ST Philip's Christian College at Waratah will host a Remote Online Learning Refresher Day on Thursday, to ensure children are prepared if schools are required to change modes again.
Principal Pam O'Dea said the school was encouraging students to learn from home on Thursday, which is its year five to 10 sport day and when most students have four learning sessions instead of six.
The school will remain open for any students who need to attend and supervise them to learn remotely.
"We just want to be ready, we want to make sure our systems are ready, we want to make sure the students don't forget how to step into this quickly so we don't lose time and that everyone is agile, able to connect and keep learning without creating any gaps at all," Ms O'Dea said.
"We thought maybe we need to do something like this to keep it fresh in their minds... we don't want them to be panicked or have anxiety around it, but rather this is just something we do and we can move in and out of this readily and our learning is not interrupted."
Ms O'Dea said Australia wasn't out of the woods yet.
"If the school was closed for a day, learning does not need to stop," she said.
"We don't want to lose time, we don't even want to lose a day of learning if we don't need to, so let's be ready."
Ms O'Dea said students in years five to 12 will log onto the iLearn learning platform at 8.32am.
Learning sessions will start at 8.56am and each have an agenda. This may involve a Zoom, an instructional video, collaboration, independent learning and set tasks.
Kindergarten to year four will participate in a 30 minute Zoom, watch videos and complete exercises in booklets.
Ms O'Dea said the school held a survey about remote learning earlier this year.
Secondary students identified benefits and expressed interest in continuing on a less frequent basis.
"It's an opportunity for them to develop their independence and learning skills.
"We have a whole of life framework here which is around students learning habits and how to strengthen those and they felt this really provided them an opportunity for that, so they were very enthusiastic about it."
She said while the school needed to consult more before it made decisions around future remote learning, the Thursday experience would enable it to collect more feedback.
She said any ongoing remote learning would apply only to high schoolers and as a tool to improve skills.
"We want to see that we develop our students and their learning skills and habits to the best possible extent, so how could this be part of that?
"We're not a 'local' school, we have students travelling from all over so the loss of travel time, changing classrooms, all that sort of thing, they will still have the timetable delivered online and teachers will be available for every session... but for year 12s it cuts out a lot of wasted time."
IN THE NEWS:
- Facebook threatens to stop Australians sharing news articles on its platform
- Coronavirus: Merewether teacher Layne Wiseman is stuck in the UK due to passenger cap on flights to Australia
- 13 new COVID-19 cases in NSW, border to soften with Victoria says Premier Gladys Berejiklian
- Additional charges for allegedly impersonating medical professional
