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St Brigid’s Catholic School students Harper, 11, and Charlize, 8, learning at home on Monday, during the state’s seven-day lockdown. PHOTO: Supplied
SCHOOLS were better prepared to support learning from home when the state went into a seven-day lockdown last week.
Having implemented online-based teaching methods during last year’s COVID-19 outbreaks, many schools already had the software in place to make the transition from classroom to home-based learning as seamless as possible.
Trinity College head Nick Hately said the school had been using the learning management system School Box, which incorporates communication and video conferencing software, to support learning for its 3900 students.
“I think as a community we were much more ready, and much more planned to know what this would look like,” he said.
“Our senior students in (years) 11 and 12 tend to have assignment-based work, which they are able to continue on with, but students in our junior school, and particularly in the middle school, have been able to have online classes.
“While they’ve been at home, they’ve been able to touch base with staff and in particular subjects, still receive direct teaching, or at least some guidance regarding some things they could be doing.”
Trinity has also been able to connect students directly with school councillors and pastoral care support.
Mr Hately said there had been a need to remain flexible and considerate around individual family experiences.
About 100 students of essential workers have continued individual learning on site.
And while school was set to reopen from Wednesday, some students have been caught up in 14-day quarantine and will need to continue with supported online learning.
At Evanston’s St Brigid’s Catholic School, students and teachers have largely stayed connected over classroom app Seesaw, with students from Year 3 and up lent laptops to use at home.
Parent Claire May has spent the week supporting her children’s at-home learning while also working from home.
“They have been getting information from their teachers on a daily basis with tasks they need to do, a bit of a time schedule, and they are sending little video clips through Seesaw,” she said.
“We’ve got a really big table in our lounge kitchen area to work at and most of the time, I have the TV off and we just have some easy-listening music going, so there is hardly any other distractions.
“I feel their attention span is probably a little bit shorter than it would be at school, but they’ve been pretty good.”
She said the kids had also seemed to have taken the sudden change to their routine in their stride. “I think because it’s the second time around doing this and they are that little bit older I think they understand what’s going on,” she said.
“They know that it’s not normal to be in lockdown but that we are doing it to keep everybody safe and it looks like we are getting on top of things.”
The lockdown occurred just two days into the new school term, following the mid-year school holidays.