You want me to learn at home!

Laughter, tears, sweat and yummy treats! What a week it has been being a parent working from home with whānau also working and learning from home.

This blogpost is a bit different as it is from my perspective as a parent and reflects our experiences as a family. We are pleased with both our children's schools and how they are rising to the challenge of teaching from home. However, there are always new learnings, and I hope this post encourages some reflection.

We have had, on the whole, three good days of learning. My wife has developed a much better understanding of Year 6 maths, Year 11 Science and Yr 8 code-breaking.

Working and learning at home is beginning to be the new normal. I often work at home and usually have a family at home when I am working; however, this is different as they are also working and require support as well. My wife is learning to work in a cloud-based environment, and the kids are learning a whole heap of new skills to organise and navigate learning online, and all have required a lot of support before the holiday break.

It has been fascinating seeing how my two children are entirely different when it comes to their planning of the organisation for learning. 

My daughter loves her timetable 

 and checklist and thrives on the structure.

It was a bit surprising how she took it so literally and got upset when she went over her brain break by four minutes and missed four minutes of maths!

My son has struggled with a lack of structure for his learning. The expectation is to use his normal timetable; however, this has been problematic as all the subjects have used different platforms Hapara Workspace, Google Classroom, Education Perfect, My Maths, MangaHigh and email. There is no one place where all of his learning can be accessed.

To support my son we have had to sit down and go through all the separate Google Classrooms (there are six of them), the Workspace, emails and Education perfect and centralise the tasks that require completion.

My son and I sat down and planned for the last three days of term 1 and created his timetable with links to the work from that list. 

Unfortunately, this first draft just stressed my son out with all the work he had to do and the times he had to do it.

For term two we then looked at creating more of a checklist that had no time allocations  and broke the tasks down into smaller chunks. 

The new checklist once printed out so he could have it beside him on the desk has been excellent for my son, and he has quietly and confidently worked through the tasks and marked them off on the sheet.

My learnings as a parent 

• It takes time to establish how your child organises their day to learn and requires a number of options for your child to choose from to support the planning of their day/week.
• There needs to be multiple ways available to them for choosing how to organise their day.
• Schools need to limit the links or spaces children need to access their learning. A one-page organiser or list linked to the learning tasks could be helpful to help the student organise the day/week. Some form of this may need to be created by the school, which would also help teachers coordinate workload across classes?
• Edited 18 April - We have found the one stop shop it is called mystudentdashboard.com. If your school uses Hapara Teacher Dashboard this is part of the package. My son logged into it and sure enough it brings Hapara Workspace and Google Classroom all into one place. Yay! We will now be able to find everything easily and my son can then organise his own timetable.
• There needs to be coordination by teachers and leaders, especially in High School due to the individual nature of subjects, to ensure workload is responsible.

I do selfishly hope this continues for a few more weeks to give teachers, students and whānau a real feel for learning that can be more empowering, ubiquitous and visible.