Sarah Langridge, Headteacher at Whitley and Eggborough Community Primary School tells us how the donation of laptops from Tunstall has helped pupils during lockdown and beyond.
May 6, 2021
Back in February the school was delighted to receive 12 new Google Chromebooks from our near neighbour Tunstall Healthcare. At that time, all children were learning remotely, except those who were vulnerable or whose parents were keyworkers. However, not all families had access to technology to support learning from home, and some were trying to work using smart phones, or children were sharing devices with siblings, and sometimes with parents working from home.
The school originally migrated to the cloud in January 2020 using Google Education, which made the initial transition to home learning in the first lockdown as smooth as possible. We worked extremely hard to provide a mixture of live lessons and videos through Google Meet, Google Classroom and 1:1 meetings, as well as offering parents a timetable to guide their teaching routine.
The Chromebooks from Tunstall made a huge difference, enabling the vast majority of children across all year groups to access the curriculum, ensuring they could engage with online learning during lockdown. We also received great support from the community, with local people and businesses also providing devices. This meant that each family had the technology they needed, ensuring that the children could continue with their learning and join in with their class meets for some social interaction. Many parents found it extremely challenging juggling working from home and educating their children, and the provision of the additional devices helped to alleviate some of these pressures.
Now that pupils are back in school, the laptops are still being used every day by the children, for example, by giving to access Google Classroom, Purple Mash and to research subjects they are learning about. They will continue to enhance the learning of our pupils for years to come.
Technology is playing an increasing role in all of our lives, and so being able to give our pupils increased resources to support their technological know how as well as all round learning has been invaluable. We’ve been very proud of the way the school, teachers and the community worked together to continue providing a quality education to our pupils through the pandemic, and as we begin to look towards the future we remain grateful to Tunstall for its generous contribution.
