Date Posted: Friday 1 May 2020
Welcome to the connectED blog, a new feature running weekly during term time, to help the OLA community stay connected and celebrate success even though we are all working remotely from each other.
In last week’s blog, I mentioned interactivity and social contact as key factors in remote learning success. As we come to the end of our third week of remote learning, each of us is taking away something different from the remote experience, but a feature that we all have in common is that, despite the daily virtual contact, we miss the connections with our friends and colleagues and the social interactions that were once commonplace.
My current reading material is a book called The Self Delusion by Tom Oliver, local author and Professor of Applied Ecology at Reading University. It is a popular science book about our human interconnectedness and explores how people, animals, plants and the planet we live on are all intimately connected – and why this matters.
There is an accompanying blog in which two of his points help to explain our need at OLA for social connections for effective learning and wellbeing: No person is an island and you are not exactly the same person that you were five minutes ago. Tom uses these phrases to deliver the message that the neural network in our brains is altered by every word, touch or pheromone that we receive from other people. This neural network is composed of around 170 billion neurons with the connections between them being formed and lost at a rate of up to 250,000 every second! Such a high level of activity means that our inner selves are constantly connected to, and altered by, others. No wonder we crave a chat with our friends!
Further afield from OLA, all over the world, collaborators and innovators are finding the means to stay connected to each other. Recently, a team of scientists has developed materials which can harvest water directly out of the air, designed to help communities in arid parts of the world.
Tom would class this as an example of interconnected human endeavour. The experience of lockdown, is pushing us to re-evaluate our interconnectedness to other people, recognising that when we have social interactions, we are less anxious, feel a greater sense of wellbeing and have more empathy. Changes we have made to the remote learning programme this week reflect both the feedback we have received and the desire to improve interconnectedness and wellbeing in the home.
Speaking of empathy, work on our Red Cross Kindness theme has progressed further this week in Y7-9 PSHCE and I continue to be impressed by the quality and creativity of OLA pupils. A selection of their work is displayed within this blog and I am sure you will agree it is of a very high standard! As well as artwork, pupils have produced thoughtful poems. Each week I will showcase a few of these poems.
All classes continue to be very engaged in their learning and have adapted very well to the Teams environment.
The connectED groups have been reflecting on comparisons between the restrictions we face now and those faced by the public during WWII. They have explored popular reading material of the era and have discovered how difficult it is to write a 25-word brief letter of the type that was enabled by the Red Cross during WWII. Next week the groups will focus on a nationwide school project to design an Outdoor Learning Centre of the Future; bringing together the themes at the heart of Tom’s book.
I would like to finish by encouraging you to continue to provide weekly feedback on our remote learning programme, using the survey link; thus, helping OLA create its own instance of interconnected human endeavour! Have a lovely weekend and a break from screen time!
Red Cross Kindness Poems
Kindness gives expecting none,
Kindness forgives when wrong is done.
Kindness comes in many ranges,
Kindness makes miraculous changes.
Kindness removes evil forever,
Kindness will keep us all together.
Isabel C (Year 9)
Kindness keeps us close,
It’s what makes us feel happy and bright
Happiness is always around
Even if it is out of your sight
Kindness keeps us close,
Anyone can be gentle
No matter who you are
Even if the pace of life is mental
Kindness keeps us close,
You can be kind
There’s always a reason to be
Even if you’ve lost kindness, you can always re-find.
Miriam W (Year 9)
W.O.R.L.D awards (Week 27 April-1 May 2020)
A special mention this week to:
Mrs Cimas Year 7 and 8 Spanish classes for being fabulous! Working admirably and for always being engaged.
All the poets and artists who have produced work for the Kindness initiative – if your work isn’t featured in the newsletter this week, it soon will be!
All those who took part in the Caption Competition last Friday – winner to be posted on Teams Friday afternoon.
Our W.O.R.L.D award winners this week are:
