St. Bartholomew's, a Church of England Primary School based in Loughborough have been using the platform for several years, the platform had previously been used by staff to store documents and school policies. Due to the Coronavirus outbreak and the school having to close they were tasked with finding alternative ways to deliver teaching and learning remotely. Their strategy was to harness their existing resources and extend the use of the platform to deliver learning resources to their students. In this article, Sonya Campbell, Assistant Head Teacher at St. Bartholomew's Church of England Primary School discusses the steps her team went through to implement remote learning.
Prior to the Coronavirus outbreak we had no real remote learning strategy in place, we encouraged our children to use some online resources and we subscribed to a number of online learning tools like Times Table Rockstars. The children however needed more so we decided to set up remote learning using our exsisting platform. Our first priority was to issue the children with logins, our teachers then spent a few days making folders, uploading resources and settings tasks for the children to complete.
“The platform has provided a key communication tool at this strange time enabling us to communicate with everyone in the school community.”
Favourite Tools
The teachers have found that the announcement tool is really useful, especially being able to pre-schedule when announcements will appear. The announcement tool enables simple and clear information to be communicated to parents too. Our year 5 and 6 children really like the assignment tool and the chat tool enables children to continue to communicate in an easy way.
“Using a learning platfrom has enabled us to keep in touch with the children. We can also set learning activities to support the education and the general daily routine for the children and families”
Advice for Schools
The response has been really positive from children, teachers and parents. Setting up remote learning was simple and quick and tasks for the children to complete are now being set daily. My advice to other schools is to keep it simple, don't set too much and aim for children to do a few things well. Schools also need to ensure children can easily access what is required.