FAQ

This page will be updated as more questions come through. If you have a question you'd like answered, email it through to: remotelearning@stacbourne.catholic.edu.au

One of our Leadership Team members will receive it.

Remember for most questions about your children, their teacher should be your first port of call.

Should I buy a laptop for this?

Our lessons are planned to be able to used on any device. If you have an iPad, that should work fine for what we need. If you require a device, please make contact with the school.

Do I have to do the lessons at the same time school runs?

We provide a recommended daily timetable. At the same time, we completely understand the challenges families face with working from home or still working on site. We are required by legislation to monitor student attendance, which is challenging within this climate. We want to work with all families.

To monitor attendance, we have created check-ins using different strategies in all year levels. The strategy depends on the age of students and platform. We have tried to make them possible to do independently, though we understand the challenges some may encounter. If we could ask that children check in between 8:45 and 9:30am, this will make monitoring attendance achievable. If it is not possible, please contact your teacher and we will endeavour to find a way to support you.

Your first contact should be your child's teacher. Our staff will continue to work their work hours, but will respond to emails sent after work within two school days. Please be understanding, that like many organisations in this COVID-19 time, volumes of emails are significantly increased and replies may be delayed at times.

What should I do to help students?

This Remote Learning is the best insight we can possibly give parents into learning within our school. It may feel that parents have to take the role of te teacher. We want you to know we are still here to teach and answer your children's questions. Great learners know how to ask questions. So one skill you can support your children with is the ability to ask a great question of their teacher when seeking help. "I don't know", is not the greatest question, but with a simple addition of "I don't understand what the word hypothesis means?" the question becomes a learning question.

The other thing to know is to take it easy on yourself. It will be okay. If the work is taking a fight to get done, the learning that follows most likely will not be valuable. Let your child's teacher know it is a challenge, and we will work with families to see how we can support.

Can we use videoconferencing or live streaming?

Due to the children's age, there are some child safety factors that need to be considered for any videoconferencing to occur.

We are looking at it with students, and once plans are finalised, we will let you know. It can be used as a tool to conduct parent support meetings. There are some strict protocols that need to be observed to ensure the safety and dignity of all are maintained.

A teacher and child will not be able to be on a chat alone. No recording of video conferences will be allowed. The session must happen through our CEO supported Google Meet platform.

As we move into remote schooling, we hope this will be a tool used throughout grades but we are just double checking everything to ensure all members of our learning community are safe at all times. We'll provide more information about this as we address our concerns.

What if I am having a technology issue?

Please reach out to bharris@stacbourne.catholic.edu.au or psharp@stacbourne.catholic.edu.au

Be mindful, that at times technology doesn't behave how we want it to. If there is a 'glitch' with a task, please move onto another task and let your child's teacher know. Even better, the student should let the teacher know. If you are making video to upload, the video should last no longer than one minute. This will assist with uploading the video. Long videos are huge files that are difficult to upload.

It's inevitable that some IT issues will occur but, as long as we know about them, we have support staff in place to attend to them; it just may take time.