The West Bridgford School

ONLINE EDUCATION PROVISION AT WBS

Online Education provision at WBS - from 18th January

OUR AIMS

  • All pupils should be taught in groups with their own member of staff, sharing the virtual classroom with their own classmates.
  • No ‘collapsing’ of groups.  30 pupils or less in a class allows a more natural teaching, questioning and interactive style.
  • Every year group should have a broadly comparable level of service. No year group is more or less important than another.
  • We must learn from our experiences of last lockdown.
    • 5 hours of online teaching a day, 5 days a week becomes self-defeating as pupils rapidly become exhausted having to constantly engage with a screen. This message came through again and again from parent and pupil surveys, that while this might be manageable for a week or two, engagement can drop away beyond this. It’s better to aim for quality rather than just quantity.
    • Staff need more preparation time to create new lessons or convert existing lessons than when they are in school.
    • 50 minute lessons are manageable to aid transitions between lessons, while giving more time for a well-designed learning opportunities.
  • Behaviour and attendance issue will be followed up in a similar manner to ‘normal’ school.
  • Virtual Classroom teaching isn’t always the best route to follow. Other activities such as worksheets, online materials and tasks, Oak Academy Lessons, coursework, assessments tasks or a range of other activities might accelerate learning than a live online classroom setting.

 

Thus to meet and balance these competing drivers the school plan is thus:

  • Starting 18th January we will move to a new timetable for all year groups. Year 7 and 8, who thus far have been working on ‘Oak Academy’ online lessons rather than with their teachers, will move to Brightspace Virtual Classroom lessons with their own teacher.
  • Brightspace is our main platform for online learning. However some staff may additionally use Office 365.
  • The online classroom time for each year group will be:
    • Year 7 will have 31 taught periods per fortnight
    • Year 8 will have 30 taught periods per fortnight
    • Year 9 will have 31 taught periods per fortnight
    • Year 10 and 11 will have 36 taught periods per fortnight
    • Year 12 and 13 will move from 9 taught periods per subject to 8.
  • Online timetables will be available to view in student Office 365 Outlook calendars. All students are aware of how to access their school Office 365 account, and Outlook calendar.
  • Substantial work has gone into balancing a student’s fortnightly timetable as much as possible, however to allow all pupils to be taught by their own member of staff, the occasional student day may have 2 taught lessons, while another might have 4. This will balance over the 2 week cycle.
  • Staff will clearly signpost additional homework beyond the online classroom. Teachers have been given clear subject based targets on the amount of work that will need to be set to meet national guidelines.