The strength of the early childhood community in NZ: an opportunity

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Last week, I shared my thoughts about some dilemmas the early childhood community in Christchurch are facing ‘post quake’. This week, I am heartened to share some of the ways that show how the Christchurch EC community is so much a part of the wider New Zealand EC community.

Children communicating using technology

Financial support from EC centres

I have been very fortunate as a member of CORE Education’s national Early Years team, as I have received queries from early childhood groups around the country who have wanted to offer financial support for as well as desire to develop ongoing relationships with individual EC centres here.

A network group of infant and toddler teachers in Northland have offered financial support to one Christchurch centre, which will be matched by the owners of one of the centres. This network group wants to continue their relationship through sharing ideas as the Christchurch centre rebuilds. A similar offer has come in from a group of early childhood teachers in Auckland. They are planning to hold a benefit night to raise money in support of a Christchurch EC centre.

Ministry support in innovative approaches

The community spirit displayed within the early childhood sector has been matched by the care and concern shown by the staff at our regional and national Ministry of Education (MoE) offices. The CORE Education Early Years team is involved in the delivery of professional development programmes as contracted by the MoE. These PD contracts are tightly shaped around meeting predetermined professional learning outcomes that, in turn, result in improved learning outcomes for children. Focused professional learning, or curriculum-based children’s learning outcomes, are not at present the main priority for centres where the lives of families and whānau have been so detrimentally impacted. ‘Post Quake’ PD provision in Christchurch is needing to take on it’s own shape in these locations.

Children using technology to communicate

With MoE support, our Early Years team has been able to be innovative with contractual arrangements, so that we can set up and facilitate a number of support networks for EC leaders, managers, and supervisors.

The formation of these networks is done with a collective vision for the EC services in the quake-affected areas to be able to share expertise, ideas, and resources for addressing and overcoming the ‘post quake’ challenges ahead. The network groups will initially target the leaders, managers, and supervisors of EC settings, as these are the front-line people in their EC community.

Who is there on the ground to support these people while they support so many others?

Networking opportunities around the country using technology

This is an exciting opportunity. The establishment of Christchurch EC leaders networks and the enthusiastic support of groups of EC teachers around New Zealand will enable us to use a raft of communication technologies to establish and maintain valuable relationships. Strengthening a national EC community is at our fingertips. The purposeful and meaningful use of virtual communication tools has potential to bring children across the country together, as well as their teachers.

Watch this space, and if you are keen to become involved please let me know.

Jocelyn

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Necessity is the mother of invention: Schools share their responses

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On the CORE Education blog, we have been discussing the need for creative and flexible solutions to deal with prolonged disruptions to school as a result of the Christchurch earthquake (see Derek’s post on Blended solutions)

Several schools have been discussing their approaches to dealing with the upheaval in their schools, on the MLE Reference Group forum. They have kindly agreed to share their stories.

St Andrews College students assemble outside after Christchurch earthquake
St Andrews College students assemble outside after Christchurch Earthquake

Cloud-based mail and online learning areas

St Andrews College: “Many of St Andrew’s’ students have left for other centres. Over the last week 600 of their 960 students have been accessing material in their online Secondary Learning Area using subject sites and class sites. All students will have been receiving emails. The school has introduced Quake Learning Messages—teachers can create brief learning messages based on year level, subject, and class. Some TICs are using subject sites to provide materials, and most teachers are communicating with students by email directly from our SMS using a web client. Information updates are emailed on a daily basis and posted on the intranet.

“Live@edu (i.e. cloud-based mail) has been fantastic—all of our mail went over to this at the end of 2009. There has been, correspondingly, no down time with email. Quite a few staff have linked their phones to email (and some students). It has enabled me to respond quickly to teacher’s requests for assistance.” [Grant Saul, St Andrew’s College]

Social networking and wireless extended to new families

Mount Aspiring College: “We have 130 additional students (a 19% increase over our roll on 21 February!) at school this week from all over Christchurch….[There has been] a huge demand from these students to have access to our wireless network, and we have accommodated this. For many of the students and their families, this is their only internet access while they are in Wanaka.

