Good Morning!

Hope you all had a restful weekend.

I have decided to start up the daily news again. It will be a more condensed version that the usual ones I send, but it will include reminders of things coming up in the coming week.

First of all though  we wanted to thank everyone for their efforts over the past week to set up the e-learning programme. It has been an incredible effort under quite difficult circumstances. The videos that teams have also started posting have really gone down well with the parents. So thank you all very much.

 

Zoom

The Zoom guidelines have been finalized – please see attached below. Most of you have already seen these through your Team meetings, but please do look through again, and ask your team leader if you have any questions.

Plan and Expectations for Zoom Usage

The parent email from the school will be translated and sent later today – see below. Again, please can I ask that you read this  carefully, as there are some important points included that would be good for teachers to know too.

Parent Email – Zoom Video Conferences

The follow-up email from the class teachers will need to be included in tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) daily email to parents. Within this email, please include the link to the zoom sessions, as well as the relevant details listed in the zoom guidelines. Your Team Leaders will call a Zoom meeting to run through this with you. A couple of further points have come up this weekend, so please can you also include these in your Tuesday email to parents as well:

  • Parents/students are not allow to record the Zoom sessions, share or publish them to others in any form
  • The Zoom sessions are for the use of  class students only, and not siblings, visiting relatives, interested friends or neighbours.

We know that it will take a little time for teachers and students to become familiar with the Zoom platform. Usually when rolling something like this out, it would take a number of weeks, and include trial sessions etc…so we realize that some may be out of their comfort zone with this. I would strongly suggest the first couple of sessions would be more about making the initial connections with the students, having some informal discussions, becoming familiar with the functions of Zoom, and laying down ‘rules of usage’ with the students. The younger students will of course need more time as well.

 

Absence

HR will continue to record staff absences during this time. Please ensure to let the relevant coordionator know if you are sick/require leave, and are not able to be present for e-learning during any given day.

 

PT Interviews

These were initially going to be held this week at school.Obviously, with he school closure, these will not be able to take place in their usual format. We will therefore be using the Zoom platform to conduct ‘face-to-face’ video conferences with the parents. More information on how this will be done will be sent later this week. For Y5-6, Wednesday, Feb 12 will be a ‘Day 1’ (it was not originally assigned a ‘Day’). The rest of the days will remain unchanged.

 

WeChat

Some parents have struggled to download the resources from the blog, particularly the larger videos. We will be setting up a system where a designated parent reps will download them and post them on the Class WeChat groups on a daily basis. We will make the following clear:

  • This will not replace blogs in any way. Parents will still need to check the daily email and blog for all information. The reason that we are doing this is that we realise that some people are struggling to download the docs from the blog, and so hopefully this will help.
  • Parent questions will still need to be addressed to the class teachers (not the parent rep or WeChat group in general).

We hope to have this set up this week. We will let you know once this happens.

 

Have a good day,

Rob