Goal #1: Communication through Partnerships
Distributed Learning school staff will increase our focus on the ongoing and meaningful communication between DL staff, DL students, DL parents, DL admin, and mainstream schools (admin, teachers, Choices teams, LAC staff, and counsellors). We feel that improvements in communication will support successful course completion and help students meet graduation requirements. Throughout the year, DL staff will be updating this page to report on the various modes of communication that they are using as they continue on their search for new, innovative, and meaningful modes of communication.
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section at the bottom of the page.
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section at the bottom of the page.
DL Communication Videos: Round 2!
Last year we created a “Welcome to DL” video for students and parents and 6 FAQ videos to support our communication goal and give students the best possible start in DL. The videos were well received, but we made them in-house, so they were not the highest quality. Special thanks to our Communications Director, Nevasha, who connected us with Kelly from HitchFlix Media, who recently came and filmed our videos in a professional capacity. Kelly is busy editing the footage and will have our new professional videos ready for us by the end of this school year. We will roll them out in Moodle, on our DL website, and include them in our welcome email for parents and students in the fall. We are so excited to have these professional videos to showcase our school. Thank you to Kelly and stay tuned for the video launch!
Working on our School Plan: School Planning Dinner
In April, we had the opportunity to come together with our School Planning team to look at our progress, share our ideas and begin the process of “tweaking” our goals. Supported by our Learning Services Director, Arlene Martin, we participated in a School Planning dinner and dialogue. Four other schools from the Carson Family of Schools joined us. We were given a brief overview of the School Planning process from Pius Ryan, one of our Assistant Superintendents, and were then given some guiding questions to start the conversations. Our team consisted of Maureen, our Principal, Lucas, our Vice-Principal, Khatija, our Academic Advisor, Naresh our DL Teacher Leader, and Jacob, one of our full time DL students. The highlight for us was receiving feedback from Jacob on the school plan and his suggestions for improvements. He also really brought to light the DL experience from a student lens, giving us kudos for certain things and critical feedback on others. He definitely “blew up” some of our assumptions of our DL students and got us thinking in a deeper way about the ways we communicate and the ways we are trying to engage students through curriculum. He also asked about our data and evidence of progress with our goals. We left the meeting with purpose and more ideas that we want to implement: including more online forums for student interaction and the idea of a DL teacher “travelling roadshow” to go to each mainstream secondary school in the fall to connect with our students earlier. Thank you to Jacob for his insights and suggestions!
Homepage buttons: construction complete!!!
We are so excited to launch the new look of our DL Moodle site. Features include our new branding, new homepage buttons for easy navigation, First Nations Art work and acknowledgement of the traditional territories, and a site-wide message area. We also have welcome/bienvenue at the top—shout out to our French DL courses! We have received positive feedback from staff, parents, and students. Important step in our communication plan!
Connecting with parents through Mentor Manger
We are excited to launch a new program called “Mentor Manger” in our Moodle site. This is to foster a greater connection to parents and to provide ongoing progress reporting. Here is what we sent to all DL parents/guardians:
Many parents are anxious to know how their child is doing in their DL course. We have made this easier for you by using a program called “Mentor Manager”. With Mentor Manager, you will be able to log in to our online school and view your student’s gradebook on a regular basis. You will see what they have completed, their current mark, and teacher feedback on their assignments. You will also have the ability to check the DL teacher schedules, and message the staff at our school if you have any questions. We will send out reminder emails to encourage you to log in to Mentor Manager on a regular basis.
Here’s how to begin:
Questions? Contact us at 604-903-3333 or [email protected]
Many parents are anxious to know how their child is doing in their DL course. We have made this easier for you by using a program called “Mentor Manager”. With Mentor Manager, you will be able to log in to our online school and view your student’s gradebook on a regular basis. You will see what they have completed, their current mark, and teacher feedback on their assignments. You will also have the ability to check the DL teacher schedules, and message the staff at our school if you have any questions. We will send out reminder emails to encourage you to log in to Mentor Manager on a regular basis.
