Tim’s Blog

I found this article in a “Learning and Leading with Technology” magazine and looks at how a school can keep functioning if your school was closed down for weeks at a time. This is unlikely to happen in Australia but it could happen and it is also likely to happen overseas.

The focus of this article was of a situation Hong Kong International School faced in 2003 when they had to close down to prevent the threat of SARS spreading. The school worked together to obtain web-based resources, design and upload Wep pages and also explored other new technologies to create a virtual school. They realised they had a commitment to the community and needed to maintain a teaching program which would be done virtually.

Grad level design team were set up (in Australia these would be Stage design teams) becasue the school acknolwedged that the job would be too hard and too big for individual teachers to design specific classes on their own. The design teams worked around a philosophy they called the three Cs: communication, community and content (interactive). Their main tools in support of the three Cs were Web sites, Webquests, wikis, e-mail, phone and fax. They made sure that they kept the delivery of lessons as simple as possible because most of theur parents and students would enter the virtual school with basic technology skills abd in some cases limited access to computers.

Like I said this is an unlikely situation to happen in Australia but if it ever did happen it is good to know that a virtual school could be designed and implemented.