 Okay, good afternoon everybody. My name is Ross. I'm going to mute everybody's microphones just so I can control the sound levels for the recording. If I can ask co-host to just unmute yourself as and when you're ready. So welcome to our webinar. We're going to get straight into business. I'm going to let each of the people from Valencia Institute to introduce themselves shortly. We're going to be approximately an hour and all the slides, any resources and this video itself. Once I can press it, I'll send it over to you in about an hour or so time. So just quick introductions. I'm assuming you've come to obviously through my teacher talk event bright page. I've been a teacher in London for 25 years and blogging online for a good 12 years and got quite a little bit of an audience. I'm going to bring in the slides in a moment. But before I do, just to kind of introduce you to Valencia Institute and obviously the Dr. Robert Lou will go into more specific details. But I'm really honored to introduce Valencia to the UK. For the first time, there are an online platform and they're here to share their expertise with you in a climate where come September, whether we at least for people watching in the UK will be back to normal service or having to offer online. And my own experience of working in schools across the UK visiting many online and virtual schools. These things have already been around for many years. And so it's nothing new to these experts. So I'm going to be sharing their insights asking lots of questions. I'm going to try and facilitate the whole session and keep everyone up to speed. So that's me. I'm going to ask the people taking parts when asked Dr. Robert Lou, first of all, just to come in and introduce yourself, Robert, to our guests and I'll just get the slides up once we've done our introductions and so over to you, Robert. Fantastic Ross. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having us. And also thanks to all of you for tuning in. So my name is Rob Lou. I'm at Harvard University and I've been sort of a biologist and a professor there for 30 years but for 20 of those years I've also been very engaged with high schools. And so for me, one of the great exciting adventures that I'm doing now is that I'm also the Chancellor of the Valencia Institute. So I really look forward to sharing with you what we have been doing in Valencia as a private online high school. Great. Thank you, Robert. And Amy, can I ask yourself to unmute and introduce yourself to everybody? So Amy is the Chief Academic Officer of the Valencia Institute. Amy. Thank you, Ross. And hello everyone. It's lovely to see you. As Ross alluded to, I'm the Chief Academic Officer at Valencia Institute and I have the privilege of working with Rob Lou to offer our online courses to students around the world. And previous to Valencia, I was the Chief of Education at Get Smarter and we partnered with tertiary institutions to help them take their courses online. So it's a pleasure to be here. Great. Thank you, Amy. And Nash, can I ask you to unmute yourself and introduce yourself to everybody? Thank you. Thanks for us. Hi, we want to hope you're all doing well today. Thank you for having and hosting us. My name's Nash. I'm Head of Admissions at Valencia. I've been in Admissions for a number of years. As you can imagine with Admissions, we get to engage with a lot of parents and students along the way. Definitely trying to help and guide them, make the right decisions. So I look forward to engaging with everybody in the chat. If you do have any questions, please feel free to pop them in there. And I'll try my best to get to all of them. Thanks. Thanks, Nash. And over to our Head Teacher, Rick. Rick, could you unmute yourself and just say hello to everybody, please? Good afternoon, everybody. Yes, my name is Rick Greene. Thank you, Ross, for hosting this. Good to see everybody here. I'm, as Ross says, the principal at Valencia and the director of teaching and learning there. I've been prior to this and been involved in a lot of technology development at school as well. And really embracing and enjoying this online environment at the moment. Thanks, Ross. Okay, thank you very much, Rick. And finally to Sarah, please. Sarah, could you introduce yourself? Hi, everyone. I'm thrilled to be talking to you today about online education. My name is Sarah Elphick and I'm the senior English teacher at Valencia Institute, teaching junior high and IGCSE. And my background is predominantly teaching IGCSE AS and A Levels English in international schools in Cape Town. Okay, fantastic. So that's everybody. And behind the scenes, one or two other people just helping with admin in the chat box or any questions in the chat box. I'm going to share my screen. You're going to see the Valencia slides and I'm going to go straight to Rob. And Rob, could you let viewers know a little bit more about Valencia Institute and how you work and how it differs to traditional bricks and mortar? You need to unmute yourself, Rob. Thank you. With Valencia, we really had an opportunity to build a private online school from the ground up. So we're sort of at a stage right now, where we have a number of subjects in terms of the junior high, we've started junior high. We also have a number of subjects in the international GCSE. By next fall, we should have A Levels and our number of sort of subjects will expand. And actually you can see in the next slide and actually the next slide after that. Ross, if you could forward it. Yes. So that's sort of what we have right now, but we're really in the process of sort of expanding this out. So what's exciting about what we're doing at Valencia is that we've tried to implement a learning model that allows not only foundational subject coverage to happen in a way as we'll see in a few minutes. We believe really enhances and promotes deep learning, but we've tried to do it in a way that allows the students to really feel that they're in the driver's seat. So if we go to the next slide, what you'll see is that we have created a framework for Valencia that's focused on sustainability, and in particular using the sustainable development goals or SDGs of the United Nations. Now, for those of you that might not have heard of the SDGs before, this is the only framework for meeting the world's challenges that actually exists out there. Absolutely the only one that's been ratified internationally. And so what we've done, there's 17 of them, we've taken that framework and identified four major thematic areas that all of us as human beings need to worry about. Climate and energy, gender injustice, health and food and jobs and industry. And one of the critical things we're doing at Valencia is that not only are you learning the subjects that you need to in junior high and in high school, but you're doing it in a context where you can apply what you've learned so that you can actually creatively innovate and think about ways to meet these challenges in this framework. So there is this principle of what's called challenge driven learning, which there are many studies that now show that that is one of the most powerful ways to engage students and to also create a curriculum that's vibrant and alive. And so Valencia is very much structured around that principle. So Robert, when you describe online learning, it's quite different from the emergency that we're currently in during the pandemic, which is remote