31 March 2020

Dear Parents and Carers,

First of all, thank you for your patience and for giving staff the time to develop the resources and platforms required for remote learning to take place. I am very excited and pleased to be able to let you know that we are trialling a full role out of our remote learning tomorrow, where all staff will be working remotely. This is to ensure that we are troubleshooting all aspects of remote learning so we are ready to go next term. There will be a skeleton staff available for students who need to continue to come to school.

We will begin our remote learning trial on Wednesday Period 1 which is our Pastoral Care lesson. We are dedicating this time to making contact with our Mentor students and after this, we will follow the student’s timetables that are available on the Student Portal.

Please see below a detailed information sheet regarding protocols and procedures for this new way of learning. We will be following these procedures and protocols from the start of Term 2.

Many of you will have heard that there are considerable concerns being raised about security issues with the online platform, Zoom. The Catholic Education Office is very aware of this situation and in response to this are moving all CE schools onto the TEAMS learning platform so that staff are able to video conference students in a safe space with added security being provided by the CE’s firewall.

In order to support all staff to provide this remote learning platform and to have it set up in Term 2, our school will be providing all staff with professional learning for the last week of term from Tuesday 7 April and Wednesday 8 April. We are able to offer limited supervision for students on these two days. Could you please let me know if you need to send your child to school on these two days so we can see what arrangements we need to put in place.

During these two days staff will provide ILT style work on Moodle so our Junior students can continue their learning, however, Tuesday and Wednesday will be “communication free” days, ie. there will not be online interactions with Junior students. Remote classes will continue as “normal” for our Senior students – especially as there are a number of assessments due in this week.

Regards

Stephanie O'Meara