Students returning to remote learning in response to continuing COVID-19 spike

Aug 4, 2020

KYABRAM and district’s students are headed back to remote learning in response to the growing number of positive COVID-19 cases across the state.

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Premier Daniel Andrews announced a state of disaster on Sunday, and that all classes across Victoria — except specialist schools — would be away from the classrooms for at least the next six weeks.

The state had already extended its winter school holidays earlier this month, adding five pupil-free days as the number of coronavirus cases began to spike.

St Patrick’s, Tongala principal Katrina Johnson said while it was disappointing to see the students forced back into remote learning, staff members were prepared.

Ms Johnson said every student had been able to take their own one-to-one device — such as an iPad or MacBook — home with them over this period.

“Obviously our best scenario is that students are back at school and that we’re together and connected, but we have done it before, and we know how to go about it without so much organising this time. We’re ready to go, so we will just get ourselves organised,” she said.

“We’re going to try really hard to make sure they stay connected to each other as much as possible, because that was our big lesson last time.

“There’s nothing we won’t try to do here to make it so that it works best for our families. We’ll just keep tweaking things and working it out so that it’s the best possible scenario, and we really look forward to when we can get all back together at school.”

Kyabram P-12 College principal Paul Tozer said staff learnt a lot over the previous period of remote learning, and he was confident students would be able to make the best of the situation.

“The staff and students did a fantastic job last time and there were certainly lessons we learnt from it — things that worked really well and things that didn’t work quite as well. We’ve got an opportunity to put all of that into that and use the best strategies going forward,” he said.

“We certainly saw that in the secondary side of things that the video-conferencing style of teaching was more effective than just delivering lesson plans and information via texts, so we’re going to increase the amount of video teaching in the next round of remote learning.

“In the primary school we transferred over a program called Seesaw, which is more interactive for students. We got more engagement through that, so that will be the main delivery there.”

Tongala Primary School principal Rob Hogan said providing as much support as possible to families over the next six weeks was paramount.

“Our kids and families were amazing last time. They did their best in such a trying time and it gives us real confidence that will happen again,” he said.

“It’s a real partnership, so over the next six weeks they need to make sure they stay connected with the school and if they need any support, we are only a message or a phone call away.”