The Sixth Republic - Will we or won’t we? That is the question! #solidarity

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here only if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

In the other staffroom, there is rhubarb & ginger gin, along with tea and coffee.

piggy that is a problem for me too, seating arrangements. Dh gets the living room, as that's where his computer is, and it's a desktop so can't easily be moved. But he also has to be on the phone, where he is loud! Currently I sit in the dining room with dd, but if dh is on a work call we just work quietly til he's finished, and dh doesn't make any noise while I'm doing my videos. We wouldn't be able to do that if I'm supposed to be on an audio/video live lesson. I would have to move upstairs, to my bedroom, or dd's possibly. That's not a good solution, and I certainly don't want my classes to see my bedroom!!!

He thinks most schools in our county stopped buying teachers laptops over a decade ago when it just became standard for people to own their own anyway.

Really? I've only been a teacher for 11 years. We don't have our own laptops - me nor partner. We've just had a conversation about buying our almost 6 year old a chrome book, because if this is going to go on for over a year or more, then she'll be needing something to complete work on.

I have a work laptop, and dial into a VPN where all my resources are stored on a shared drive. We now have Teams too.

I see the Torygraph is going with a new 'study' that kids don't spread it.

Yeah, we connect to the school's intranet/network, too, but the expectation is absolutely that staff have their own tech.

I did work in one school twelve years ago where the school didn't have desktops, but laptops that the staff carried around and plugged into network cables and screens for each lesson. So they could take those home, but they switched over to desktops only ten years ago.

I'd be careful of buying a chrome book for your dc. Most of our students who are needing printed work sent home are because the chrome books are really hard to use to log in to our intranet. I think a full, but cheap, laptop is better.

OK. Thanks. I have no idea about chromebooks.

My last school had laptops that you plugged in wherever, but I never used a shared drive there, it was all on the harddrive.

Not saying this is 100% an issue, but I'd check it out first.

40% of our kids are needing paper packs - in a reasonably affluent cohort - mostly because of chrome books! It might be different for primary if they're accessing online platforms that the school pays for, rather than an intranet.

@FrippEnos I have always enjoyed the contradiction that is teaching, I know where and when, but the how changes from class to class and sometimes moment to moment.
Thank you! I was trying to explain to non-teacher friends on our Saturday night virtual drinks why this new way of working is so hard and that’s spot on. We upload a week’s worth of work on Monday morning and it’s so hard not to be able to adapt and change tack during a lesson. In the same instance, I need a mental plan for the term.

We have school laptops and are not allowed to access our emails even let alone the schools databases or GO etc from our own devices. They’re full of confidential data and it’s not considered secure to access from anything other than school laptops

DH has a chrome book borrowed from school. It's a horrible thing to use.

We have laptops we plug in wherever. We have shared drives at school but can't access them from home, so anything I needed for home learning had to be downloaded from the shared drives onto my laptop before we closed. I have been able to ask our TA to email me some stuff from the departmental drive when she's in, but realistically, she's busy printing work for the kids that need paper packs posted out to them.

Time check people. Sleep well when you get there

We have to go via the school portal to access our drives, management system etc etc so nothing confidential is downloaded to your own laptop that way.

We're also supposed to go via the portal on our phones to check email but realistically, it's too laggy so no-one does.

How do you upload lessons from home, then, Honey?

Allegedly we'll be using MSTeams after half term for my year group.

Personally I think we should carry on as we are with the school class website, and have a year group email address for contact - rather than them having my personal work email address.

Trying to teach us to use Teams as a classroom has been awful, and I'm reasonably good at that sort of stuff. The others are having a load of hassle with it - lots of emails back and forth with screen prints saying 'what does this mean'. Even the Teams training sessions are full of 'no, I can't see your screen share... no, which button?' and so on. Can't imagine 7 year olds trying to use it. On their mum's phone.

At the moment our hit rate is around 60% but over a week, not on any given day. So, by the end of Friday, around 60% of they phase have looked at the Monday lesson.

Sorry, that was meant for AwesomeDragon.

Sleep well, all.

Alarm set for 6.45 here, instead of 5.45 as at least there's no commute!

Awesomedragon- I am jealous of your visualiser. I've had to do without one for two years and I LOVE them. So much easier to just write/calculate on paper and show them. Also usefully models layout and handwriting while you're at it.

