Lessons learnt so far

Early days still but after three weeks of preparation, Yarra Valley Grammar launched its fully online curriculum on Friday 20 March. It's been a sound collaboration between the School Executive, IT Services, Heads of Department and all teachers. Here's how this has played out so far:

Communication and Structure

The Principal, Dr Mark Merry, has been active in regularly communicating to all members of the Yarra Valley Grammar Community by both writing and in filming short social media clips. At a time of uncertainty, parents have appreciated the regular communication and leadership.

Our video conferencing tool is Microsoft Teams with all learning content based in Canvas supported by Google Drive.  Email and phone contact complete this as the backstop. This structure gives us a stepped framework when the global internet becomes eventually overloaded thorough demand. All classes were imported into Microsoft Teams by IT Services with policies refined to prevent students from contacting each other by video calls and chats outside class. With Teams supported in the Azure cloud, Canvas in the Amazon Web Services cloud and our email hosted on-prem, we are cautiously optimistic that having each framework component in different clouds and email on-prem will serve us well.

To begin our online preparation program, our teachers were based at school and this decision gave everyone confidence that there was technical and collegial support for the first week.  With things changing rapidly in Melbourne, rather than have teachers start remotely at home, the shared sense of purpose from the start was tangible. All Admin staff have been assigned VPN and remote desktop access to be able to work from home with onsite training provided.

The timetable is replicated with all teachers asked to begin each class with a short video conference to the class followed by a set task. This allows the teacher to then talk with students in small groups.  Most teachers have opted then to conclude the class with a recap video conference. We don't want to burden students or teachers with too much work outside class at this stage. We need to start small, support each other, build confidence that this is manageable and make adjustments.  Consistency and routine are essential right now as we all respond to the challenges each family faces.

Each student's timetable is available to students, parents and staff through the Community Portal. Attendance is taken. We are trialling different ways to do that from thumbs up in the chat to a Google form ("Yes I'm here"). This is then recorded in our SIS (Synergetic) with parents notified of unexplained absences.

Assessment

The main message to our teachers is "think shorter".  We know that online teaching is a different paradigm and we simply cannot expect to continue with the same curriculum program.  Formative assessment becomes front and centre.  Low stakes assessing of content covered in the conference can be as easy as "Complete/incomplete" in Canvas assignments or four or five multiple-choice questions that self-correct in Canvas quizzes.  We want our students, teachers and families to be confident that our online learning approach is achievable and sustainable.

In 2014, we chose Canvas as our learning management system and, with the support of our Heads of Departments, introduced a system of real-time reporting in the Middle School and Senior School with all formal assessment and feedback reported back to parents through Canvas assignments. Our semester reports are a one page summary of results achieved in the semester together with a progress comment from the Tutor. That decision seven years later means that our Canvas deployment is mature and ready to meet the needs of remote learning. Our teachers understand that online learning is a different paradigm to face-to-face teaching and that formative assessment must be systematic, ongoing and regular when teaching remotely.

In February 2019, Grade Guardian (AKA Dropout Detective) was introduced as a way to be able to track student academic progress more effectively in Canvas for Tutors, Year Level Coordinators and Heads of School.

Screen recording:

In the first week of February, with the possibility of major disruption looming as the year progressed, a classroom lesson capture workflow was fast-tracked and developed to record audio and digital panel content through the Front Row Teacher Edition software. Subsequent to this, teachers have been encouraged to pre-record learning points on their laptops using Microsoft Teams without an audience and then to store these in Microsoft Stream. This integration has a powerful tag system for archiving and is developing auto captioning that is also searchable.

Both the Windows and Mac operating systems have built-in screen recording features.  While the Windows system is still somewhat clunky, Apple's keyboard "Command Shift 5" is a simple and elegant extension of its Command Shift 3 and 4 options.

ScreenCastify as a Chrome extension is also being trialled with promising results. (The first five minutes are free)

We ask our teachers to consider their lighting and to improve the camera angle by putting their laptop on a riser stand. It is an ideal time to learn about the "Rule of Thirds".

Preparation

Our teachers undertook approximately seven hours of preparation using Teams and refining their Canvas content immediately before we launched.

Separate sessions were held for students in year levels and teachers to launch the program. The Principal or Head of School introduced each session, and I followed with our expectations. These included switching off microphones at the start of a conference; bedrooms should not be the place for video conferences; punctuality, note-taking and mind mapping were all emphasised. Teams was demonstrated in the session before groups practised using the app around the School.  

The professionalism of colleagues was brilliant to see and be a part of. Students left on Wednesday 18 March with the following day for teachers to prepare and students to catch up with schoolwork at home before we formally commenced on the Friday. We also ran an optional, casual Heads of Department impromptu session on the previous Sunday afternoon, so Heads felt confident of being a couple of steps ahead of their teachers before we launched with teachers formally. 

Our parents have continued to receive emails and short YouTube videos from the Principal, Dr. Mark Merry, with guidelines for parents posted on the Community Portal. Judging by our social media feeds and subsequent publicity, this has started successfully. Check out 15 min 40 seconds:

Supporting Teachers

Over the last eight months, the School has provisioned each Middle School and Senior School teacher to have an office work station that includes an external monitor, wireless keyboard and mouse as well as laptop and monitor stands.  Our rationale was that if we wanted our teachers to continue to develop online learning content, we needed to ensure that teacher work stations were ergonomically sound. While this was initially intended for staff office use, teachers are permitted to take home this equipment by completing a simple "Self Report and Safety Checklist Form".

Fortuitously, a significant increase in internet bandwidth has been a major project for IT Services (Interleave Australia) over the last eight months. This project is due to be completed by mid-April and will see a significant expansion of our bandwidth to 1.5 Gb. While we do not know how future demand will impact on the internet globally, we are in a strong position to meet the needs of remote learning and teaching.

Our Individual Programs Department (IPD) staff have continued to support their students. With all IPD staff assigned an iPad with an STM keyboard and case, we thought this would suffice for Microsoft Teams access. The issue we discovered was that while an iPad can be used to create channels for communication with specific students, the iPad cannot initiate video calls to those students. We then had to deploy a very low specced student class set of basic laptops used for Lego Mindstorms coding. We've found that Teams works really with lower specced laptops.

Next Steps

We simply do not know how long it will be until we return to learning and teaching on-site. It could be July, October or even much longer. While there is a huge opportunity to modify and ultimately redefine learning tasks as outlined in both SAMR and the T3 Framework, we must be acutely conscious that we just need to get to the next operational stage and engender confidence and optimism to all in our community. The best way right now to maintain method and help follow a schedule is to replicate the timetable.  Our structure provides certainty and routine when both are in short commodity as the world around us changes by the hour locally and globally.  We have plans to shape the next phase, but we intentionally chose this model to be able to springboard more easily to our next phase.

Some schools have sought to go to a project-based model and to use technical terms like "synchronous" and "asynchronous" learning to explain remote learning to students. If your school uses these terms regularly and has a more independent, less structured approach to learning, then your students and staff should fly.  But this is not really the time to be introducing a completely new style of learning without the parameters that the school environment can give.  The result is likely to be further uncertainty, confusion and fatigue for students and teachers alike as they try to keep up with competing demands across the curriculum. We know that this challenge is an opportunity to think differently but our first priorities come back to confidence building through routine, certainty and sustainability right now. 

Anecdotal stories on social media from schools around the globe report teacher fatigue as a common issue.  We must all be conscious of the need to modify learning and teaching to meet the needs of both our students and teachers. With global economic and health concerns, learning should be a welcome respite from what may be happening around our students.