Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Guest JTS98]

8 hours ago, Gaz said:

I've also found it interesting when newspapers have reported things like "a third of pupils not engaging with any online work" and people are surprised at this.

I suspect anyone who teaches at a typical state school will report that it is very common for lots of pupils not to engage in any work when they're sitting at their desk in class and you're standing in front of them trying to get them to engage, let alone when they're stuck at home with myriad distractions.

I received the first bunch of reports this week for a variety of different courses I've been involved in writing/developing for a combination of universities and international schools, language schools etc.

University online work has had almost 100% engagement across the board. International school courses at about 60-65% with the odd spike (and these are kids with exams etc to do) and private language school kids' courses at 50% and below. I'm currently involved with the staff of an international school to see how we can better design next term's online work so that it will work better based on our new assumption that loads of them won't do the independent work.

Interestingly, levels of contact with parents through e-mails, phone calls, text messages etc make no difference to the levels of student engagement.

Anyone getting a child to do a decent amount of work in an extended period of home study is very lucky.

Edited June 24, 2020 by JTS98

[Billy Jean King]

Hopefully the press don't make an arse of themselves like they did after the Nike Conference and wait for the source of the virus to be identified.
But I suspect Carlaw won't be able to help himself.

What the SNP bad press you mean. Just look at the negative headlines today and that's announcing the supposedly good news. We all know how the press will report the first (inevitable) cases despite them being few and far between.

[101]

1 minute ago, Billy Jean King said:

9 minutes ago, 101 said:

Hopefully the press don't make an arse of themselves like they did after the Nike Conference and wait for the source of the virus to be identified.
But I suspect Carlaw won't be able to help himself.

What the SNP bad press you mean. Just look at the negative headlines today and that's announcing the supposedly good news. We all know how the press will report the first (inevitable) cases despite them being few and far between.

The press can create as many wacky headlines as they like but if the public shrug and go so what then it loses its effect. Anyone who thinks the original plan of blended learning was going to last more than a month tops is at it. I think that people were given the plan for the worse possible situation allowing them to plan round.

I would be pretty confident that chances of a child causing an outbreak at a school will be slim to nil, teachers should still be staying apart in the staff rooms and canteens to stop the chances of them spreading the virus to adults.

[doulikefish]

8 hours ago, peasy23 said:

Strike 2 on the PGA Tour as Cameron Champ withdraws from the Travelers Championship after returning a positive test for Covid19 during the pre tournament screening. 2nd player in the last 6 or 7 days to test positive.

Strike 3.....Mcdowells caddy tests positive aswell so gmac is out aswell 

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Yeah that's a possibility. Although not without its own challenges of getting them marked and getting results back to pupils in time for university / college admissions etc..

We were discussing this yesterday - our confidence in SQA turning round exams in a shorter time was not great.

[DeeTillEhDeh]

 Whats going to happen is when schools open and the first member of staff/pupil test positive for the virus those shouting for the schools  to open will be shouting that the schools should never have opened imo 

Jackson Carlaw will be at the front of that queue

[doulikefish]

So the opening the pubs announcement  was to cover up them not neeting the 5 tests that needed to be met before the pubs could open.All the tories on tv telling us that the 5 tests have been met but when presented with the facts are basically saying go to the pub.Its pure put your fingers in your ears stuff and deny its happening 

[craigkillie]

46 minutes ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

10 hours ago, Gaz said:

Yeah that's a possibility. Although not without its own challenges of getting them marked and getting results back to pupils in time for university / college admissions etc..

We were discussing this yesterday - our confidence in SQA turning round exams in a shorter time was not great.

 

There's something going wrong somewhere in the process if that is the case. I appreciate that there are slightly more logistics involved in having to pull together papers from several sites and distribute to different markers (some of which may be done online now I think?), but university exams are regularly marked with a 1 or 2 week turnaround if necessary. For example, the exam period might run from something like late-April to late-May, and there will be an exam board meeting in early June. Typically the marked results have to be in a few days before that exam board meeting, regardless of whether your course exam took place at the start or end of the exam period.

