Magazine 2020

8 | Edition No. 23 | 2020 INNOVATION IN LEARNING Parklands College has been preparing its teachers and learners for online learning and a possible education crisis since the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. The launch of our Apple One- 2One programme in 2010 and its success inspired conversations around how we could ensure we would be ready for the occurrence of a similar crisis. We began by running e-days in the Secondary Faculty, where learners worked online from home at least once a quarter. Our first e-day was held on Friday 23 August 2013 and was a huge success, and we have had the opportunity to refine the process ever since. As a result of the experience gained from our e-days we were as prepared as we could be for the announcement of Level 5 Lockdown by the President. I am proud to say that not a single day of learning was missed by our learners during Lockdown due to the incredible work of our management team and teachers. Our online programme included both synchronous (where teachers deliver live virtual lessons online) and asynchronous (where learners complete work at their own pace and submit it elec- tronically) learning approaches. Google contributed massively to our success by improving their software tools and of- ferings to schools all over the world during this period. We used the Google Suite (G-Suite) platform to deliver online learning with Google Meet for live lessons and Google Classroom for the scheduling of work, submitting of tasks and assessments. Our backend reports that the school as a whole delivered 6238 hours of online syn - chronous learning, training and meetings from 6 April 2020 to the end of Quarter 3 (23 September 2020) through Goog - le Meet. This is a total of approximately 1040 online school days of 6 hours each, which is just short of 3 years of online vid - eo interaction. In addition, asynchronous learning and teaching through Google classroom, offline preparation and parent support added an immense amount of time to this calculation. No wonder every- one is feeling exhausted! We continued teaching our team robot- ics programme online as well. OurWorld Robot Olympiad Teams built their robots in the 3D LEGO design platform, LEGO Digital Designer, and then imported them into the Virtual Robot Toolkit (VRT) plat- form. Learners can program their virtual robots to perform tasks in VRT like they would in the real world. Our ICT support team has also worked tirelessly to support teachers, learners and parents online and I can confirm that it has been one of the busiest times for us. The reason for this was that our learning community doubled overnight as we be- gan to support our parents remotely as well. As is expected, our learners have shown incredible tenacity and have continued to astound us. As is expected at Parklands College our learners have shown incredible tenacity and have continued to as- tound us. Here are some of their 2020 achieve- ments: Our FIRST Tech Challenge team, the “Hy- perionBots”, won the Alliance competition at the FTC African Championships and the Moti- vate award for 3rd place overall in their second year of the competition. Parklands College Studios and the Sound Engi- neering and Music departments released their third digital album, “A Mandela Day Music Cele- bration 2020”. All proceeds from this album will be donated to the Nelson Mandela Foundation for International Mandela Day. This foundation inspires individuals to take action to help change the world for the better, and in doing so, build a global movement for good. Keagan Strydom has released four new apps on the Apple App store through MAD Studios, our internal mobile application development incuba- tor: Mini-cricket is a management and scoring ap- plication for mini-cricket. Coaches can interac- tively manage and score matches, as well as view player and team statistics.We are hoping this will become the App of choice for the South African mini-cricket community. Chaos is a game where you move through an endless space filled with dangerous obstacles. It is a difficult game that tests your reflexes and focus. AttendMe and ScanMe together provide a COV- ID-19 sensitive attendance system that removes