We all learn from Virtual Engagements

Many schools have been receiving visits from Engagement Officers from all around Nova Scotia, virtually. Did you know the EO can provide a full engagement on many different topics and we do this without having to drive to the school?  This helps us reduce our CO2 emissions and engage more schools in the same day! How then do we engage the students?It is actually quite simple! We do so over the Internet. We use Google hangouts for our Virtuals, and so all a teacher is required to do is follow the link that would be provided to them by their EO and voila- a lesson is provided to the students.

On the 19th of February 2019, I was getting ready to engage with the grade 6 students at Bedford South School, when an email came through from their teacher Ms MacDonald, informing me that another grade 6 class,wanted to participate in a Virtual Engagement. We always offer two options, that the two classes combine in one class or I could engage with the other class at a different time.  Ms MacDonald came up with a brilliant idea, and asked if it was possible to simply share the call link with the other Grade 6 teacher? This was a perfect suggestion and the other class could participate in the same engagement! . I quickly agreed to this because it was a simple way to engage as many classes as possible at the same time. This idea blew my mind, and I had to share it with all the other EOs. A Google Hangouts call can have up to 8 participants on it, and so this is something that can happen with many different classes of the same grade level. The engagement on History before Electricity, with the 2 classes went very well and both classes listened attentively and asked many questions. The virtual has fun guessing games about some old small appliances  that were not as easy to figure out.Many of the students were impressed by some of the appliances, as they did not look like anything they had seen before.These two classes will be receiving Virtual engagements every other week for the next 6 weeks, focusing on different topics!

Virtuals are a new learning tool that we are offering here at Green Schools, and the EOs are always welcoming innovative ideas on how to make them easier and more accessible to the schools, and so we always appreciate it when teachers offer us ideas such as this one!

Ruvi Mugara

Engagment Officer