[Wee Willie]

11 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

Not really. Completely unsourced information which, in turn, makes it potentially dangerous if people think everyone wearing a bit of fabric over their face will reduce the chance of spread by 98.5%

Fancy graphic it may be, but that's all it is.

ffs Stop being a dick. Anyway, if you really are god then why can you no stop the virus?

[pandarilla]

This. Though your opinion as a teacher is probably far more important anyway.
I'm pretty embarrassed by the efforts my kids have made in the last 3 months to be honest. I have particular family circumstances which have made things very difficult but I still don't think they, or I, come out of this with any pride. They have by and large spent the last three months on extended holiday, thankfully mostly in pretty decent weather which let them get into the garden (since we were shielding for the first 10 or 11 weeks of it and not allowed off the property). The school did what they could I think probably but we had real issues really achieving anything and I do feel I've failed a bit as a parent in all this. I'm not uneducated myself. I have a degree and professional qualification but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have the patience for it. The kids don't respect me as a teacher either so try as I might have in the initial week or two especially, they just pretty much refused to do stuff.
The school set them Sumdog tasks to do on a weekly basis and I got them to do those but that's pretty basic stuff and took them a couple of hours a week, and when my eldest was struggling with some of it I really wasn't good at trying to help. Teaching  is NOT my forte. We had real problems with accessing any of the IT resources. Despite an array of devices floating about we never did manage to get them working on Teams. Any device I had was either too old or the wrong operating system to run it.  Glow would partly set up on their Kindles but Teams wouldn't, I don't have parental access to set up their Huawei tablets so I've no idea if they would have worked, and whilst it would install on my youngest's phone, it never appeared to work and he never got anything through it. Eventually we just gave up trying to make it work. I'm not inventive, I didn't set them tasks of my own imagination. I asked them to do reading and they pretty much refused unless it was about Star Wars or football depending on which child I was talking to. They've spent most of the last 3 months playing games and watching videos on their tablets. In some cases while I dozed next to them having not finished work until 4am the night before.
A lot of the other software resources just wouldn't work on the Kindle Fires I had or if they did work, weren't all that practical with a touchscreen keyboard set up. Or they wouldn't install on the child profiles. An actual pc or laptop they could have used would maybe have solved it but getting them to share time on it would have been difficult too. A little frustrating when I actually live adjoining the playground of the school and could see the keyworkers kids in there every day!
By the time they go back in August they'll have effectively done almost no schooling for 5 months. As a P5 who was near the top end of his class probably when this all started I'm not massively worried about my youngest. He'll go back and make it up. My eldest going into P7 though struggles a bit and is almost certainly autistic (formal diagnosis is in the pipeline). The five months at the start of a huge year for him, his last in Primary, is vital time he may never make up.
For us remote learning just hasn't worked and I genuinely feared for their education if it had been even half of the norm for much of next year. So today's announcement from Swinney is a massive relief. Hopefully it comes to pass as he's predicting. Quite apart from their education, I also faced the very real possibility of having to give up work or at least back it down to part time if I could have arranged it for the foreseeable future to give me 2 or 3 days a week of childcare if they weren't going back to school and grandparent care wasn't going to be allowed for much longer. It was a very real worry and today lifts a weight off in that respect. It's likely the road ahead will still have some bumps though and I'm still working extremely odd hours for the time being to work round childcare and presumably will be till mid August anyway.
All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

That's an incredibly honest post, mate.

What you lack in tech awareness, you certainly make up for in self awareness.

But as others have said - don't be too hard on yourself.

Of course it's been frustrating for parents, you're not teachers and when I say that I don't mean it in a condescending way. I've had several parents ask me why they do work in school but not at home and the simple answer is it's just not an environment where the kids expect to work as much and as parents, you can only do so much when you have to balance your own jobs and homes.  
Councils should  have been more proactive in arranging for the loans of IT equipment that would work with the likes of Teams, and there could have been greater training for staff on the features and expectations.    Instead, we've been pretty much left to figure it out as we went along, with varying degrees of success.   Hopefully this period leaves us better prepared for any similar situation in the future.  
What I would say is you should not be being too harsh on yourself or your kids.  Parents everywhere have been thrown outwith their comfort zones, and kids won't learn if they don't want to.  If you've had positive experiences and valuable time with them at home during the last few months, that can be just as beneficial. 