“Social networking with peers has been one of the big requests. Thus, we have relaxed our internet filtering rules for specific students, and allowed access to, for example, Facebook. Mount Aspiring College has two video-conferencing units—if home schools have a need to go face-to-face with their “refugee” students then we can arrange this easily. [Tim Harper, Mount Aspiring College, www.mtaspiring.school.nz]
Kendall School Twitter app

Updates for families via Twitter and the website

Simple and effective: Kendal School has an app on their home page of its website that displays the principal’s Twitter feeds, keeping parents and local community informed. Easily managed from a phone or home computer, one post on Twitter and it’s there for everyone to read.

Lessons online with Ultranet

The Cathedral Grammar School: “We are currently developing lessons within Ultranet. Our staff have taken an accelerated learning curve to get lessons to students. Already having interoperability (interop)working meant all accounts were already created. We have used a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) model of computing for a large number of years, so we were able to re-establish our network as soon as we were able to enter the cordon. We are looking at full virtualisation in the near future. We are also on the brink of releasing live@edu accounts to all staff and students as the interop, for that is also working….. It is just a matter of a little PD.” [Adrian Gray, The Cathedral Grammar School]

Crowd-sourced courses

Shakeupschool wikiAnd across the country, many hands make light work:

  • Jill Hammonds of CORE Education is working with educators across New Zealand to upload a range of learning activities to a wiki for primary students – Shakeup School Wiki (See also the CORE blog, 15 March Towards a temporary virtual solution for schooling in canterbury)
  • The GCSN (Greater Christchurch Schools Network) are trying to get some material up onto a Moodle 2 site as soon as possible to help schools and students who have been affected by the recent earthquake. The idea is to upload material and courses onto this site, and then share them with other schools via the Moodle in Schools HUB. Read more on Derek’s Blog: Resources for Canterbury schools
  • Marielle Lange has set up a space for schools to request assistance or provide it: Schools EQNZ
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When disaster strikes

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A number of years ago I had the misfortune to be caught in a heavy rain shower on my way to work. Not only did the water penetrate the raincoat I was wearing, leaving me totally saturated, but it also ‘drowned’ my laptop, leading to problems occurring when I tried to start it up, resulting in the hard drive being completely unusable and nothing able to be retrieved from it. Fortunately I worked in an organisation that allowed me to send daily backups of my laptop across the network to be stored on the server. Within a few hours I was again working on a borrowed laptop, with all my files installed, minus just a few things I’d been working on the night before.

That was really my first ‘close shave’ that caused me to appreciate the absolute importance of ‘backups’! Failure to do that would have been a disaster for me!

I’m imagining that many schools and teachers in Christchurch are thinking about this after the recent earthquake. Many have either had their laptops or servers destroyed, or have lost access to them as they lie inside condemned buildings. For them the issue of ‘disaster recovery‘ takes on new meaning – more than simply a case of whether things have been ‘backed up’ – but also a case of where those back-ups are located.

The principal from one school I spoke to is distraught because while his school had invested wisely in a complete back-up server and ensured that regular and comprehensive back-ups were made on a regular basis, the back-up server was located alongside the active server in the school, and together they lie in a condemned building in the city. Their data is undoubtedly safe, but inaccessible.

A teacher from a second school was telling me how ‘lucky’ they were that as the earthquake was happening their technician had the presence of mind to grab the back-up tapes from the office as he fled the building, and now the staff and students are able to continue operating on borrowed computers in borrowed premises accessing their files installed on a borrowed server. Certainly a case of good luck rather than good planning – they are the fortunate ones. Their tapes could so easily have been left inaccessible inside a condemned building also, leaving them in the same situation as the first school.

One of the essential elements of a good disaster recover plan is to ensure that you have off-site back-up and storage. This doesn’t simply mean that you take the back-up tapes home at the end of each day. Effective off-site back-up involves regular ‘pushing’ of data to the off-site server – this should occur at least once daily, typically overnight, but with digital data being mission critical for schools, more frequent back-up or “continuous data protection” should be seriously considered.

This is one of the significant benefits of being connected to Ultrafast Broadband, and as schools look forward to how they can leverage their investment in UFB, the lessons learned from Christchurch should raise the concerns for a good disaster recovery plan to somewhere near the top of the list.

This article is cross-posted from Derek’s blog

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Post quake thoughts – a new reality for the EC world in Christchurch

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Damage to ECE centres in Christchurch earthquake

As progress is being made with re-establishing the early childhood services in Christchurch, it is becoming increasingly evident that nothing is going to be the same as it was pre-quake.

