The Avon Maitland's Learn from Home program has been up and running for about a month now. Education Superintendent, Jane Morris, says they've worked out most of the wrinkles but it took a lot of effort from a lot of people, including some of the suppliers the board deals with.
Morris says one of the biggest challenges was to make sure that everyone had the tablet and internet connectivity to make the system work and that started with staff that normally used desk top computers at the school and were not necessarily equipped to work from home.
Morris says the next step was to shift their focus. "Immediately thereafter the priority shifted to students because when the Minister announced that Learn at Home was to begin on April 6th, we had two weeks, which seems like a lot of time, but meant that there was an awful lot of new learning for all of our departments."
It also meant checking with parents to see if they enough devices that would allow their kids to participate. They ended up finding about one thousand i-pads and chrome books for families that didn't have them as well as about 200 internet-enabled devices for families that didn't have adequate internet service. And Morris credits a great relationship with Apple in getting that done.
She explains, Apple called them and said they were working on something with Rogers and wondered if the board would be interested. Morris said yes, explaining they had being trying to get portable wifi and had been looking at buying cell phones for students.
Morris points out, the program would not have been possible without some of those rural families getting reliable internet service.