Pretty much this.


I said this before but generally i think there's an unrealistic expectation of how hard kids work and how much they actually learn when in school (even good kids).

Just try to think back about stuff you learned in any class in secondary school. It's much more about the process of school than actually learning stuff.



And as for someone mentioning giving up after lunchtime? I'm a teacher and my own kids do no more than 2 hours in total per day (wee half hour, or 45 minute sessions).

I'm focusing on quality rather than quantity, and then throwing them outside to play (or upstairs - although i limit screen time quite strictly). Those 2 hours involve me or my wife keeping a close eye on them (which means we can do a wee bit of our own work but not too much because the kids do need to be kept focused).

Add on some cool life skills in the garden and the kitchen and I'm quite chuffed with the last few months in terms of their education.

I don't mean to appear smug in any way but the last few months have been horrible for me health wise and i know how much that takes its toll on the family so I'm finding positives in what has been a horrible time.

[ICTChris]

50% of students in Edinburgh have not engaged at all.  Some of them will have done some work and not handed it in but a good number will have done absolutely nothing.  I spoke to a friend of mine who teaches in a private school and she said that 25%-35% of their students haven't engaged at all and that's kids whose parents are wealthy and pay for their school.

So if your kids have done something then you are ahead of the curve.  I really don't knwo what they are going to do about this cohort, they might be as well just canning this school year and having everyone leave a year later.

[Melanius Mullarkey]

I was in high school during the EIS strikes of the 80s. For what seemed an eternity we were only in on a Monday and a Friday.  Never did me any harm.

Spoiler

 

[madwullie]

11 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

Not really. Completely unsourced information which, in turn, makes it potentially dangerous if people think everyone wearing a bit of fabric over their face will reduce the chance of spread by 98.5%

Fancy graphic it may be, but that's all it is.

The numbers are probably bollocks but I think the concept behind it is useful. 

[vikingTON]

20 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

50% of students in Edinburgh have not engaged at all.  Some of them will have done some work and not handed it in but a good number will have done absolutely nothing.  I spoke to a friend of mine who teaches in a private school and she said that 25%-35% of their students haven't engaged at all and that's kids whose parents are wealthy and pay for their school.

So if your kids have done something then you are ahead of the curve.  I really don't knwo what they are going to do about this cohort, they might be as well just canning this school year and having everyone leave a year later.

If only there was a spare 40% of the calendar year sitting around that could be used to return them to their expected learning outcomes before May 2021. 

[madwullie]

11 hours ago, Skyline Drifter said:

This. Though your opinion as a teacher is probably far more important anyway.

I'm pretty embarrassed by the efforts my kids have made in the last 3 months to be honest. I have particular family circumstances which have made things very difficult but I still don't think they, or I, come out of this with any pride. They have by and large spent the last three months on extended holiday, thankfully mostly in pretty decent weather which let them get into the garden (since we were shielding for the first 10 or 11 weeks of it and not allowed off the property). The school did what they could I think probably but we had real issues really achieving anything and I do feel I've failed a bit as a parent in all this. I'm not uneducated myself. I have a degree and professional qualification but I'm not a good teacher. I don't have the patience for it. The kids don't respect me as a teacher either so try as I might have in the initial week or two especially, they just pretty much refused to do stuff.

The school set them Sumdog tasks to do on a weekly basis and I got them to do those but that's pretty basic stuff and took them a couple of hours a week, and when my eldest was struggling with some of it I really wasn't good at trying to help. Teaching  is NOT my forte. We had real problems with accessing any of the IT resources. Despite an array of devices floating about we never did manage to get them working on Teams. Any device I had was either too old or the wrong operating system to run it.  Glow would partly set up on their Kindles but Teams wouldn't, I don't have parental access to set up their Huawei tablets so I've no idea if they would have worked, and whilst it would install on my youngest's phone, it never appeared to work and he never got anything through it. Eventually we just gave up trying to make it work. I'm not inventive, I didn't set them tasks of my own imagination. I asked them to do reading and they pretty much refused unless it was about Star Wars or football depending on which child I was talking to. They've spent most of the last 3 months playing games and watching videos on their tablets. In some cases while I dozed next to them having not finished work until 4am the night before.

