Scott Angle, principal of Senator Gershaw and Bow Island Elementary schools, is ready to deliver a Google Classroom session for his students.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
K-12 classes resumed in an online form Monday across the province, but two schools in Bow Island got a head start.
Senator Gershaw School, which serves Grades 4-12, and Bow Island Elementary, which is K-3, already had many of their classes up online last week.
Scott Angle, who serves as the principal for both schools, says some teachers sent out course materials for the rest of the school year as early as March 16, the day after the chief medical officer announced the indefinite cancellation of face-to-face instruction.
The older grades were able to transition “seamlessly,” beginning classes March 17, while the younger classes posed more of a challenge, explained Angle.
“It’s been a little, because they weren’t quite as connected already as our older grades were,” he said.
Older students were already doing a lot of online work via Google Classroom over the past couple of years, so it was relatively easy to incorporate more online elements for the remainder of the school year, Angle said.
“We didn’t want to have a big gap in what students learned, so we kept going anyways,” Angle said, acknowledging there were some challenges with making such a rapid change.
“We were just trying to keep moving forward in some form, but we didn’t know how much that should be, to be honest, as far whether we should be giving almost a regular school day, or should we cut back on what we’re doing, making sure we aren’t overwhelming people.”
He said the provincial guidelines for K-12 online education unveiled March 20 were valuable, because now every school division is on the same page.
“It’s nice that we’re all following a similar standard now, because I know there were some different kind of ideas of what should happen across the province,” Angle said.
