can be completed at any time that is convenient across the school week. We are well aware that some students may be sharing devices with siblings or parents so may not have access to a device for learning from 9am on any given day.

All students are asked to submit samples of their learning on Seesaw as an Activity and not to the Journal feature of Seesaw. This helps classroom teachers keep track of what tasks have been completed as they can see task submissions at a glance. Additionally, our specialist teachers cannot access tasks students post to individual class journals. Tasks must be posted to Activities so that our specialists can see the work completed and provide feedback.

Another reminder that students are expected to complete tasks to a standard they would strive for in the classroom. Teachers have learnt this week that we need to be more explicit about our expectations so we will work on this as we continue with remote learning.

I’m sure you will all recognise the huge amount of work teachers have done in preparing for and managing remote learning this term. Our teachers have been learning to manage the enhanced features of Seesaw, how to create and upload instructional videos and are now experiencing challenges in managing the workload of feedback on large volumes of submitted tasks. The time involved in giving 3-4 sets of specific written feedback to 25 different students each day is immense and intense. As a school, we are currently discussing what is appropriate and reasonable for teachers to provide in terms of 1:1 feedback to students. We will be able to provide more information on the school’s expectation around this next week.

Despite the overwhelming majority of RGLPS students learning remotely, all Victorian schools have needed to remain open for students of essential services workers who cannot work from home, as well as some disadvantaged, special needs or vulnerable children. This necessitates a skeleton staff onsite each day. Please be aware that if a teacher is supervising students onsite, they don’t have the ability to provide feedback on submitted Seesaw tasks that day. As a school we are developing a roster of staff available to supervise onsite so this might happen for up to one day per week for your child’s teacher.

On a positive note, we expect students to come out of the COVID-19 experience with strengthened ICT skills and much greater independence. Parents and carers, please support your child to work as independently as possible. Teachers have tried to design learning tasks that students can complete with minimal support from an adult. If your child is unsure of what to do, encourage them to view the teacher video again or reread instructions, rather than ask an adult.

Finally, remember that this transition to remote learning has been exhausting for all concerned. As I mentioned previously, intense learning is taking place in ICT, independence and personal learning. Many children (and adults) may be highly anxious and thrown by the changes. When schools return to full scale onsite learning, the focus will again be on literacy, numeracy and other academic areas. Wellbeing, mental and physical health are key priorities at this point. Please don’t put extra pressure on your family or your child to work for 10 hours per day. We understand that completing all the tasks posted on Seesaw will be difficult for some. We just ask that parents try their best and do what they can.