A lot of the other software resources just wouldn't work on the Kindle Fires I had or if they did work, weren't all that practical with a touchscreen keyboard set up. Or they wouldn't install on the child profiles. An actual pc or laptop they could have used would maybe have solved it but getting them to share time on it would have been difficult too. A little frustrating when I actually live adjoining the playground of the school and could see the keyworkers kids in there every day!

By the time they go back in August they'll have effectively done almost no schooling for 5 months. As a P5 who was near the top end of his class probably when this all started I'm not massively worried about my youngest. He'll go back and make it up. My eldest going into P7 though struggles a bit and is almost certainly autistic (formal diagnosis is in the pipeline). The five months at the start of a huge year for him, his last in Primary, is vital time he may never make up.

For us remote learning just hasn't worked and I genuinely feared for their education if it had been even half of the norm for much of next year. So today's announcement from Swinney is a massive relief. Hopefully it comes to pass as he's predicting. Quite apart from their education, I also faced the very real possibility of having to give up work or at least back it down to part time if I could have arranged it for the foreseeable future to give me 2 or 3 days a week of childcare if they weren't going back to school and grandparent care wasn't going to be allowed for much longer. It was a very real worry and today lifts a weight off in that respect. It's likely the road ahead will still have some bumps though and I'm still working extremely odd hours for the time being to work round childcare and presumably will be till mid August anyway.

All that said, and it really does worry me, I have genuinely valued spending a lot more time with my boys at a great age than I ever would have in normal circumstances. That's valuable time. I just wish we could have done a bit more productive stuff with it.

Mate I've not read the full thread and I'm sure someone else has said, but you're being really hard on yourself and there's really no need. 

Something you have to remember is that every other kid has been in the same boat. It's not like your kids have been away on holiday while the class ploughed on and they've missed loads of stuff it's impossible to catch up on. Every other kid has been in the same boat, a lot of kids will have done very little, and when it comes down to it, a lot of kids have been r wet ally anxious, so if you've managed to spend some proper dad time with them and they've been happy, well I don't think you can really ask for much more. 

Sure I've done work with my boy, but in the main it's been revision as the teacher couldn't really trust that all parents would be able to teach the core concepts. I'm sure some have, but I reckon they'll have to go back over all that stuff when they're back in anyway. If not, well, all pupils are in the same boat so they're not particularly worse off. 

In terms of reading, if I could have got my classes to read books / comics about football or star wars I'd have been over the moon. Reading isn't for everyone, and especially at primary level, but even into secondary, reading is reading whether it's Ulysses or copies of bunty. The aim is to get them used to reading any kind of text, to get them used to hearing their own inner voice etc. Go easy on yourself. 

[NotThePars]

Yeah, me too.
I can't blame them too much, though. If I was 16 and effectively given an extra three-months holiday, I'd probably have been doing very little as well.

My Call of Duty kill death ratio would be insane

[Todd_is_God]

10 minutes ago, madwullie said:

The numbers are probably bollocks but I think the concept behind it is useful. 

I don't / didn't deny that.

47 minutes ago, Wee Willie said:

ffs Stop being a dick. Anyway, if you really are god then why can you no stop the virus?

How is pointing out something that is actually quite important being a dick? People believe any old shite they see on social media. False / incorrect Covid-19 information is completely unhelpful.

As for the second sentence... when you said you were in your 70's I assumed you meant years, not months.

[Dan Steele]

27 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

50% of students in Edinburgh have not engaged at all.  Some of them will have done some work and not handed it in but a good number will have done absolutely nothing. 

But what's the %age been during lockdown?

[ICTChris]

4 minutes ago, The Skelpit Lug said:

But what's the %age been during lockdown?

Oh you.

[The Moonster]

16 hours ago, Skyline Drifter said:

Well, apart from the fact that the demographic of the school attendance is that they are all under 18 and the demographic of football crowd attendances isn't.

The demographic chat has been taken over by VT and others here, but if the criteria for reopening schools as normal is Scotland having zero infections and then vigorously tracking, tracing and isolating any new cases, we should be able to (at the very least) allow home fans only to attend matches. I can't see any good justification for preventing that.