Duration: 2:1
School principal, Simon Marshall explains how distance teaching and learning helped shape connections between home, learner, and school.
| Audio | Visual description |
| Title slide: Engaging with the community at Newbury School. | |
| Simon Marshall, Tumuaki What our community has been telling us around the positives of distance teaching and learning is that chance to really engage with their children and know where they are at in regards to their learning and truly have that partnership. | Simon, seated, facing camera. |
| We're really excited about the opportunities that distance teaching and learning has brought because it's really strengthened that triangle between school, between home, and between the learner. So that's something that our families have been really positive about. | Diagram in triangle shape. Label for each of three sides: school, home, learner. |
| We've been working really hard to try to make sure that the communication has been a two way street with our community as well as with school, that it's not just an outflow of communication to them. | Simon, seated, facing camera. |
| We've utilised Google Forms quite extensively to find out information from our community. Our teaching team has been sending out regular emails to parents asking for feedback around the programmes, ‘What's worked well?’ | Screenshot of Google Form and email. |
| We realised that it's not great to be online all day, every day. It's not great for the learners. It's not great for our team. It's not great for the families. | Simon, seated, facing camera. |
| So we've been really encouraging them to be taking breaks, to getting outside, you know, if they’re wanting to disengage for an afternoon, for a day, it's absolutely no problem. So we've been providing articles to our families through Facebook, through email, around, you know, the benefits of, I guess, limiting or at least being aware of the amount of screen time that have been on there. |
Screen of Newbury School facebook page showing student playing football. Student jumping outside. Screen of Newbury School facebook page showing links to Netsafe resources. |
| What we've also noticed, is that ako has become more evident for us. | Simon, seated, facing camera |
| That connection between the learners, their whānau, and teachers and what their whānau can bring to the table in regards to the learning and what they can share has been really important for us too. | Screen of Newbury School facebook page showing student playing guitar. |