Principal's message

Dear Parents, Carers and Students

I hope you are all healthy and well and that you are in good spirits. I have been hearing about some very engaging classroom activities over the past fortnight and I wanted to share some of these with you. We have hosted a number of theme days such as the House colours week. Well done to Jackson House for placing first! There will be a number of other ways in which students can win house points this term, so stay tuned.

The STEAM Team area have hosted the Girls Invent program for the Year 8 students.  This program is offered through the Year 8 Technology (wood) and some Personal Learning classes and would usually be done on site. In Semester 1 Years 8B, 8D and 8F and will be undertaking the program. Girls Invent is a schools based inventing and business development program. Through a structured series of focused workshops, the girl inventors create their own original product or service idea and are then shown how to progress it as any entrepreneur would into a real business. It is so good to see that even though we aren’t hosting this onsite that our students are still gaining an insight into what is possible in the virtual world.

I mentioned in the last newsletter that we will be commencing work on our STEAM building very soon.  So stay tuned for some photos on our Instagram and Facebook page. We have continued to paint the school during this period and we will be upgrading the wet room area of the JLC and the First Aid room in the next few weeks. I hope to be able to share some photographs with you in the near future as well.

I am hearing about some really interesting and engaging classroom programs from students, parents and teachers. In some cases, parents have joined the classes and given an insight into their area of work.  It is so good to see the real world experiences of the families coming through.

I thought it might be useful to share some of the Department of Education (DET) resources for families in this message. There are online resources for parents that can provide some clarification as to the difference between home schooling and learning from home (which is what we are doing). When you start to think about helping your child to learn from home, remember that no one expects you to be an expert or teacher. The most important thing you can do is to continue to provide comfort, support and encouragement to your child.  The DET link Learning from home is a good place to start for parents. 

Learning from home is a school-based remote and flexible learning model. Under this model of learning schools continue to support your child with learning tasks and technology support (as needed). Our teachers will remain in contact with your child each day through their lessons. But as this is new to us too, we would value feedback from parents and students as to how we are navigating this period of time. We know that being online does replace students seeing their friends in person every day and they have a lot more screen time than usual. 

We are doing our best to adjust the workload for our students but we want to check in with you to get a parents and a student’s perspective as well.  We will be sending students and parents out a short survey shortly to help us to get the workflow right and it would be appreciated if you could provide us with some feedback.  If we have got it right, then let us know.  If we need to adjust it, then also let us know.  We can only make the adjustments if the majority of students and parents give us this feedback.

At the beginning of this term we also sent you a survey to ask you to let us know of any issues that you might have in relation to student laptops or iPads. The survey also asked you whether you had any internet issues that were causing some problems for remote learning. We didn’t get a large response (about 25% of parents responded) so we can only assist those we know about. If you are experiencing any difficulties with either of these issues, please email me on linda.brown@education.vic.gov.au and I will do my best to assist you. 

The school can assist students with a loan of a device (such as a laptop or iPad) and we can let the Department of Education know that there are issues with your internet. DET is responsible for assisting families with internet dongles or SIM cards (whichever is appropriate) to assist families through this period. The Department has partnered with Telstra to provide 1000 4G dongle devices with 4G internet access, and 4000 SIM cards that provide 4G internet access, for families who do not have access to the internet at home. These will be free of charge, and will be provided for the next six months.

For trouble shooting issues with student owned devices, our IT Team are available through the online portal accessed via the MGSC Intranet page (student access only) or send the issue through to ICTHelpDesk@mgsc.vic.edu.au. Unfortunately, we can’t have students or parents come to the school without a prior appointment or prior contact due to Child Safety requirements and the restrictions in relation to Covid-19.  So please email our team first and this will get the process started.

Finally, I do not want to forget to make mention of our 2019 Dux, Alicia Gilpin, who has achieved a Premier’s Award for Psychology.  This is an impressive achievement which Alicia receiving a 50 for this subject. 

Keep well

Linda Brown

Principal

Thanks for your support 

Messages from our parents and students

Our family would like to thank you very much for your fantastic communication and dedication to our girls during this extraordinary time. You have made it easy to understand the keep up to date with the latest Covid 19 news and how it will affect MGSC. Our daughters are both flourishing learning from home with alarms set around the house at school bell times. Both agree they are learning more without the classroom disruptions, have more time to focus on the work set and have more homework – which they are enjoying and seem very focussed. So again, thank you and best wishes for the months ahead.

I wanted to let you know that our daughter is thriving at home and having lots of fun learning this way! We knew she would cope with whatever was thrown at her at home and as her dad and I are both working from home as well, we hardly see her as she goes about completing all of the tasks with her usual dedication. In saying that, she is missing her new friends and looks forward to returning to school.

Many thanks to you and all her teachers as she always understand exactly what she has to do and I fully understand the extra effort and long hours that enable our daughter to continue progressing as she is.

I must say we have enjoyed hot blueberry cinnamon muffins for morning tea as she completed a food tech. task, so there are some advantages! Please pass on to her teachers that we are so very appreciative of all of their efforts. Kind regards,

Thank you for all that you are all doing to keep connected. I attended the webinar [on remote learning] last night and found that our school (MGSC) is doing everything that could be to motivate and connect students to keep on top of school work. I actually felt proud and validated that we are doing more than OK! So well done to all.