Oh I want one I do. My precious!

How are kids sending work back to you?

I think ours would work best if they could just take a photo of it on a parents phone, and email it to us.

I'm just trying to make it as easy as possible. Especially now I've probably got another whole term of it (gov decision pending, obv).

Oh my goodness The Torygraph though I cant see as its a pay wall. I think is quoting that New South Wales study.

Wow they are desperate to get schools back wow!!

Checking in - sorry so late! Thanks for new thread.

The Torygraph has been printing fiction throughout the last 9 weeks, it's like a comic now.

Bedtime is irrelevant to me at the moment. Can't sleep until 2am no matter what I do. Also, I've put all tomorrow's lessons up already - I don't work until the afternoons when boyfriend has done his 7 hours. Having said that, he's still sitting here watching some bollocks on telly and drinking whisky!

Ours send work by taking a photo of it and emailing it to me. I've got the sixth form scanning it with the Adobe scan app on their phones so they can send multiple pages as a single pdf rather than several photos. Even my weakest students can now manage to take a photo and email it (the last one mastered that skill last week!). The ones who don't have internet access just aren't sending any work back, so I've got no idea whether they are doing any work at all.

Thanks to Awesome's comment above, I suddenly remembered putting Google Lens app on my phone. An hour later and I know how to scan in, create a pdf and share to my Google drive (from where I can obviously email stuff to my work address and then upload to our home learning platform). That's saved the need to mess about with the printer at home!

Danglingmod Thank you so much for mentioning google lens - I’ve just downloaded it and it is fantastic, especially the translation tool. I‘ve been translating 4 different subjects into 2 different languages and that tool going to save me a ton of time!
(Until now I’ve been having it print off a fuzzy PDF, type it onto a word doc then translate. Absolute pain in the nethers.)

Thank you!!

I must say that everything I see on DH's teams and everything I read does suggest Google classroom is a nice platform to look at and use. I think teams possibly does more , though?

My kids send me photos or typed work loaded on to GC which works really well. We have a virtual site too but they said right form the get go that we weren't using that because it is too hard for everyone to access remotely all at once.

Why on earth my school is thinking of taking on a new platform no one in the world has heard of is beyond me!

I am making the move to Google Classroom for next half term. I’m hoping that I’ll get a better return rate on work...

The work I set last term was a Google Doc that I shared with the kids with a page a week of activities with both tech and tech free options (other than opening the file, of course...). I have no idea how many kids are doing but not showing their work. I can see that 90% of my students have accessed the file (and how frequently) but I think less than 20% have submitted any work. I’m still going to send home a weekly “tech free” email and hope that it’s of benefit to someone though...

But, I teach languages, and they’re ALWAYS the first that get sacked off . In a staff chat the other week, some staff that have children at the school cheerfully told me they’d told their children not to bother with languages... other teachers, telling their nice, capable, well equipped kids to do that. I’m fighting a loosing battle. And their comments still smart.

Re: tech. I use my own “home” laptop to create resources, access emails etc. We have a school policy of not storing students data, photos etc. On our personal devices (fair enough!), but I can use It to access Google Drive through my browser. I can’t access SIMS on it, so I’ve had to bring home a school issued laptop, but it’s over a decade old with out of date programmes and a temper . In school I only use it as a means to project, print and access SIMS.

I’ve been having to phone families from my own mobile as my school is closed (Hub model LEA), over an hour away and I couldn’t really take toddler DS with me. I make the calls with my number hidden, biggest problem is that for the first time ever I ran out of talk minutes in April and I’m nearing them now half way through May! I had to use DHs minutes (also number hidden) the last week of April.

cheese , di you see the TeacherTapp survey about work completion by subject?

It was interesting : worse return rate for English, followed by Languages. DS1 immediately said 'that's because English is too much like hard work' !

The language issue was more interesting : TT pointed out that English lacks goo remote platforms and so work setting is very hard and the tasks required quite complex, but that MFL actually ahs lots of high quality internet based learning platforms : so the conclusion is it is a cultural aversion to MFL which also exists in school as we know. And, yy, to schools themselves giving non core,and especially often languages, a low priority.

The link to the findings is on the last thread somewhere I think!