Principal's Report

The last time our school newsletter was published, all students and staff were still attending school on site.  Indeed, as with every other year of schooling in the history of Warrnambool College, we anticipated that this would continue.  How quickly things evolved and changed at the end of March.

I want to thank every member of our school community - parents, carers, students, staff and supporters for your incredible flexibility, patience, creativity and energy over the past 6 weeks.  What we have achieved in our transition to remote learning over such a condensed period of time is nothing short of amazing.  I acknowledge that the learning and teaching is not ideal and that we look forward to coming together outside of a video conference session.  However, I know that we have done everything possible to ensure that students continue to learn to the best of their abilities in an online environment.  Indeed, some students have reflected that they prefer this style of learning and are already asking how it might continue when we get back to being physically together on-site at school.  We will certainly do our best to ensure that all the innovation and learning about learning isn’t lost when we’re able to return to a new sense of normality.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been able to loan out a number of school owned netbooks to support students who do not have access to a learning device at home.  We have now received a number of Department of Education learning devices and wifi enabled devices that we can loan out to families that may require this.  If you do not have access to the internet and you have a good 4G mobile signal inside your home, these wifi enabled devices can provide online access so that all students have access to remote learning.  Please contact the school if you’d like to know more details so we can assign these devices to families that need it.

While there are obviously fewer interruptions to classroom learning this term (such as sporting events or excursions), there are still times when teachers are not able to teach their online class via Google Classroom during the day.  In these instances we are doing our best to ensure that casual relief teachers, trained in how to use Google Classroom, can take the class on behalf of the absent teacher.  However, there are some classes that we cannot cover which are then cancelled in the student’s Compass schedule.  Students should be checking their schedule in Compass at the start of each day – if a class is not appearing on the schedule, it has been cancelled.  Work is usually left for students to go on with in the Compass class news feed so that students can continue to learn throughout the whole school day.

Whilst our student attendance in the online learning environment remains very high, we are also noticing that some students are present for the start of the period of learning, but not completing ‘exit pass’ tasks at the end of the period.  Please have a conversation at home about ensuring that your child stays in the online learning platform for the WHOLE period of learning – a lot of important learning and assessment is completed towards the end of the lessons and we want to make sure that no-one is missing out.

My many thanks again go out to our whole school community.  You continue to inspire me with your persistence and resilience in these surreal times.  Please continue to reach out to connect with each other via phone, video conferencing and text.  It is vital that we draw on our networks of support to ensure that we’re all getting through this together.

Kind Regards,

Dave Clift - Principal