Student WorkSet - Case Study in overcoming the challenges in reacting to Covid-19 in Education

Case Study submitted by:

Mr Wayne Buckland - Principal - Bream Bay College - Ruakaka, New Zealand

Bream Bay College likes to push the boundaries on how we use our School Management Platform PCSchool to enhance learning. In these unprecedented times, we needed an easy way for students to enter their virtual classrooms. For our College, we were aware that we would have over 400 individual hyperlinks to virtual classrooms to keep track of. After some discussions with PCSchool, it was agreed that the WorkSet feature could have added functionality added to it in the form of an icon on staff and student’s timetables for each period. This allowed us to enter the virtual classroom link as a hyperlink under WorkSet for each class. The net result is that all staff and students now go to their timetable in PCSchool and click on the WorkSet icon for the appropriate period of the day and then click on the hyperlink for the virtual classroom. By doing this, we have also enabled the Principal, Deans, Deputy Principal's and Heads of Departments to be able to join any virtual classroom at any time during the school day.

As Covid-19 restrictions are eased, we will move to a new form of teaching which we are referring to as composite teaching. This is where any students not at school will join the class virtually to be part of the actual physical class taking place at school. This will be a “new normal” for us going forward.

To make the “new normal” better than the “old normal” we have issued every teacher with a quality tablet. We choose a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 as it had the fine S Pen and it also can access the Samsung app “S Note” which can be used easily as a scrolling whiteboard. Teachers join their laptop to the virtual classroom first (Zoom Meeting) and then join their tablet to the virtual classroom second. This makes their tablet a co-host of the meeting. The screen on the tablet is shared to the class (to the Zoom Meeting and the actual class via the HDMI lead to the TV or projector in the classroom.) The tablet is like a smartboard on steroids. When you add an app like Explain Everything* to the tablet you have replaced the physical classroom whiteboard in a way that you could never achieve with a whiteboard or a smartboard plus you have access to all the apps in the Playstore. (*EDU licence for Explain Everything is $5 US per educator with a minimum of 5 licences.)  

Thank you PCSchool adding this enhancement that makes our composite model of teaching easy to access for students and staff.

We are committed to being better on the other side of Covid-19 than when we went into lockdown.

If you would like to learn how PCSchool WorkSet can assist your school in better ways to provide online learning to your school community, please contact support@pcschool.net.