We were pleased to award Galley Hill a grant to buy two Dell Latitude laptops. As Gail Ringrose (computer technician) explained, whilst in school, the laptops will be used by SEND children…
“… to access online learning or computer programmes already purchased by the school to assist in their learning when they can't access the class teaching.
The award would help the children make progress with their learning targets, provide them with additional resources to develop their learning journey & keep them engaged when they might otherwise switch off or distract other children
We would allocate the laptops to a particular SEND child, to support their learning, for full weeks at a time. This would allow for the class teachers / TAs to plan accordingly for the week and ensure that we were following covid guidelines so that they are left untouched during the weekend. In addition to this, the laptops (along with all computing equipment currently used in school) would be wiped down before and after every use.”
In the event of a school lockdown, the laptops would be used by teachers. This is a difficult one to pass through our award criteria as our grants have to benefit children’s’ learning and motivation directly. However, Gail argued her case well…
“In addition, they will be used by teachers for use at home where they do not have anything in place already. Finally, they will be used either by teachers or pupils at home in the event of another lockdown to support children's remote learning.
We have recently received the DfE funding to set up our online learning platform. All teachers received training in the use of Microsoft Teams for remote learning on 16.09.20. Unfortunately, we do not yet have the full infrastructure to allow staff to set this from home in the event of a lockdown. The additional laptops will provide us with enough for all teachers to be able to run 'virtual classrooms' for their classes in the event of a lockdown, therefore directly benefiting a whole class of children to be able to have direct access to their teacher and teaching materials in this situation. In the event of a lockdown, the DfE will provide us with laptops for some of our most vulnerable pupils but these will only be of use to us if the staff are able to set online learning using our new platform in the first place. “