learning, which currently teachers are doing. Can you just clarify how you describe the difference or the distinction between remote versus online? Absolutely. And by the way, as someone that teaches until this spring, I certainly went through this. So one definition that I use for remote learning is that essentially that is when you have a brick and mortar class that halfway through you need to do the pivot to teaching all of your students scattered all over the place and remotely. What that means is that you're really focused on doing your best to transfer what you would have been doing in the brick and mortar classroom into an online setting. When we think about online learning, what we think about are things that are built from the bottom up to work really effectively online. And at Valencia, we use a process called Addie. And in fact, if we jump one slide forward, what Addie stands for is in fact a way in which you approach the building of your course. So you begin with analysis, right? What are the objectives for your course or even for a single session that you want to achieve? You then design all the components, what your students will do, what they'll be listening to, what they'll be actually reading. Then you develop those components. You thread them together into a learning pathway. And then as this is executed with your students, you evaluate how you're doing and you line that up with your original objectives. So this is actually the gold standard for how you build a program, a whole curriculum, but also how you build an individual course so that everything we do is focused on this really cycle of where we analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate. And what this allows us to do is that you don't just build a course once. You need to actually constantly evaluate it and evolve your course to really make it as strong as possible. So Ross, if you move forward, yes. And so one of the critical outcomes of this is this principle of a learning pathway. You know, very often we think about a syllabus, what are the subjects we have to cover? We think about a lecture, what are the topics we're going to cover? What Adi allows you to do is create a learning design plan that is actually translated into what we call learning pathways. If you look at your course, if you look at every individual session and think about what is the path your student is taking, right? How do they deal with the content? And how do you actually think about a pathway where you combine, you know, journaling, where they're having reflection, where you have a live session with them? What activities are they doing to enrich their understanding of the subject? And what is the graded material that they can then use to understand if they've learned the material? This process of a pathway with built-in feedback loops where they're allowed to retrieve their learning is absolutely critical. So this is really what online learning looks like today. Thank you, Robert. I'm going to bring in Sarah. Sarah, for a teacher who's thinking more about interactive kind of participatory live online learning in the future, and perhaps the term ahead, given the way things are currently looking from the start of the new school year, what practical suggestions like lesson length or design tips do you recommend to enhance engagement in live sessions and throughout the school day and week? So in a brick-and-mortar school, you have so many opportunities for spontaneous student interaction. And online, unfortunately, it's quite limited and quite planned and quite structured. So planning in an online environment becomes critical to the success of what you are doing. And to ensure that our live sessions are as focused as they can be and that we take full advantage of our face-to-face time with our students, we use what is called the flipped classroom methodology. Let's go to the next slide so you can have a look. Yeah, there we go. So this methodology relies on a learner's prior exposure to the content before they reach the classroom space. So as Rob spoke about, a lot of detail and planning goes into the design of every one of our subjects, learning paths. So as a result at the lensher, the flipped classroom approach is not as simple as or limited to giving your students an information pack at the beginning of the week and then sending them off to learn. There's a lot more that goes into it. So on the screen here, we have a screenshot. We just want to go back again. All right. So I have a screenshot of a learning path from my junior high English module on social media. And I've highlighted exactly where my live sessions are in that module so that you can see what happens before the learners even get to me. And so what we see here is that by the time is by the time the learners are in front of me, they will really read a short set of notes. They've been learning for 10 minutes long and they've completed something called an answer garden, which I'll show you in a moment. And that's also only 10 minutes. And you'll also see that each live session that I have with my learners is it's never longer than 45 minutes. In online learning, you really want to avoid the double lessons that we usually do in a brick and mortar school. It's very difficult to keep your students interact and focus for that amount of time. So we make sure that it's always 45 minutes. Next slide. I can show you what this looks like. Okay. So here is a screenshot of our first set of notes. And it's a very introductory. And we also estimate that it takes about three minutes per page for a student to get through the notes. So on average, our notes are very rarely longer than three pages. And then the second screenshot that is an example of an answer garden. And you can see here that the learners had an opportunity to tap into their prior knowledge and show what they already know about or feel towards social media in preparation for my lesson with them. And in the next slide, we have a screenshot. There we go. Of what was taking place in one of my lessons. So because the learners had completed these two very short, very simple tasks before they saw me, they were already oriented towards the subject. Which meant that I could use my live session time to extend their existing knowledge. And then this particular screenshot is from one of those social media lessons. And as you can see, the learners were able to test their understanding in the lesson. And in this instance, they were using the annotate tool to complete this graphic organizer. And I was in a position where I was able to facilitate and deepen that understanding. So in using the classroom approach in a very consulate and very conscious way, the live sessions themselves have the potential to be highly interactive and participatory. And then further down in the learning path, if you want to skip ahead to the next slide, please. Thanks, Ross. Okay, so you can see here I've got a little arrow pointing out to a discussion forum. So this is another example of where the learners can interact away from the teacher, but they are still progressing in their learning. So here you can see that I haven't only thought about the instructions that I want my learners to follow in the discussion forum. But I've also thought very carefully about the learning outcomes associated with this particular component in the learning path. And on the next slide, we have an example of a response from a student. And you can see that