Thursday 4 June 2020

Where are we after COVID-19?

Term 1 ended quite abruptly on Monday 23 March 2020 due to the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 and weeks later, in May we were back on board. First day back was a teacher only day where the staff discussed our new norm of
social distancing
sanitising hands
sanitising surfaces
sanitising devices after each use
signing in and out for contact tracing
eliminating the need for students to leave campus by providing them with morning tea and lunch
setting up a roster to supervise our smokers during both breaks and of course
rearranging our teaching spaces and staffroom to suit.

Week 1 began with student briefing at the start of each day and again at the end to reinforce expectations of our new norm and by week 2 we only had student briefings in the mornings. Our students adapted remarkably well to the new norm.

What a difference feeding our students........
 Quantity of work produced and quality of learning evidence was impressive. It certainly helped that during the lockdown period I had created a variety of screencasts for all standards so that learners could self manage and have rewindable resources at their fingertips.
By week 1:
50% of my 11Elective class had passed their Physics assessment worth 4 credits
By week 2:
63% of my 11MAT students had passed their Algebra assessment worth 3 credits and immediately immediately moved onto Probability.
100% of my 12MAT students had passed their Networks assessment worth 2 credits.

Only ONE student in all 3 classes worked online during lockdown, so it is impressive to see that after such a long break, my students returned to school ready to learn. Below are a few examples of  bite-sized rewindable learning resources which students have been accessing.

Probability                    Physics         Algebra          Networks Cheat Sheet