Back into learning from home

Today marks two days into term 2 of the year 2020. However, the beginning of term 2 this year looks very different to the beginning of term 2 in the years before...

Term 2, 3 and 4 at Pt England School usually begin with an Immersion Assembly. An Immersion Assembly includes a contribution from the teachers of each team to introduce and hook our learners into the new inquiry topic for the term.  Here is an example of a team 4 immersion assembly movie from 2016:


This year however,  just like other schools from all around the world, we were not able to meet in person. We did not have an Immersion Assembly this term. So how did the beginning of term 2 look for team 4?

With everyone stuck at home because of the Covid-19 Pandemic, we had to make some changes to the way we do things. When we first went into lockdown, we did three days of remote learning, before the school holidays began. This allowed the children to become familiar with this new way of learning which in turn, allowed us to get straight back into teaching and learning from day 1 of term 2.

As our children are used to, we are using our Team google site for the children to access their learning.

Across our team, we follow a very similar structure to our day. Our Room 10 school-from-home routine looks like this:

9am Google meet for Kia ora/mihi and time for the children to ask questions and find out what the writing task/learning is for the day.

Children then have time to move off and work on their writing task.

10:15am Google meet to check in/ time for children to ask questions about their writing/ set up reading task/learning.

Children then have time to move off and work on their reading task.

11:45am Google meet to check in/ time for children to ask questions about their writing or reading/ set up maths task/learning.

Children then have time to move off and work on their maths task.

2pm Final Google meet to give any notices and suggestions/ time for children to ask questions/ time for an end of day reflection. Set up any inquiry/additional learning tasks for the day.

Many of the children have been highly engaged in the new online learning and have taken on the challenge maturely. They have respectfully followed instructions/protocols on google hangouts (for example, muting their microphone when they are not talking).

Now for some numbers...

Today, I had 19 children actively involved in google meets, which is fantastic! In the last 2 days, room 10 children have posted 59 blog posts!! That is absolutely incredible!!

So, is learning happening for our children from Pt England School?? YES IT IS!
Are our children from Pt England School engaged in their learning?? YES THEY ARE!

So, what will tomorrow look like? Tomorrow will look pretty similar to today, with new learning for the children. The difference tomorrow is that we will be having a full school assembly (via google meet) which will be livestreamed for everyone to see. This will be our fourth school assembly since we have been in lockdown.

Online Digital Fluency Intensive

On Friday last week, I worked with the Manaiakalani online digital fluency intensive course by supporting a small group of teachers in creating a multi-modal google site for learning. As part of this, I chose a School Journal text, Becoming a Martian. We then collaboratively planned resources which could support this text and the children's learning around the topic of Mars and Resources needed for survival.

The teachers I worked with were:
- Phil Margetts
- Jess McMillan
- Vicki Swider

Here is our collaborative plan of resources spanning a number of year levels:



After we spent time finding a number of multi-modal resources that were readily available online, we made google sites which we could use to share the learning with children.

Here are the sites we created using our collaborative planning doc as our base.

Click the image to see my site.

Phil's site
Jess' site
Vicki's site