because of this backwards design, we have a highly focused and thoughtful interaction here. And all our conversations that learners end up being that way, even if we are not physically in front of them. So what you can hopefully see from this approach is that if you are very mindful about what you are doing in the time that you have with your students, it is possible to have a 45 minute lesson and get through all the work. So rather than using your lessons to disseminate information, which uses a lot of time and undercuts the potential for meaningful interactions. Instead, you should design your learning path so that you can take advantage of face to face time and facilitate deep learning. So here's a question for you, Sarah. Try to create a sense of community and establish relationships online. How do you manage to achieve that and create those kind of connections? Because we know that education very much relies on relationships. What tips do you have to create that sense of community? So I think all teachers know that maybe the most important thing is the connections that you have with your students. It is vital. And particularly in an online environment, you know, to avoid a kid feeling that they're sitting in front of a screen and they're just being talked at, which becomes a very passive experience. It's almost, there's almost more pressure on the teacher to be highly interactive. Especially because you also don't have those spontaneous moments where you walk past a student at school or they come and have lunch in your classroom or anything like that. So again, then live sessions, there's a lot of pressure there to make sure that you are taking that opportunity to foster a sense of community. So if you go to the next slide, just a few tips. So what I find very interesting is that technology actually increases our opportunity for inclusion. And so it becomes possible to bring learners into the conversation who are typically more passive. So I give my students and all my lessons the choice to ask or answer questions allowed or to type them directly to me in the chat box. And then throughout the lesson, I make sure to answer all those questions as they come up. Or if I feel like it's a little bit unrelated to what we're doing, then I just say to the students that I will get to that at the very end of the lesson. And what this has done is it's meant that the learners who are typically more reserved and prefer not to involve themselves or work in group settings are now in a position to participate without the same sense of risk. So for many of them make their sense of confidence has grown because they've started to realize that their questions and answers do have a place in the classroom and then they do add value to the discussions that we have. I also encourage my learners to thank each other or acknowledge each other when someone asks a question or offers an answer that helps them. So as you can see in this image, someone's one of some students in the class said something that Joellen found to be helpful. So she used this thumbs up reaction, which I mean zoom has the thumbs up and the clapping which happens a lot in my classes now. And the more you encourage your learners to use these kinds of tools, the more of a habit it becomes and the more supported the learners feel when they choose to share their ideas or ask questions during the class. So in that sense, the technology has really fostered that sense of community. It's also really important that as a teacher you inject as much personality into those 45 minutes as you can, as well as allow the learners to bring their personalities to the lesson. So because of this, I make a point in every lesson to include at least one little activity or hook that allows the learners to bring themselves into the content. And I also mentally factor in the time that it might take for them to share a story that's related to that. In this example here, I was teaching my learners about the narrative arc, and I was using a roller coaster as a metaphor. And you can see here they were annotating on the roller coaster how they would have felt at various points. And I mean some of the stuff there there's one kid who who seemed to really think he was going to die on this particular roller coaster. So that was a lot of fun and it just sort of, again, injected some enthusiasm and excitement and brought it back to their own lives. And then you allow the kids to ask you these random questions about roller coasters. You ensure that that happens in your lessons. Sarah, I'm going to throw in an extra question here. A lot of people watching in the UK are going to have general safeguarding fears about children's behaviour online. What advice would you give for people? So this is a really interesting question at the lecture. We do have a code of conduct that the learners must abide by and we have this disciplinary action that follows on from that. To be honest, we've been very fortunate that we haven't had those kinds of issues in our lessons. Our kids know where the line is drawn and. But you've got all the kind of safety rules and regulations all mapped out so it's clear from the start. And in fact, if you actually go to the next slide, I haven't got an example of it, but you'll see that I have, yeah, there we go. If it loads, there we are. So you can see there I've got a screenshot of the different discussion forums that I have. And at the top there it says forum etiquette and guidelines. So we make it very clear to the students all the time what is expected of them in terms of how they behave in the online space. But to just sort of finish up talking about, you know, this idea of fostering a sense of community outside of our face to face interactions with our students. I create discussion forums that are outside the learning part. So in other words, they are no learning outcomes associated with them. And one of the discussion forums that I created is to allow my students to share their creations with the rest of their cohorts and it can be anything so art music writing anything that they wanted to be. And as you can see in the one where I've highlighted that creativity one I've already had 136 posts from my learners there. So they've really, really linked into it a lot more than I anticipated. Last week I had a student post a video himself doing a happy, happy Friday dance, and another learner wrote a rap and posted a video of herself performing it. So this particular forum has been an incredibly supportive and celebratory space where our learners actively encourage and demonstrate appreciation for one another. So hopefully what you can see is that, I mean, I think we all know that online learning could be very dull and boring. But if you do take advantage of the tools that are available to you in an online space and you lean into them you don't resist them. But if you can do to create a very close knit community and it's a slow process but it will happen. Thank you Sarah I'm going to ask Amy to come in here on on the topic of you know looking at apps and tools as teachers look to leverage a new technology to teach your classes. Do you have any apps that you could recommend or go to points for teachers who are looking to integrate more active tools in their online teaching. So maybe I can just comment on one of the questions you asked Sarah one of the great things about zoom is that every lesson is recorded so tying in the code of conduct and the