Update #3

April 15, 2020 Good Morning Everyone! It has been a busy week already! I hope everyone is not as overwhelmed as I am! It has been quite the struggle to not only plan and find meaningful remote learning resources for students, but to also try to home-school my own three kids! I start work every day at 6am just so I can provide my own children schooling from 10-12:00! For those of you with young children my heart goes out to you! I wish we were back in class- my workload is three times heavier, and it is hard being isolated from all the support that we usually have as a community. Hang in there! As just a reminder to everyone, schooling will look different for each family, teacher, and district. I miss the students incredibly and I would love to have everyone connect digitally through a safe platform that protects all student's identity. I really want to see everyone, but I also understand and respect district protocols and suggestions. Not all students have equal access to internet, and I am working with Ms. Willows, Ms. Hagbloom and other teachers to try to provide meaningful tasks that can be assessed.

Zoom I have sent out the USA based consent forms for Zoom, and once the Canadian platform is available, I will have to resend out a new consent form if this is our platform we will use. The teachers in our district have been given clear instructions that even though we have consent forms now for Zoom USA (only just provided to me on the 14th) it is best practice to have only the teacher use video, and the students to connect with audio only. Other teachers might not be doing this, but student privacy and safety is of the utmost importance to me and I understand why this would be considered not mandatory, but best practice. Student Connection: I will be phoning to connect with students Weds and Thursday mornings around 10. I hope to speak directly with all students to check in with them at least once a week. If I cannot reach your student, I will try one more time. If your child missed a contact from me, please email a time within school hours that I can reach your child and I will try my best.

Email Teachers have also been given a new emailing system to use within the new Office 365 learning platform without any training, and even though I am very literate with computers, it has been a struggle. It seems some parents have not received all of my emails. Please respond to this email- even with a simple "yes" so that I know you are getting my emails. My email address has changed, but all emails sent to my old email address should be funneling through the new system.

I will check my emails at these times during the days: 8:00am, 12:00pm and 2:00pm. I will respond to as many emails as possible but only at these times.

My new email is hmcgowan@sd57learn.com but either email should work until June 30th.

Website: It seems there is a delay in posting my website to the Nukko Lake Elementary Webpage, under Learning Links. Sorry for the delay- but I am attaching the link below. https://hmcgowan3.wixsite.com/mysite

My Website will be updated every Monday with new tasks for the week. Please email me if you would like clarification on tasks. If your child has completed the tasks and would like additional tasks they can always voluntarily complete extra Mathletics, Duolingo, Typing Club, Epic, and BoomWriter tasks.

If you would like to celebrate something your student did at home with a picture, you can always take a picture of their work (with no student faces) and I can post it to my blog!

BoomWriter I have attached a pdf of all student passwords for BoomWriter. This data is not considered private as the first time your student logs in they change their password to something meaningful. This means I will not have access to your child’s password so please have them write it down.

Boom Writer is a program that I purchased that allows students to write in a digital platform. I can read your student’s work, ask them to complete revisions, and then resubmit. Unless I turn the group write feature on, student work is only shared with me. Parents were sent a portal link through BoomWriter, I am not familiar with it, but from my experience with it, students log in (they can use the link from my website) with their username and password and the program is easy to be independent in.

Students have at least 1 assignment per week, and there is a Silent Writing Journal for free writes that I can also check. Student work will be assessed in BoomWriter- look for my comments on your student’s work and starting next week work will be assessed.

Continuity of Learning Assignments: Once we are in full swing of implementing curriculum, students at our grade level are expected to complete up to 2 hours of day of curriculum based tasks. This includes 30 min of Daily Physical activity (DPA), and also includes tasks such as those suggested by the Keep Learning BC website (also linked on my website) such as life skills (baking, cooking), social/emotional tasks (mindfulness, meditation, journal writing) current events (discussing news topics) and arts and crafts. Each family has their own needs and own schedule I respect your decisions as to what is important each day and throughout the week. Right now I am aiming for about an hour and a half each day including 30 min DPA. If possible please focus on Mathletics assignments, Epic reading tasks and Boom Writer for now, as I will be reporting and focusing most of my assessing on these tasks. I will be recording all student achievements, but these are my main focus at this point. Attached is an April Calendar of "funwork" tasks for anyone who would like additional work- just send me an email with a photo attached of your student work if you want me to see it! I know these emails are lengthy- but I receive up to 30 emails a day from various sources so I am trying to put everything into an email to help everyone out!

Keep up the amazing work everyone! Ms. H. McGowan