TaraNet elearning students met at Stratford High School to prepare for the year ahead. It is good to see Stratford High has students enrolled on the VLN this year. Also a changing trend from previous years is the number of our own TaraNet students in our own classes. Last year we had only one, all others were cross cluster enrolments. Our Spanish class is completely made up of TaraNet students, followed by Physics with 6 of our own students. All other eteachers have one or two TaraNet students, except for Joel’s Stats class which has none.
Unfortunately Coastal & Patea were unable to join us today but we VCed into Patea so the students there could join in part of the day & experience a VC with other students.
We followed the usual agenda of discussing expectations of what VC learning is all about. See above the students collated PMIs. They have a pretty accurate preconception of some of the ‘characteristics’ of being an elearner. Certainly more accurate than students contributions to this discussion in previous years perhaps an indication that the VC & elearning is registering on the radar of our schools’ community. This is the first year we have had students sign a contract to acknowledge what is required of them as an elearner & also to assure them of support they will receive as an elearner. This is useful also as it involves parents as they take it home to discuss with them. Most VC students are responsible learners but occasionally they need a reminder to keep them on track.
Also during the day we went through technical procedure of using the VC equipment, invited an experienced elearning student speak with them and explored the TaraNet website and the VLN Student Module.
