Distance Learning - February Update from Miss Neal, Assistant Principal

Distance Learning February Update

Dear Parents and Carers

Thank you for your continued support in helping us to provide your child(ren) with online learning. We appreciate how hard it is to juggle jobs and families with homeschooling and understand that the recent announcement of lockdown extending beyond February half term will not have made things any easier. This update is to make you aware of some of the improvements we are making in our determination to ensure that our home learning provision runs as smoothly as possible.

Student Engagement

We have now completed 4 weeks of remote learning and are very proud of our students’ efforts. As you know, students have 25 online lessons a week in line with their school timetable. For each of these lessons, students upload evidence of their work to their Google Classrooms for their teachers to see. For work returned with a score of 100, teachers then award a Distance Learning point on Classcharts. A score of less than 100 will indicate a little more effort is required to complete the work and students may not receive their Class Charts points. You can track points awarded on the Classcharts app which you can download to your phone. Please email thadfield@worle-school.org.uk if you need login information. Any students receiving around 20 points plus a week are clearly working very hard. Please join with us in celebrating their resilience during this difficult time. Twenty points a week allows a couple of lessons off to walk the dog, bake a cake or indulge in any other activity which gives them a break from the screen. There is no expectation for students to complete any more than 5 hours a day and it is at your discretion to give your children some time off. It is important to recognise that it is not necessarily appropriate for all students to complete 25 lessons a week.

Engagement has been increasing week on week. A weekly report is run and on average across the school over the last 4 weeks, 86% of students have logged into Google Classrooms and completed work. In Year 7 last week, 82% of students completed work in 5 or more subjects and 38% achieved 20+ Class Charts points. This is amazing! Well done to all those students who are trying so hard at home and to you, their parents, for supporting them to achieve.

Guardian Summary reports

I am aware that these emails have been very long and I am grateful to those parents who got in touch to query the content of these emails. It transpires that there was an extra button the teachers needed to click to ensure that completed work was removed from the summaries. Please be assured that teachers are now doing this and going forward, these emails should provide a more accurate picture of work that is yet to be completed. Please note that these emails are automated from Google Classroom and we have no control over their content. As such we will attempt to “reset” them over half term – we are all having to learn so much! I should also stress at this point that it is imperative for students to “hand in” their work too. It may seem obvious but it is possible to submit work without actually handing it in!

Lesson content

In order to continue the improvement of our Distance Learning offer and in line with far more work now coming in from our students, we have diversified our video content to include the excellent resources available from Oak National Academy (the Government’s own online school) as well as other commercially available resources such as Hegarty Maths and Tassomai. This blended approach allows for a rich diet of quality-assured lesson content specifically designed to support student access to the lesson material. Furthermore, it allows staff time to focus their attention on assessment and feedback for students.  You will have noticed the addition of voice recorded feedback which I know has been welcomed by many students, as well as the inclusion of misconception videos across a range of departments. We are working hard to ensure our excellent teaching and learning strategies used in the traditional classroom can be replicated online. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with comments; we are always happy to receive your constructive feedback.

Wellbeing

We are pleased to announce our “live” tutor sessions which start next week on Monday 8 February and will take place twice a week on Mondays and Thursday at 8.40am. We see these as an extension of the welfare and support calls that are being made to all families fortnightly and an opportunity for students to engage with their peers as well as their tutors in a twice weekly discussion to set them up for the day. Please do let us know your thoughts on these sessions.

Website

Please visit our website regularly where you will find additional information and advice that may be useful to you. It is constantly being updated

https://worle-school.org.uk/wcsadistancelearning

We wish to thank you for your support and feedback during this time. We are constantly working on our Distance Learning offer and welcome your thoughts on how things could be improved.

Stay safe.

 Sam Neal - Assistant Principal

sneal@worle-school.org.uk