DDSB@Home Students Start the Day with Campus Connect

Posted On Wednesday November 25, 2020
Paul Reed, Vice Principal for DDSB@Home Grade 3-4 Campus, presented a STEM activity for Kindergarten to Grade 3 students tuning in to Campus Connect.
Paul Reed, Vice Principal for DDSB@Home Grade 3-4 Campus, presented a STEM activity for Kindergarten to Grade 3 students tuning in to Campus Connect.

Over 2,000 DDSB@Home elementary students tune in to the morning broadcasts

Elementary students in the DDSB@Home program are starting the school day with a 30-minute interactive broadcast called Campus Connect.

Students in Kindergarten to Grade 3 tune in every day from 8:30 am to 9:00 am, Grade 4-6 students tune in weekly on day five of the five-day cycle from 8:30 am to 9:00 am, and students in Grades 7-8 and the 4-8 Gifted program tune in weekly on day 2 from 9:00 am to 9:30 am. DDSB@Home French Immersion students are also among the audience tuning in from home.

“Campus Connect is an interactive virtual broadcast with a team of people working collaboratively behind the scenes,” explains Ryan Adams, Innovative Education Facilitator at the Durham District School Board (DDSB). The Campus Connect team includes Innovative Education Facilitators and Teacher-Librarians working as producers and DDSB@Home Administrators are creating the content.

The content is presented using Google Slides. After administrators have added the content to a templated slide deck, the producers click through the slides, play videos, and ask live questions to the students watching from home.

“There are between 2,000 to 2,500 students tuning in to each of these broadcasts,” reports Adams.

Creating Interactive Content

Each broadcast begins with a reading of the Land Acknowledgement, a video of “O Canada”, and a reminder about the Character Trait of the month. “We also include a movement activity and a brain exercise that students can follow along to at home,” says Adams. The rest of the content in each broadcast varies depending on grade level.

For example, in one of the Kindergarten to Grade 3 broadcasts, Paul Reed (Vice Principal for DDSB@Home Grade 3-4 Campus) read the book Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty with follow-up questions about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Afterwards a Campus Connect producer repeated the questions and gave students five minutes to brainstorm answers. Students were then encouraged to discuss what they learned with their teacher in their next period.

In one of the Grade 7-8 and Gifted 4-8 Campus Connect broadcasts, students were given time to write about the most optimistic person they know, using their Character Education journals hosted on a Google Doc. Students were also engaged physically and participated in a five-minute pre-recorded workout video.

Creating Community Engagement

Toufan Arieb is the Vice Principal of the DDSB@Home Kindergarten Campus. Arieb says the goal of Campus Connect is to create a sense of community among DDSB@Home families and staff, “As we build this community through Campus Connect broadcasts, we hope that every morning, for at least half an hour we can all be together for a morning message that inspires, builds character and gets us all moving!”

Adams notes the team has plans to expand their content, “We attempted going to live video with one of our Teacher-Librarians. We switched to a live shot of him in his backyard where he explained how the leaves are changing colours and he did a weather report. That was our first dabble in showing a different way to present, and it went rather well. We’re hoping to grow and add more engagement and hopefully see more attendees.”

You can follow along to what’s happening on Campus Connect by using #DDSBCampusConnect on Twitter and Facebook.