St John Plessington Catholic College

Google Classroom Update

Dear Parent/Carer

Google Classroom Update

I would like to thank you for your continued support in ensuring your child is accessing Google Classroom and completing relevant learning materials. I appreciate that this is a new and difficult situation for us all where we are having to adapt to a very different way of life at present.

The feedback on Google Classroom from parents and students thus far has been overwhelmingly positive and the amount of time students are allocating to their learning hasn’t gone unnoticed by their teachers. I appreciate that there have been some issues with logging on, completing classwork or general technical questions and our technical team have been working hard to respond to these. As with any new system, we anticipated some teething problems and we expect that these will be minimal from this point forwards as students should all now have logged in and are becoming more familiar with how to use Google Classroom.

The aim of Google Classroom is to ensure students have some form of learning that they can access daily. We have advised students to follow their normal timetable simply to contribute to a basic routine and to try and make learning/working manageable (Currently: Week 2 Thursday). All teachers have been asked to ensure materials are there to complete and access the day before the lesson. If there are quite a lot of tasks or materials within a subject class we have asked teachers to ensure that these are titled with the date/day so students know which work to complete and when, instead of thinking that they have to complete everything at once. 

Some of you may have received an email(s) to inform you that your child had not accessed Google Classroom, learning materials or submitted work. I apologise if this has caused any upset to students because they have spent time working through and completing materials and for some reason this has not been recorded as submitted. I hope you understand that we wanted to ensure we had a general form of communication to parents as an alert and a way of monitoring work completion. For those students who have completed work but it has not shown as submitted, we have obviously highlighted a technical issue which we can then look into. In the majority of cases this has been due to students not clicking on the ‘hand in’ button to physically submit the work. For this reason, we will ensure that all our help and guidance tutorials are signposted again on social media and the website so that you and your child can ensure that all steps are being completed. Should you continue to experience any technical difficulties with Google Classroom please use the website to get in touch and our technical team will aim to respond as quickly as they can.

We do understand that there are some students who cannot access Google Classroom and paper resources have been given to these students. We also understand that some students have been ill or have family members who have been suffering at present so are unable to complete work, and we thank you for keeping us updated about this via email. We know that some families have more than one child trying to access learning and there may be limitations to devices that can be used or the type of device, which may limit what can be completed. We fully appreciate that you are supporting the best you can and wanted to reassure you that many of our teachers are also adjusting to these environments too.

A reminder that our phone lines are set to voicemail so if you do need to contact school please continue to use our email schooloffice@stjohnplessington.com.

As a community we are all pulling together to support each other. Please take care of your families and stay safe. We will look forward to welcoming all of our students back when the time comes.

Yours sincerely

Mr S J Rylance

Head teacher