expected behaviors that we expect from our students. They also know that all of their activity on our platform is monitored so where we have had the odd instance where a child is behaved inappropriately. They immediately face disciplinary action so I think knowing the boundaries and understanding that even though they're operating in an online space. They still are expected to conduct themselves in a specific way or they face certain consequences I think is really important. So maybe just to speak about the apps and tools side of things. We use a canvas learning management system and there are quite a few different learning management systems. I'm sure some of you would have had exposure to those things like Moodle Blackboard Google Classroom and I think you know really as you're looking to a learning management system and to choosing one is really important that you understand what features you're looking for. Or we used a scorecard approach where we tried to find a specific learning management system that would be fit for purpose. And so if you go into the next slide you'll see just this is how we've set up our canvas instance. And what's great about canvas is that the reason why we actually chose it is because it offered so many integrations with different edu apps. So if you jump to the next slide and you can actually view all of these edu apps on the edu app center and this really just has a whole bunch of apps that integrate with various learning management systems. And I think really when it comes to choosing different apps and pieces of technology, you really need to understand what your what your learning objectives are every app comes with its own learning curve. And so if you're kind of choosing a bespoke set of apps that you're wanting to integrate, it's really important that you keep going with them because students take a while to actually get accustomed to using them. So if you go into the next slide, I've basically just I've listed a lot of the different apps that we use up for Lenture. Obviously Zoom is fundamental to the teaching live environments very much like this. It's the classroom really. And we use this for all of our live sessions and we do a number of teaching live sessions that have interaction but our focus very much on, you know, getting through the content. And then we've got breakout live sessions where we break our students up into smaller groups and we do a lot of application work with them there. On the next slide. And this is at this point, I'm going to hand over to Rob to take us through LabExchange because this is an incredibly exciting addition to Avalanche's offering. And so at this point, I'm actually going to stop speaking and I'm just going to hand over to Rob. So I'm going to hand over there. Rob, so you should be able to show your screen to everybody. Yes, perfect. Okay, so LabExchange is a platform that's focused on the teaching of science launched on January and in full disclosure. This was done by my group at Harvard. And what LabExchange allows you to do is to teach science really in the context of sort of simulations and a whole rich series of kinds of things that you can do. So the way in which we're structured things, they're not structured like a course. They're structured in terms of what we call clusters. So here's one focused on biotechnology. And as you might imagine, because of my role at Volentia as chancellor, LabExchange also has this principle of what we call a learning pathway. Right, where once again there's a series of rich media things that you're able to do. But one of the things that we've created at Volentia and if you're teaching science, in particular molecular biology, you should look at this is that we have created an entire structure of virtual labs, right, where you're able to actually go in. And you have a virtual lab environment that your students can use, and they can actually run experiments, they get guidance can take notes, etc. All of this is free and accessible to all of you. So I would really recommend that you take, take a look at that. And it's designed to work very well with any learning management system that you have, in that it's like a lightweight overlay that you can use. What's also noteworthy is that you can build classes. So this is a class that I'm teaching right now with 60 students in it. And as one might imagine the pathway concept continues. So like for example, this is a pathway that I built for my students earlier this week, where you set a learning objectives. And you have a particular sequence of activities, including video readings and sort of formative assessment and interactives that the students can go through. So this is one example of a free app of a free platform frankly, that all of you can use. Before I bring back to Amy, in keeping with cognitive load theory and memory, I'm going to launch a poll, so it should be on your screen now. And that's asking you a number of questions if you just respond to those and then I will get the screen, the slides back on your screen shortly. So I'll give you another 10 or 15 seconds just to respond to that survey. While I do that, okay, five more seconds. Okay, so here come the results. So you should be able to see, so we just want to get a sense of who's watching. So we've got a couple of parents, so not a couple, 2% of parents. Do you feel ready to teach for September? The vast majority, so 64%. Do you already have students learning online? So a large number of you do, which is good to hear and are you aware of Valencia? So some of you are, which is reassuring. So now you all are, which is even better. So Amy, over to you just to go through the next set of apps if that's okay with you. Okay, so I think maybe to just pick up what we wanted to do is just show you some of the apps and tools that we integrate with our learning management system. So if you think about these as Lego blocks that you can kind of think about and fill them into your course, but you really need to think about the learning objectives what you're trying to achieve with your students. So we use a lot of the G Suite tools. And this is just an example of Google sites, but G Suite has, you know, they've got Google documents slides, etc. And this is really a great set of tools for collaborative work. And specifically that was one where Sarah Sarah's kids actually worked on a website project together, and they produced the most beautiful websites together. So G Suite tools continued, we use forms for social voting. So again, coming back to that point on how do you get engagement prior to a live session or check for consolidation afterwards. We use a Google forms for social voting. And then if you go to the next one, I excel for math and English practice. It's a great bank of math and English practice exercises, catering for all of the year levels in the secondary school space. And that's an even below that as well. Duolingo for languages. So specifically for French we use a lot of the Duolingo lessons and interspersed those with our own with our own language lessons. It's a fantastic app that our students really enjoy using. And then H5P for interactive lesson material. This is a great set of tools that really allow you to add interactivity to things like videos and the answer garden that Sarah shared earlier. There are a number of different things that you can do with H5P tools to really ensure that you're getting the engagement levels up on your online