Principal's Report
Sharing and Caring in these Times
Last week I shared Martine Oglethorpe of Modern Parents' tips on working and learning online and Amanda shared tips on how to keep safe online.
This week after 8 days of remote learning, I want to to take a breath and say a big thank you again to parents/carers, students and staff for their enthusiasm, ingenuity and commitment to the learning of our MPRPS students. I know it's difficult and above all its very intense and exhausting work, but after all the heartwarming emails sharing the ups and also the challenges, I believe we are doing it. Who would have thought we would be doing what we are doing, as we came back from Christmas to start the 2020 school year and doing It so well.
It's important for you all to know that staff do know how challenging it is juggling, children, you're own work and their school work because many of them are doing it too. We are trying very hard to make sure the tasks we set meet the DET guidelines but are also a good fit our students and their families.
A couple of points to remember
- There is not an expectation for you to 'teach' your child. Please direct children to the videos and audio that teachers develop to be a support for the learning tasks and any questions to the classroom teacher.
- Not every task will get done. Not every day will students be able to get online and complete learning tasks. Staff accept this and now we encourage you to accept this too. We cannot all do everything every day. This is where we need to take care of ourselves and our families.
If you have any questions we are here for you - we may not know all the answers but we will work with you to come up with a solution.
Share a Working from Home Photo
With this being such a unique time I though it would be good to document it in someway. I would love to put together a slideshow for the foyer TV of all our students working from home. If you felt comfortable about sharing a photo please send it to the school email or your child's classroom teacher for us to add to the Working from Home slide show - might be nice for students to be greeted by this when we eventually return to normality.
Assembly No. 2
This is a link to Assembly Number 2 online. https://vimeo.com/413022978
I had a lot of help from our amazing School Captains Ollie and Anais and our SRC Presidents Jia-Xuan and Sophie.
Family Phone Calls
Thank you for all your positive and constructive feedback to your children's teachers, as we make contact with all of our families.
SeeSaw and Google Classroom Teacher Feedback
You will see below how amazing the statistics are for our Junior School SeeSaw learning tasks! These figures show the level of engagement across the Junior classes with students, teachers and parents!
Please also be aware that if a class teacher was to comment and give deep feedback on three items a day that would be in excess of 60 pieces of feedback. This is not sustainable, particularly with staff planning and completing administration, team meetings and assessments. To ensure the feedback is valuable and supports a student to improve instead of deep feedback for every piece of work often a 'like' or a thumbs up will be provided as encouragement.
Privacy Considerations
Just as we have privacy policies governing the sharing of student material everyone needs to be aware of the need to not share materials produced by the school.
Any material produced by the school, MUST NOT be shared, reproduced or published in any other way, without the written consent from the school. I ask that you consider our staff in this context. The learning tasks developed, accompanied by the videos is work that we have put a great deal of effort into. We do not post this work in the online environment for praise or public scrutiny – the only purpose is to educate your children. You can imagine how vulnerable and exposed our staff will feel if videos of themselves are shared (even if the intentions are to highlight how wonderful our lessons are) – just as your professional documents and files are not for public display, neither are our teachers – please privilege them their privacy. If I am made aware of this breach of privacy, I will be addressing this with parents/carers directly.