Dear Parents and Carers

Thank you for your continued support during the past few weeks to assist your children with their remote learning experiences. The children and parents of St Mary’s have embraced this method of learning with such a positive and enthusiastic approach. It has been heartwarming to see the continued excellent quality of work our students have produced.

Microsoft Teams

As our Stage 2 and Stage 3 teachers prepare to meet their students on Microsoft Teams, the following guides have been made available by Catholic Education to assist you in downloading and logging into Microsoft Teams. Each platform i.e. iPad, Chrome book and laptops or desktops has a guide available to step you through the process. Please choose the relevant material applicable to your platform at home.

The online privacy of both the teacher and student is important. A recommendation from Catholic Education is that when participating in Microsoft Teams meetings, teachers and students have their backgrounds blurred or they should position their camera so that it is not facing a public part of the home. Instructions on how to do this are available in the before mentioned guides. If you do not want your child to be recorded in a Team Meeting, please notify the school, and the student will be supported by allowing them to have their camera off and microphone muted during a meeting. This will limit student participation to the use of Chat and Emoticons to respond to peers and the teacher during a meeting. Teachers will remind students of behavioural expectations of an online meeting as they would do in a classroom environment.

Meetings will be held as a class, not individually, students and teachers will automatically record the virtual meetings and download the recording to store securely via Microsoft Teams. Your child’s teacher will let you know the days and times that they will be participating in a class MS Teams meeting. At this stage, the meetings will have a ‘well being’ focus, with an opportunity for teachers and students to ‘check in’ with each other.

At this time, our Kindergarten and Stage 1 teachers will commence a "check in" using MS Teams at the beginning of Term 4.

St Mary’s staff are looking forward to having regular “check-ins” with their students, discussing and celebrating all of their wonderful achievements.

Have a peaceful and enjoyable weekend.