course. If you jump to the next one. This is an example. So that was just the previous one was an example of an H5P tool and this as well is also an example. So this is the answer garden example from earlier. All of these are available on H5P. Then PHET interactive simulations. These are also a bunch of science simulations that we use from time to time. And then if you go to the next one. Prezi is also fantastic. So if you're wanting to look at explaining visually oriented concepts and that need a grounding and visuals and it's a it's a great tool to use. Time toast interactive timelines allows kids to build interactive timelines, which are visualized differently either on an actual timeline or in a different format which I think is on the next slide. Sarah actually used this in her course where she wanted to track the evolution of of media and covers magazine covers over time and allowing students to build those out. And then the next one. I'm not sure if there any more in here. There might be one more. That's just a snapshot of the different things that you can integrate. I mean, there's so many and I think it's really just to be creative at the end of the day. It's been normal school for you as usual, Amy. But I'm interested in whether you have also had to make adjustments to students needs during lockdown, mental health, have you had a spike in numbers? Are there any new interventions, for example, that have been especially effective that you could share? We definitely have had to make some some adjustments. We only had one blended class that was affected by lockdown. Otherwise, it's been business as usual and school as usual for our kids. But we have learned some lessons along the way and I think I mean one of the things I've said fail fast fail forward. So if you go to the next slide, one of the key things I pulled up this because I'm not sure how many of you can relate. Just a lot number of us of our teachers just coming back and saying no one shows up to office hours. We have these office hours. We set them up. We want the kids to come. And, you know, this concept of teachers just feeling a bit lonely in the office hours. And so one of the things we realized is that, you know, there's some practical things that we really need to do to increase the engagement with those office hours, specifically adding to them to the learning part so that students can actually see them there. But actually, Rob, I would love for you to just speak a little bit to the office hours because you made some great points the other day just around how we can actually engage students in office hours and get them to come and show up. Right, so I mean I think it's actually something we've learned a lot in brick and mortar, as well as online students and anyone will not show up unless they have a specific reason to do so. So two ways in which I have tried to sort of lay this out is that I will hold back from my classes, some connection with a current affair or current issue. And that's very probably really provocative, really controversial etc. And using things taken from movies and series on TV. I'll create a cliffhanger in the class where it's like, well there's this question that we haven't tackled yet. But if you want to hear about that, come to my office hours. And so that's one way in which you can set up a reason for them to come. Students are often nervous coming to office hours because they feel like, oh I have to have something really brilliant, or I have to have a lot of problems that I need to talk about, in which case I'm nervous about coming anyway. If you give them a reason to come that's interesting and provocative, then I think the other reasons will then follow very easily. So structuring opportunities where there's a reason to come that's actually linked with what you're teaching. I think is certainly a powerful way of doing it. Think about cliffhangers in New Yorkers. Can I just add a point in about workload and also this thing, you know, the engagement tips, very useful Rob, but in terms of workload, you know, there's a large number of people watching from around the world on this session, at least 30 countries, but vast majority are in the UK and I know there's a lot of people with Blythe's teachers internationally, not just specifically to the UK, but what workload tips do you have for teachers working online through your particular niche? How do you balance your own work-life balance and sustain that with the people in which you work? Well, I mean, that is something that I'm struggling with right now. I think we're now in a situation where every day seems the same and everything seems like a long sort of continuation. What I found for myself is that it's very useful for you to sort of really define a schedule and it's actually what we tell our students as well. Build a schedule, even though all of our lives are now self-paced. Build a schedule, define clear blocks of time where you're doing your course development, you're working on your lecture, you're doing a recording, you're putting things up into the learning management system, you're having some sort of set of office hours, and try to define that upfront as clearly as possible and no matter what stick with it, because the risk of having everything creep into every conceivable hour that you have will actually wear you down, right? And this is one way to truly avoid burnout. Thank you. Sam Amy? Yes, and I see some of the viewers are asking about what office hours are. So basically, in order to make yourself more available, naturally you don't have a physical classroom. What we do is we create these office hours where students know that they can really just drop in, speak to their teacher, ask them questions about the work that they're doing, and check in on key concepts. And what we really want them to do is show up, right? And so this office hours tip on introducing cliffhangers is something we've seen as working. So, okay, so you can go on to the next slide for me. So yeah, and then including them in the learning path. We've just seen that this concept of a learning path is probably one of the most important things in designing effective online courses. And so anything that's not in the learning path kind of gets left behind. And so, you know, this concept of, you know, students receiving packs of work that they need to work through. There's very little structure in that. And so the learning path almost becomes like the centre of the central focus and helping students get through their work. Thank you, Amy. I'm going to bring in Rick, our headteacher. Rick, I want to come back to this point on safeguarding. You know, I know viewers are watching in the UK are going to be particularly nervous. You know, access to remote learning for a lot of our vulnerable pupils about 1.3 million in the UK access to technology, the safeguarding risks, the costs, all those types of things. But the safety aspect of online learning, Rick, by which I mean, you know, external disruptions, you know, background noises, zoom bombing. And students taking pictures of themselves. What tools do you use to keep things safe for everyone? And what advice can you share to everybody watching? Russ, I think that's always a big concern. You use the word technology and people start to get nervous, particularly when you mix that with education. And I think your structure is tremendously important to start with, to make sure you've thought of all the aspects