From Novelty to Necessity

Nau mai haere mai e te whaanau. I am Rick Whalley, Principal at Lake Rerewhakaaitu School and the Board chair for the VLN Primary.

My waka tapu is Tainui
My iwi is Ngati Tamaoho
My marae is Whaataapaka
My maunga is Putauaki
And my awa is Tarawera
I am also from many European stocks

My background in online teaching comes from long a association from a Primary school perspective. Many years ago I wrote a blog post about online learning and headed it from Novelty to necessity.

A little bit of background into this is that I have been teaching in small rural schools for several years. I knew my limitations and what my strengths were! I also knew that in a rural situation it is not easy to get experienced or expert help readily, for the children or teachers. In 2004 I asked the Ministry how they could help with this as I knew there was a lot going on around secondary school in relation to lessons over Video Conferencing. At that stage the Ministry's focus was secondary schools and they would look at primary later.

So I organised with other like-minded schools to try out virtual lessons using skype, emails and FAX. This proved very successful and there were one off sessions, sessions that worked for four to five lessons and even a whole term unit with another school integrating reading and writing. In 2009 we were given an Adobe Connect site by the Ministry and we had one French lesson going to two other schools (12 students). In the second term we were able to provide French and Spanish lessons between the three schools until the end of 2009. We now have over 1000 students and 40 - 60 schools participating. So this has grown into a full time coordinators position for an e-principal primary, deputy eprincipal and secretary and others.

As we have progressed through the last seventeen years there have been those who have come in because they can see the value in what we are trying to achieve for the children and teachers and those who have seen it for its fun factor or something different for the kids to do. We have a wealth of talent in our schools and we need to be able to tap into this to work together for the enhancement of all our students.

There was also the challenge of bringing in outside agencies like RTLB, GSE, to schools and now we have our LSCs who work across schools in Kahui Ako. Travel is a big factor in getting these people to our schools. The VLN reduces the need for travel and the agency can provide for several schools at once using zoom without having to leave their home school. This can also work for other organisations such as Te Papa, DOC and the like.

So my challenge at that time was to take it from Novelty to Necessity.

This pandemic has seen online learning taken from novelty to necessity. Teachers and schools were in some cases thrown in the deep end and had to quickly adapt. Others who had been with the VLN Communities were just “Business as Usual”.

Teaching or running a meeting online whether it is with children or adults requires a certain set of skills and knowledge. Last year when we went to online learning in the first lockdown, I had a teacher who was very confident with elearning and technology. After two weeks of online teaching and learning they soon realised how different it was to face to face. So pedagogy is key and the opportunities that this conference brings to help us understand the key concepts of online teaching and learning will do us well into the future.