Principal's News

Dear families,

With only one week to go of Term 3, and hopefully just a week left of remote learning, I know many families are looking forward to some respite from being online and a break from ‘the screen’. It is quite remarkable how draining it is being on meets and just brings home the amount of energy we gain from being in the physical company of other humans! This is our last newsletter of the term, and I will communicate Term 4 news to you at the end of the holidays in my usual ‘welcome to the term’ letter.

Please try and relax and switch off- quite literally! Well done again to all members of our community on the magnificent efforts with remote learning. Let’s hope we don’t have #7.

This week the children have been involved in a wide range of activities outside of English and Maths sessions, such as the remote ‘100 Days of Prep’ (I think it’s much more than 100 but better late than never!); sustainability incursions with Ceres; rainbow club; extras with specialists and the odd potato Olympic event here and there.

Our term ends next Friday with a special remote ‘Footy Colours Day’ and I thank Marta Cummings for organising a wide range of fun activities for our students to participate in. More details about this are contained in Marta’s news, later in this newsletter.

Tech Questions

I thought I’d share Martin’s tech update from earlier in the week regarding email functions with our student accounts. We know it can be a bit of a nuisance not being able to send your child an email, especially when you want to share attachments such as photographs, but we know this block on external emails provides a high level of online safety for our children. I’d hate for them to receive questionable content from strangers.

Just an update/reminder about the student Google/Email accounts. MACS (Catholic Education) have filters on the student email accounts, this means that the students are not able to receive any messages or share material from anyone who is outside the @sjmalvern domain/network.

I understand this does cause a couple of issues, especially when trying to email work or photos taken of work to your children so they can upload this into their Google Classroom.

There are a couple of ways to get around this one way is to login to your child's google classroom by downloading the google classroom app, you can then add videos/pictures directly through the app. If older students have their own phone they can do this themselves.

Alternatively, there is a google drive app which you can login as your child and upload videos, etc directly from a phone.

The Chromebooks do also have a camera which can take videos and photos although it isn't the best it should suffice for school work.

If you find your child needs to upload a video or photo to complete their work and are really stuck/the above solutions don't work you can email me at martin.earl@sjmalvern.catholic.edu.au and I can then forward this to your child's account.

Thank you for your understanding.

At St Joseph’s we also have the Hapara system running quietly in the background and this a wonderful tool that teachers use for onsite and remote learning.

Hapara gives teachers the ability to monitor, direct, and redirect students to support learning above all—even as the responsibility for learning shifts and evolves, whether onsite or remotely. Hapara allows teachers to:

Remove temptations and control a list of URLs to disable or focus on; easily done with Hāpara’s Guided Browsing.
See a full class view of current learner browser activity as well as recent and current tabs.
Pause students’ screens temporarily to underscore a point or focus attention on the teacher and a one-click option to close a URL or tab on a student’s device.

Above all else, we take our responsibility for child safety very seriously, whether on school grounds or in a virtual classroom.

Mary Poppins Jr

As we head towards the end of the term, we have had to think about many planned events in Term 4 and alternative arrangements or cancellations.

As you know, our big art project this year is our school musical, Mary Poppins Jr.

Our lead cast has been rehearsing from home with myself and Miss Sinker, and they are doing a fantastic job under the circumstances. The show was originally scheduled for the 27th and 28th of October at Malvern Town Hall.

With a heavy heart, we have decided to push the show out to Tuesday 30th November and we also have to plan for restrictions preventing an audience to be present. We have booked a streaming/video company (Turbo 360) to come in and spend that day filming the show, which they will then edit and provide a streaming link to our community. We will also be able to download a high-quality video of the show to share with you all.

Whilst it's not ideal to perform without an audience, I'm sure our very talented students will still enjoy the experience of performing on stage. I will communicate the finer details with you closer to the time.

In the meantime, let's hope the children will be back on-site as soon as possible so we can go ahead with in-person rehearsals!

Thanks Joanne and Isabelle (aka Thelma and Louise)

A sincere thanks to our dedicated admin staff, who spent yesterday driving around the Malvern area to hand-deliver a special teddy bear's picnic parcel to our 2022 prep students.

You can imagine the excitement from our newest students and the compliments from our families about these important 'little personal touches'. We can't wait to meet our new students next Thursday at the remote picnic.

Request for Onsite Attendance

Please complete the following request form as soon as possible and email your work permits to office@sjmalvern.catholic.edu.au

https://forms.gle/XZUDk2Gcvkvm3P2R6

A Final Farewell

This week will be Rebecca Hyde's final week at St Joseph's as she takes up additional teaching days at her other school, much closer to home.

Whilst it's not ideal to leave when we can't be together to give Bec a proper and fitting farewell for her 12 years of service to the school, she has promised to come back in December for a visit to staff and students. We wish Bec and her family all our best wishes for the future- I know we will all miss her humour, collegiality and teaching expertise.

An important message from Year 3 to round out the term:

Take care, stay safe and I hope we can see you all in real life very soon!

Michelle