and you've covered them. And for us, that meant policy. I know it was mentioned earlier. You asked the question to Sarah about that. And so we have a code of conduct for the students that they go through, they need to understand, they need to sign, the parents sign it. And we take the discipline very seriously. We have a faculty board that meets on a very regular basis to deal with any disciplinary matters, be it from misconduct or plagiarism. And I think Sarah mentioned it earlier as well. We've been very fortunate not to have many cases at all. Only minor incidences, but we've dealt with them quickly and make sure that there's an appropriate level of consequence. And we always involve the parents as well so that they fully participate in that process. But as a minimum, we all our sessions are recorded so that if there's any need to go back and review anything, then it's all there. And all the technology under Valencia's auspices are monitored and recorded for safeguarding reasons. Zoom bombing, yes, that's always people are conscious of that and what can happen there. But we've ensured that all the Zoom logins are via the students authenticated Valencia campus Zoom accounts. So that helps enormously there as well. We've also been very clear on boundaries with teachers and ensuring that they don't join any social media groups or WhatsApp groups that there shouldn't be. And also inform parents of their responsibilities outside Valencia. Of course, putting all these measures in place. It doesn't mean to say it's going to stop misconduct entirely. It does happen, but that so we just make sure that our governance aspects of our school are held and that the students understand the values. And also that they feel that they can report any inappropriate or concerning behaviors as they happen. And they can do that by their designated designated mentors. We haven't mentioned mentors yet, but we have a mentor, a structure, student success division and the mentors build up a very good and close relationship with them. Ross, you're on YouTube. Foolish of me. Thank you, Rick. Rob, I'm going to ask you to come back in. I want to kind of stick with online safety. I know it's going to be a big, probably the greatest concern for teachers in the UK. Another concern, you know, we mentioned both the context of online learning and traditional schooling, you know, cyberbullying. Have you any specific advice on how teachers can prevent that from occurring during online school? Well, I mean, I think certainly bullying and cyberbullying is a significant problem that we always have to be aware of. I would argue that bullying is something that happens in the dark. And so what you need to do is to make sure that the sun is shining brightly in your class so that there's a culture of transparency, where you see what's happening with your students, you're able to observe what's going on. And using the context of office hours, etc., you have an opportunity to always check in with your students and have an atmosphere of openness with your students so that if problems are arising, you're able to actually see them as they're happening. And as Rick mentioned with Valencia, we have mentors, right, that have a particular relationship with students and are there to coach them, if you will, in terms of their learning. So they're also there to catch, if you will, those moments where you can see that something's going on with the students. That's not quite right. One thing that I've done with my own classes online is that, you know, we've just talked about how students don't want to come to office hours. If they're having a problem with bullying, they really don't want to come to office hours and talk about that. So one thing that I've used, because I'm able to do this, is that I always show up in the live Zoom class 30 minutes to 15 minutes early. And I always make it clear at the very end that if folks want to hang out and chat with me about something, and once again I use a cliffhanger, there's something going on with the pandemic, do you want to hear more about it? You're free to stay. Having those two sort of pre and post kinds of opportunities for students to hang with you is actually a way in which you can read the temperature of what's happening. And if something problematic is going on, it often emerges in those sort of unstructured moments with yourself. So for people watching, you know, teachers that are maybe considering wanting to work with you, for example, I'm assuming you give all the training and, you know, the cyberbullying. You know, we're now in a place where maybe cyberbullying outweighs physical bullying with the wealth of the internet. Do you provide the necessary training for people that sign up to work with you? Oh, certainly. Yes. Yes. I mean, we're just and also don't forget with Valencia, there's a sort of a team based sort of it takes a village approach to working with our students. So there's the teachers, they're also the coaches slash mentors. And so it's the combination of that sort of team based approach that allows us to make sure that students are not just learning, but that they're learning safely. But yes, there's significant training that goes into how how our teachers are prepared. Okay, thank you. I'm going to thank you, Rob. I'm going to bring in Amy. And I know that a lot of schools, I found it quite difficult to monitor and assess students studying at home. And I know particularly when the pandemic started, the increase of notifications and emails went through their flooded many people's inboxes. So, you know, we won't be sending parents end of year reports everywhere some schools are but what ways do you use to monitor and assess students progress, both for your understanding as a virtual school. And to have that data that you can share with students and their parents. Absolutely. And I think reporting is one of the key items that people wonder about as it relates to online learning. So the key internal metrics that we constantly monitor our live session attendance. So attendance is something that we that we're constantly looking at. Fortunately, we have mentors who can follow up with students on the day if they're not in their live session. So just as, as, as you would see in the brick and mortar school if a student doesn't show up at school, their parents would get a phone call in the same way the student doesn't show up at a live session it's treated in the same way. So live session attendance is a big one and students actually have a newly performed requirements attached to it so they know it's part of the their reporting requirements for the end of term and the end of semester. And we also monitor submission rates on a weekly basis. So we just follow up with all students over the course. We've, so we've actually basically catered for a learning curve and I think that's important to notice what we've seen with students who are transitioning into an online mode of learning. They take a while to get used to learning in that, in that mode and so submission rates weren't particularly high when they aren't particularly high when they first start. And so we give them a little bit of grace in the beginning and we sort of give them a few warnings. But what we, what we do is we basically follow up with students over the course of the first semester. When they don't submit we give them extensions on work and we are very clear then that this is a process whereby the warnings