Learning Partnerships

This week with fuller classes it has been brilliant to see students re-connecting and learning together with all staff across the school. The importance of the partnership between school and families to work together to support individual learning cannot be understated. We are grateful to all St Michael’s parents and caregivers as the first educators of their children and privileged to work with students on their continued learning journeys.

The NAPLAN that wasn’t

This week marks the time that Year 3 and Year 5 students would have ordinarily been sitting their NAPLAN tests for Reading, Writing, Language Conventions and Mathematics. With the national cancellation of these standardised assessments for 2020, St Michael’s continues to focus on quality teaching and learning informed by classroom and school level assessment data. Teachers are gathering assessment in a variety of modes, throughout their programmes and using this data to hold professional discussions around the direction and target of future instruction for individual students. Over the coming week there will be further communication around assessment information for all WA schools and parents are encouraged to speak with their child’s teacher with any specific questions after this time.

Tik Tok App and students

Tik Tok (previously musical.ly) is a free social media app that lets users watch, create and share short videos. Staff have noticed students are increasingly talking about content they have seen or created using this app for example; participating in popular dance challenges. It is essential that parents are aware that the recommended age for using Tik Tok is 13+ due to privacy concerns and mature content (source: Common Sense Media). It is therefore not recommended for primary aged children. Information collected by Tik Tok is not protected under Australian Privacy Laws as the data is stored internationally.

For parents who elect to permit their child’s usage of digital social media outside of school, it is critical that students are not to record and share videos of themselves wearing the St Michael’s school uniform, including the sports uniform or leaver’s shirts. The geo-location capacity for tools such as Tik Tok and ease with which young children may inadvertently share identifiable information, is cause for concern. There are options to enhance parental controls within Tik Tok and parents are encouraged to establish protective protocols for their children if participation with this app is permitted. Protective protocols may include; only using a parent account, previewing any videos before they are shared, enabling restricted mode and family pairing within the app settings.

There is no substitute for active, regular monitoring of your child’s use of social media by a parent or caregiver. If you have any concerns, please consult the Australian Government’s eSafety Commissioner guidelines here: https://www.esafety.gov.au/key-issues/esafety-guide/tiktok

Media Ministry

Hello Saint Michael’s parents and students. This term Isabella, Max, Francesco, Grace, and Zack are creating the newsletter. This week we will be giving you the latest about what is going on at school!

The senior classes have been using a platform called Teams and doing most of their online learning tasks for the past few weeks. This week we have been doing online calls with people at home and at school.  Mrs Turner and along with all the teachers have been working extremely hard with answering questions from parents and kids as well as a few new websites that we have being using so people at home can see what we are doing. A big congrats to all teachers for working in this new environment!

As I am sure parents, students, and teachers have seen the virtual assemblies that the Year 6 class have created over the past few weeks (and if you haven’t you definitely should!) every ministry have all participated in the assembly and Mrs Turner and Mr Powles have edited the assemblies. Here is the video for this week https://youtu.be/oKRVNEn81Zg

Next week the Year 6’s will be doing a special podcast and activities for the whole school. We can’t tell you what the podcast and activities are about, but the clues are: Trees, Sunshine and putting rubbish in the bin even, if it’s not yours.

Thank you for putting your time into reading this week’s newsletter. Keep up the good work everyone and remember to wash your hands

Regards,

Media Ministry

Assistant Principals
Jemima Saunders and Ryan Powles