I have done a lot of talking and listening in the past couple of weeks—friends and family, teachers across sectors, Ministry of Education (MoE), managers, and EC leaders. What is emerging is that each group is now faced with unexpected dilemmas when it comes to thinking about early childhood care and education.

Recovery decisions in order to get EC services running again

Everyone is resigned to the understanding that rebuilding and repairing the city’s infrastructure is going to be a long-term project. While this recovery begins, decisions have been made around getting schools and EC services up and running. The MoE is supporting the education sector by promoting guiding Principles of Recovery From Traumatic Incidents, namely:

  • Normality
  • Communication
  • Inclusion
  • Consultation.

While these principles offer an admirable vision, I am troubled about whether the sector has the capability to realise these goals when people in the sector are working in such complex and pressured circumstances, both personally and professionally.

Some of the dilemmas being confronted by early childhood services

We are entering a new and uncertain environment. How will EC services continue to meet the changing needs of their communities? The following are just some of the dilemmas that the Christchurch EC community is facing:

  • Many families with young children have left the city. Whether they return or not is largely unknown.
  • Families have been displaced, and now live in different locations—their support networks have been interrupted, and they are no longer in easy access or proximity to their regular EC service.
  • EC staff are returning to work at the same time as juggling their personal childcare, travel, and housing dilemmas.
  • Many EC centres have not opened yet. Parents returning to work are under increased stress as they are desperate for an EC placement.
  • Emotions are very fragile, particularly as parents, who don’t really want to be parted from their children, drop their children off in EC services.
  • Workplaces have been relocated so that the choice of EC placement may no longer be situated in the most favourable location.
  • On the road, travel time has doubled—trebled—meaning, parents will face increasing stress when dropping off and picking up their children.
  • Affected secondary schools have reformed with schools sharing sites; this can result in one group in school between 7.30am–12.30pm, and the other from 12.45pm–6.00pm. Secondary teachers with EC children will face problems finding EC placements to suit their new working situation.

These dilemmas have very real implications for EC services.

Transitioning and financial management issues

Two of the big questions that I have been thinking about are:

  1. What does it mean for children and families transitioning to different centres? And,
  2. What are the implications for financial management of services?

Transitions: is there the support needed?

What about transitions?

How are children and families being supported to make the types of transitions that they now face, particularly as these are happening out of necessity not choice? Displaced children will be popping up in EC services throughout the country—are these services prepared to support not only the changes transitioning involves but also the emotional needs of the children and families?

Financial management: are new situations being catered for?

What about financial management?

Pre-quake, many EC services had made financially-driven decisions around their operations to cope with the 80% qualified staffing cap. Some had reduced their operational hours; others had implemented policies where attendance-options were limited to 6 hours per day or more (no less). These decisions are now going to conflict with the needs of families. Who is going to cater for secondary teachers (and possibly others) working half-days, beginning work at 7.00am, or finishing at 5.30pm? And what about the cost of additional travel-time for parents with children in EC? In my own case my daily travel to the workplace has increased by 1.5 hours per day.

Comments please!

I would love to hear the thoughts of others. Maybe there are some innovative ideas floating around out there— your thinking could really assist to overcome the new medical condition of ‘quake brain’ we here in Christchurch are suffering from.

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Schools surviving the Christchurch earthquake: Update from Douglas Harré

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Earthquake damaged schools force closure of schools

Parts of Christchurch do feel somewhat otherworldly at present, so I thought I would take a moment to report on one part of CORE Education’s support for schools in that still somewhat beleaguered city

I am back working with the Ministry of Education over the next couple of weeks to assist with getting the ICT systems of damaged schools up and running, although, it is likely that the schools will need a large amount of ongoing assistance for a couple of months.

As you will be aware, there are many more schools badly affected by the February 22 quake (up to 30), compared with the September 4th event (only 2 local schools closed after that event).

What options available to schools without a school?

The Ministry of Education and local schools and their Boards of Trustees have been working hard to find space for schools that have been given the dreaded red sticker, and are therefore out-of-action in the short to medium-term.

Shared space option

The result is that many schools will be sharing space in the interim—it looks as though primary and intermediate schools will share space at the same time, and high schools will split their day around 50/50.

St. Mary’s Primary moving to another school hall

About 100 students from St Mary’s Primary are, therefore, moving into the hall of another unaffected school nearby—the hall will be divided into five partitioned zones that teachers and children will work in until the fate of their own school becomes clear. The school needs to have broadband, power, data, and a wireless network put into the hall…. “And, oh!” said the St Mary’s principal (with a hopeful smile on his face), “if you can get us ten desktop PCs, that would be greatly appreciated”.

The case of Heaton Intermediate

Heaton Intermediate School damaged in earthquake

Heaton Intermediate (500 students) was the next school to visit. Their three-year-old, stylish, angular, steel and glass admin block and staff room doesn’t look too bad from the driveway, but once inside, you can see how walls have come away from floors, things have a generally Pisa-Tower-ish look to them, and the staff room has an unappealing layer of detritus that came up through the floor boards and oozed everywhere within 10 minutes of the quake. Broken glass is still strewn across the floor from when the dishwasher door flew open and disgorged its contents at the peak of the shaking.

Heaton’s Year 7s are off to Casebrook Intermediate, and their Year 8s to Breens Intermediate—each of those host schools are working hard to find space (old rooms, garages, spare prefabs, large cardboard boxes) and facilities for 250 students and their teachers, who are about to turn up later this week.

Fortunately, Heaton managed to get their servers out. Plus, they had a backup (yay!) and a proper offsite backup also (double yay!!), so they are looking good…. Now we just need to get the infrastructure and associated hardware going, so we can use it in the host schools. Because the Heaton teachers have been using eTap (a hosted SMS) and KnowledgeNet (hosted LMS), they will be able to continue to use those products in their new location. Cloud computing is looking increasingly attractive to those schools with email servers buried under a steel beam or in a location with no power. :-)

…and secondary schools: Avonside Girls High moving to Burnside

As an example on the secondary front, Avonside Girls High School is moving to the Burnside High School site—the high schools are going to run consecutively rather than simultaneously—so it looks as though Burnside High School will operate between 8am to 1pm, then Avonside Girls High School moves in from 1.30pm to 5pm. Avonside Girls High School has managed to get a lot of their PCs out of their outlying buildings, but about 30 TELA laptops remain trapped and alone in the badly damaged admin block (generally with a multitude of teacher resources on each one). As you can imagine, this is one more stressor for teachers who may also have power or water off at home, or be dealing with injured family members.

I was able to acquire laptops direct from Equico for those teachers, so they are being couriered down to Burnside High School over the weekend, re-imaged Monday–Tuesday by IT staff to make them ready for the Avonside Girls High teachers. What we can’t do is replace the resources on the laptops (if they aren’t backed up), so we will see how that unfolds over the next week or so.

Inside the CBD: Unlimited and Discovery 1

Last example is Unlimited and Discovery1—the two schools in the heart of the CBD. Six hundred and fifty staff and students in a modern, vertical, concrete and glass structure—state-of-the-art ICT facilities, fast fibre connection, and with the city as their learning-environment. They are in the Red Zone, so is off-limits— all teacher laptops, school computers and servers (and backups) inside…a sub-optimal scenario to say the least.

Those two schools are being relocated for the next month or two to a rural, horizontal, one-story school on the outskirts of the city—an interesting cultural change for students, who may not have seen a cow for some time, or felt grass between their toes, and, who may now have to travel 3 kilometres for a double trim latte—but as many have said “needs must”—and (hopefully) a fantastic learning opportunity for all concerned.

Ministry of Education logistical challenge

There’s a big team of Ministry of Education people there also, but spare a particular thought for Bernie Scannell (the Queen of School Transport), who has been living out of a suitcase in Christchurch while trying to organise the dozens of buses that will be required to pick up 6-7000 school kids twice a day and deliver them to and from their new schools, across a pretty broken transport network.

…and help from around the country

In the midst of all that is happening in the wider Christchurch context, I would really like to note the rallying of teachers and schools together to support one-another. In all my conversations with principals and teachers last week, there was a very supportive atmosphere. This has been aided and abetted by the sterling work of numerous CORE staff around the country, who are contributing in a variety of ways —the rapid development last week, of the school resource wiki being an excellent example. People in the schools are very appreciative (and aware of) the work occurring nationwide to assist them.

I hope this has provided one small set of examples concerning the challenges schools are facing in the city. Morale is generally pretty high, but people are very realistic about the challenges ahead. How it will all play out in the longer term regarding the provision of education in the city, as a whole, is an as yet unanswered question.

Cheers,

Douglas

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