sort of wane off and they start to, they start to, we start, we start to have stricter enforcement of our policy. So submission rates are key. Those are kind of the two behavioral indicators that we are monitoring on a daily and weekly basis. Naturally we're looking at academic progress, term to term. So we're looking at things like their GPA against, we've used the CAT 4 assessments, which are incredibly helpful in just understanding, you know, their cognitive abilities, whether they are making progress to the level that we anticipate. And what's great is we established, we've established meeting rhythms between our faculty and our student success teams, so that we're not just looking at individual, at an individual siloed approach of a risk on a specific subject, we're also looking across at all of the, at all of the student subjects and understanding how they're doing at a macro view. And then this report that you can see on screen is, it's a basic report that we send out to parents. It's a progress report that they receive on a Friday. So our, all of our courses, they have a modular approach, so modules released on a weekly, on weekly increments. And at the end of the, at the end of the week, they have weekly deadlines. And so on a Friday, parents get a report, their kids are copied into it, where they can basically see for each subject, how many live sessions did they attend, how many live sessions were they excused from and that would have been obviously in, in collaboration with the parents. Assignments submitted, and then the cumulative time that they've spent online. And these, what we hope this will do on a Friday, because the submission deadlines on a Monday, we hope that it will allow parents to have meaningful conversations with, with their child, before the deadline arrives so that if there is an opportunity for them to remediate before the deadline, they can intervene at the appropriate time. A general rule of thumb of class sizes just for people's interest. Yes, absolutely. So the majority of our class sizes at the moment are between 25 and 30 students in a class. We find that quite manageable because we can really then effectively utilize breakout sessions. And really foster a sense of community. I think it's an interesting balance. And we've, we've seen that between 25 to 30 students at this, at the stages is really working well. Right, thank you. Rob, I'm going to ask, you know, life outside of school, do you have any advice on how teachers can encourage, you know, that fine balance between academic work, you know, maintaining social relationships with friends online during lockdown. Right. So, once again, I think one important way of thinking about this is to not think that the student that you might have seen in your brick and mortar classroom that that is actually where they live and that's only where they exist. So I think as Sarah pointed out, having a real interest in and connecting with students lives outside of the classroom, I think in the online space is particularly important. Because I think it gives you an opportunity to understand your students. That's data that's Intel that you can use to really understand when problems are arising, what might be a factor in those problems. But it also allows you to try to connect what they're learning in your class or at school with things that they really care about. So at the start of this, I talked about the importance of agency and really one key part of agency is high-hoping students figure out, what do I care about? What am I excited to do? And that excitement, that caring, that passion comes from something in their lives. So we quite often talk about, you know, work-life balance, school-life balance. When there's a colleague of mine at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that says this balance thing implies that they're against each other. But in fact, what we should be thinking about is a productive integration of school and life. So school and life goes together. School informs your life and allows you to make it and take it in a direction that you want as a student and your life actually gives you a foundation to make school focused and more interesting for you. So I think bringing those two together will be very helpful in this regard. Thank you, Rob. I'm getting lost. Just to remind the audience, you know, Rob here is a world-leading expert in online learning. So thank you, Rob. Thinking about the next school year, so from September, this week our schools in Scotland are closing down for the summer. There'll be hundreds of thousands of 11-year-olds transitioning to secondary school. And, you know, that's a big challenge for most of us at normal times. But if we still find ourselves having to teach as we are now and, you know, the headteachers at least that I'm in touch with it, suggest that despite government advice, that's going to be the case. What advice do you have on getting the best out of our children? Well, right now I think, because I'm facing the same thing this fall as well, with a new batch of students, try to set up sort of an intro and a check-in with each of them. Once again, try to find out what their situation is. Try to find out what they're bringing to the table, what their concerns are. It will help you understand how you might be able to create a class that will work for them, but it will also signal to them strongly that you really care about them and you care about their learning. So if you're not able to meet with your students face-to-face and see them in the classroom together, I think the only thing we can do is to have live outreach if we can to each of them. I'm facing a class of 65 students this fall and I think it's going to take quite a bit of time, but you do a rolling process of even as short as 15 minutes with each student. I think that's going to be incredibly helpful. And I've tried it this summer, right? I have 60 students this summer and in one week I've met all of them. So you're already starting now. Just like you would in a normal school and transition needs to make connections now before the year. Absolutely. Okay, thank you, Rob. Rick, a final question. When you've been recruiting teachers, do you think there are any special skills that teachers need to work effectively in an online environment? And what advice and training do you provide those teachers who are watching? Ross here, not too different from someone recruiting for a brick and mortar school really, but passion for educating young people is obviously critical. Having a progressive outlook, creativity certainly, it's about taking what a good teacher would do in a classroom and translating that into an online presentation. There's a good dose of confidence as well, not to be afraid of the camera in front of you. And to inject, I think Sarah mentioned this as well, a lot of your own personality into your teaching and being exuberant, drawing students in and creating that sense of community which you alluded to as well. And we've also said building trust online is a little bit more challenging, but one of the best ways to do that is to try and include fun and humour in your lessons if you can do that. But another key ingredient is taking an interest in the lives and happenings of the students. Sarah's mentioned it, Rob's just mentioned it now as well, really important to connect with your students on that particular level. So taking what a good teacher would do in a brick