Stretch and Challenge – Teaching & Learning Toolbox for Research Informed Education. As a Seneca Pioneer School, [read about the start of the journey here] I decided to roll out a questionnaire to all my classes that I have used Seneca Learning with.
Some groups where just introduced to it, others had used it in the previous academic year. Planning for disrupted learning: Go long; provide the tools. Imagine you have embarked on an adult learning programme – perhaps a part-time degree, a masters, a professional qualification.
In addition to the regular demands of the course itself, imagine you have a complicated life and need to engage in a flexible manner, attending as often as you can but knowing you will need to be able to keep up-to-date even if some in-person sessions are missed. With all this in mind, what would you want at your disposal? I’d suggest it might include the following?
A course overview. A sense of the entirety of the course: the units, the assessments.A reading list including core reading and suggested wider reading.Detailed unit guidance from online resources and core texts, setting out all the key knowledge you’re supposed to gain, with summaries for self-review and progress checking. I have many examples of this approach paying off – like when Soo Min badgered me about when we’d be covering Colloids, or when Taran made his awesome plan: Digital strategy in an age of remote learning. A free guide to creating a digital strategy for your school has been updated and republished taking into account the new landscape of remote learning.
It has been written by SecEd editorial board member Al Kingsley, who is chair of a multi-academy trust and MD of ed-tech company NetSupport, and ICT expert and former school leader Mark Anderson. The guide considers the purposeful use of technology, its links to pedagogy, IT infrastructure, finance and budgets, SEND, safeguarding, working with governors and a number of other areas.
New additions to the guide in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the national lockdown include information and advice on the challenges and solutions to remote teaching and learning. A new section on communication and collaboration also looks at using video communication tools and provides guidelines for children, parents, teachers and schools on how to get the best out of them.
Further information & resources.
How can schools educate isolating children if families can't afford wifi? From Thursday it becomes illegal for any school to let isolating children sit at home without work to do.
It’s not clear who will police this – perhaps the mythical new Welsh border force? Or the people tasked with raiding our living rooms to check we’re not visiting our elderly relatives? Now, as if headteachers were not stressed enough already, unless they start sending home packs of work they will be breaking the law. Children do, of course, need to access learning while at home. Owing to the government’s incompetence over track and trace, there still is no functioning system that can quickly get isolating students back into class.
The government has issued rules for how remote learning should look. Despite the burden, most school leaders have taken it on the chin. Many parents are doing their best, too. Academic learning isn’t the only thing at risk. Offline in Lockdown: How Millions Have Been Without The Internet During The Coronavirus Pandemic. A world without access to the internet is almost unthinkable, but imagine what that’s like when that world goes into lockdown.
The internet was not the first thing on her mind when 31 year old Jamila* gathered together a suitcase, her handbag and two small children and crept out of her family home. There are, after all, other things to consider when you’re fleeing a violent marriage, like ‘will he see me? Will he follow us? Where will we spend our first night in safety?’ But when Boris Johnson declared a nationwide lockdown on March 23, it was all she could think about.
Alone, in a bedsit, far from the place she had once called home, she suddenly found herself with no television, no phone and no internet as a dangerous new virus raged across the country. ‘Everything was so hard, because absolutely everything is online,’ she explains via a translator. Leon NealGetty Images. Get help with remote education. This page and information for parents will be updated regularly to include further resources and reflect the latest information and developments.
Remote education support: available now The items in this section are available now. Devices, internet access and digital education platforms. 100k more laptops for schools – but access is slashed. The government has bought a further 100,000 laptops for schools – but headteachers have seen their allocations slashed by around 80 per cent to ensure the stock lasts longer.
The Department for Education told schools today the new approach, to be introduced after half term, will ensure “allocations are more effectively targeted to the children, schools and areas of the country that have greatest need”. The government had worked out allocations for schools based on how many disadvantaged children they have in years 3 to 11, and has already delivered over 100,000 laptops since September. However the new system means schools will now only be able to claim around 20 per cent of what they’ve been allocated.
The move has angered headteachers and comes as more pupils are forced out of the classroom to learn at home as coronavirus cases rise. As of this week, schools are also under a new legal duty to provide immediate remote education for any pupils off because of Covid. Find support to close the digital divide.