Here’s how to begin:
- Watch this Mentor Manager Video to learn exactly what you need to do to access your student’s progress: https://youtu.be/WJ4rrbtLWh0
- Go to: https://sd44dl.ca
- Login: Use the first initial of your first name and your full last name (lower case, no spaces) or if you have a very common last name, your full first name and your full last name (lower case, no spaces)
- Password: parents1
Questions? Contact us at 604-903-3333 or [email protected]
NVDLS has a new sign
For many years, we have been trying to make DL “known” in the community. When we moved the school’s main DL Centre to Mountainside Secondary, we got a beautiful new space, but we did not have any visual way to communicate that we were here! The outside of the building has a beautiful “Mountainside Secondary” sign, but there was nothing to indicate that NVDLS was also sharing the space. Thanks to the support of Superintendent Mark Pearmain and Trustee Cyndi Gerlach, we finally have a new sign, and new stairs and a ramp to welcome DL students to our Centre. Drive by and check it out!!
Remind App---Using text to connect with our students
We have discovered something very interesting in the DL world—despite the fact that our Moodle Learning Management System relies on email; our students are not the email generation! So, we have had to be creative in offering alternate ways to communicate with our online learners. Two of our DL teachers, Naresh Chand and Bryan Lockless are using the “Remind” App. It is free, and students are required to sign up for Remind when they begin their course. Teachers can then access the Remind App from their laptop and send individual or group texts out to their students at any time to remind them of course deadlines, homework expectations and upcoming tests. This has been highly effective for students, who are already fully entrenched in texting as their preferred communication method with family and friends. Naresh recently presented the “Remind” App to all of our DL teachers at a staff meeting and we are hoping to get others on board. The more communication we have with our students, the more connected they feel to our DL world.
E-Campus and the “Zoom Room”
Every Wednesday and Thursday evening from 6:00-8:00, our DL students are invited to attend our evening e-Campus sessions. E-Campus in our “virtual classroom”. Students can login and interact with a DL teacher via chat, video, audio and messaging. The virtual whiteboard allows teachers to “show” students how to solve problems in real time, the desktop sharing feature allows students and teachers to review specific materials in the course, and the video feature can actually allow teachers to invigilate tests. All this, from the comfort of your own home! The online tool that we use to facilitate our E-campus is called “Zoom”. We have a private NVDLS “Zoom Room”. The Zoom room features a main room and we also have access to break out rooms for 1 to 1 tutorial sessions. Parents are also welcome to come to the Zoom Room to ask questions and meet the DL teachers. Two teachers, one from Math/Science and one from English/Humanities are in the room at any given time. They will support any and all DL students, even if they are not in their specific course. We are hoping to increase traffic in the Zoom Room—it is an excellent way to foster communication and support students in the evening when they are most likely working on their course.
Under Construction: Updating our Moodle Site
The DL school is housed in a Learning Management System call Moodle. Moodle is an open source software product and is always changing and upgrading. After our recent upgrade to the newest version in Moodle, we have decided to do some “cosmetic surgery” on the site to make the experience more engaging and to help to communicate more effectively with our students. We are currently working on changing our banner, welcome page, and information “buttons” to allow students to see and access the necessary information more efficiently. Ask your student to log you into the site so that you can see our progress!
Staff Collaboration: Communicating with Colleagues to Support Student Learning
You may have noticed that the last Wednesday of every month our main DL Centre at Mountainside is closed from 8:30 to 10:00 am. Sometimes students will forget and come to write a test and we respectfully ask them to wait until we are open. Why?--because this monthly hour and a half is very important to our staff! If you dropped by, you would see our full time DL teachers and administrators gathered around a table, sharing some snacks, and deeply engrossed in conversation. What are we doing and why is it so important? We are discussing, recommending, suggesting, structuring, planning, agreeing and often disagreeing, about how to improve our DL Moodle site, our DL courses, the way we invigilate tests, how to improve student success and how to share resources with each other. We have open and honest conversations about how to adapt and change NVDLS to make every student’s experience online the best it can be. We are fortunate that in addition to being a highly professional group of educators who are passionate about teaching and learning, we are also all very good friends. Our relationships and our ability to communicate with one another is an asset to our school. It also makes it a very fun place to work!