and mortar school and being able to adapt that into the online environment is what we'd look for. We do provide training, we've spoken about training a little bit before, but certainly training on our systems and our approach. And in learning how to use technology opens up ideas and allows for that creativity to flow. At Valencia one of our key successes is also collaboration. It's been mentioned before like by Amy that we do have different divisions within Valencia. And what we've basically taken is a teacher's role and put them into specialist teams. So we deal with all the key elements within the school but within those specialist teams. So there's teaching, there's curriculum design, there's mentoring and coaching, there's technology and so on. So we work closely together and that can sometimes be challenging but the collective thinking produces some very innovative and new ways of doing things. And we all know that what sort of synergy is developed through collaboration. And for us this delineation of teacher's roles helps the teacher themselves to focus on what they do best and that's to interact and to teach. Another question, Rick. In terms of equipment that a teacher might need at home, you know, I've got my kind of podcast microphone here, a white board, you know, a little camera, this side. And obviously I do a lot of those things as a blogger, but apart from a laptop, is there anything specific that a teacher may need if they work with you or that Valencia provides? Ross, is that a question for me? I lost your audio there for a moment. It's to Rob or Rick I suppose, you know, in terms of the equipment I need as a teacher to work for Valencia, is it simply a laptop or, you know, do I need my white board? Do I need a camera, you know, specific types of resources such as cameras, microphones, or is it pretty straightforward stuff? If you can answer that, that would be great. Now, I can go. I was just waiting to see if Rob was going to answer that one. A laptop is great. I mean, that's what most of our teachers will use. One thing that's fairly indispensable to delivering lessons is a second screen so that you can spread your various bits of work out so that we find incredibly useful as well. And there are other things that you can get and develop and help to enhance what you're doing. You can include specific special interactive whiteboards if you want to. There are other things you can do, but, you know, effective teaching, I think Sarah mentioned it earlier, is about building that relationship with your student. And you don't need a lot of technology to do that. It's about you interacting with a student. And in fact, one other thing I would add is that it really depends on what style you're most comfortable with and what really reflects your personality as a teacher. But sort of a not overly expensive investment that I think many folks have made is buying one of those holders that have a very flexible neck for your smartphone camera. I mean, your smartphone camera is like one of the best video cameras that you probably have in the house. And that will allow you to capture, for example, if you point it downward, you can instead of using a whiteboard, you can use a piece of paper, write things out. And in Zoom, you can have a direct link with your phone that allows you to share that with your students. So it's kind of the equivalent of a board. And that works very well for me as a science teacher. It's very important to be able to diagram things out. And so I use my camera. Amy, a final question then. So I guess I'm covering all areas, but specifically for teachers who find themselves maybe looking for new work or for those going into school before a vaccine is found. Are you looking for new teachers next year? What options are available for the 2% of parents that are watching the school leaders out there that are looking? You know, I haven't observed all the chat box, you know, but the costs, those types of things. What can you offer just to finish? So perhaps I'll hand over to Nesh just to speak about our intakes and some of our fee structures and things like that for the parent side of things. But I'm so glad you asked me about teachers because we're always looking for fantastic teachers. And we do have an intake coming up in September and one in January and then another in June and September next year as well. As you know, we're planning to expand our offering to A levels as well. So we're always looking for really good teachers who are interested in trying something new and innovative and different. And who have extensive experience working with international curriculum specifically. So if you are interested in applying for any of the positions at Valencia now in the future, you're welcome to email your resume to faculty recruitment at Valencia Institute.com. Thank you, Nesh. Nesh, do you want to take the question on our intakes? Yeah, so we currently recruiting for a few intakes. We've got the June, July intake, which is closing next week. So, you know, if you do have any students that are interested on online learning and need some more information before that, it would be useful to send them our way as quickly as possible just to get them informed. We also have a September intake. The June, July intake is predominantly for our junior high. The September intake will be for junior high level as well as our international GCSE. And then we've got our big January 2021 intake. So there's multiple intakes on the go. When it comes to B structures, I think the best thing to do is we have this wonderful email address, which is admissions at Valencia Institute.com. That's admissions at Valencia Institute.com and we'll be able to send you a detailed structure of all the different options available for the piece. Yeah, I guess just, I mean, for me, I use every platform that I can just to echo the voice of the parents and the students. We tend to speak to quite a few of them on a daily basis. And I think just a lasting thought for myself would be, you know, patience is key. We've been astounded by the feedback we've got from parents about how they responded to online learning during the COVID pandemic and just giving students an extra bit of time just to acclimatize to what online learning is. They've seen them excel. And I think for us not to be too afraid about the potential of online or only seeing it as a short term solution. We've had a massive spike in admissions and interest from everybody around the world, predominantly the UK as well. So if you do have any, you know, people or students that you do interact with on a daily basis that needs some more information, please feel free to send them our way. Great. So with three minutes to spare, I think we've done very well for time everyone. So for everyone watching you will export all the chat box and answer your questions and things. But I want to say thank you to Dr. Robert Lou to Amy to Nash to Rick and Sarah for your time and wisdom and to offer the global community. And another option. I, you know, what is the future of school, you know, bricks and mortar those types of things forever, never mind a pandemic. But thank you for watching. Thank you for everyone taking part. We'll get the slides in the video to you shortly. I wish you all the best. My name is Ross McGill, I've been your host at Teacher Toolkit. Bye for now and thank you once again. Thank you everyone. It's been a pleasure. Bye everybody. Thank you.