Update on Arrangements for Distance Learning

Statement ID: CS-CVD19-19032020-1

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Dear Parents,

Like you, Chengelo School continues to carefully monitor the spread of Covid-19 around the world. Today we wind up our school programs on campus in preparation for our students to return home. In doing so, we are ensuring all our students are signed up and ready to continue their education remotely through Google Classroom whilst they are away from school.

We fully recognise that there are a number of difficulties for you as parents in trying to ensure your children can continue with their education while limited to using online tools. We also understand that for this to work well, we need a partnership between parents and the school. For this reason, as we set up the Google Classroom platform, we will be connecting parents and guardians to the classrooms to enable you to monitor the work being set for your children whilst they are at home. This access will enable you to assist your sons and daughters in downloading the activities and in responding to them as we go forward.

Of course, this new way of working is not unique to Chengelo at this time. Around the world today, schools and parents are having to establish new routines to ensure that students are able to continue with their studies. We are proud to have highly experienced staff on campus who are already in the process of preparing digital lessons while continuing to mark work and ensure you receive feedback on the progress of your sons and daughters.

That said, we want to do far more than just this. We aim to continue to provide support for our students, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, socially, and even physically. In the coming weeks, there will be regular opportunities for our students to join online chat sessions with their tutors, interact with our pastoral team and engage with our Chaplain.

Google Classroom allows us to share a wide variety of resources with you and your children to support them in their learning. Through this crisis, the materials available online across the world have significantly improved and we will guide our students in accessing appropriate interactive content that will ensure learning remains interesting and exciting.

Further details of what to expect via the Google Classroom platform will be shared with you early next week by our Deputy Heads, Mr Paul Vines in Secondary and Mrs Naomi Cowling in Primary.

As our students use the Internet to access these materials at home, it is critical that their online activities are supervised to ensure their safety. Our Head of ICT, Mr Chanda will be sending out a document with guidance and advice on keeping children safe online in due course.

If you run into any technical difficulties with accessing Google Classroom, assistance will be available to guide you through it. Please contact one of the Deputy Heads in the first instance and they will direct your concern to a staff member who can help.

Over this coming week we want to spend time with you ensuring all our students can access these online learning tools and that they are successfully responding to this style of study. It is impossible to say at this stage how long we will need to continue to work in this way but we are confident that with our parents’ support, we can pull together to ensure our students continue to excel.

We look forward to sharing further details with you over the next few days so all students can begin to access assignments as soon as possible next week. We are determined to provide the best support we can for our young people during this rather unsettling time.

We pray that you all travel well, and stay safe.
God Bless,

Andrew Cowling
School Principal