Senior Open Event Success
The Head's Study, Senior School
As we finished broadcasting our first Virtual Open Day last Saturday, I concluded it was, without a doubt, a ‘marmite’ experience - something you either love or hate.
A few hours later with a cup of tea and some brunch in me, and I am marvelling, yet again, at how Covid has catapulted us forward by at least 5 years. Like it or not we have had to embrace technology. Saturday’s Virtual Open Day felt alien with our only audience ostensibly being those girls and staff who were speaking, all of us socially distanced around the Memorial Hall. The buzz and uplift from the relationships you start to build on a pre-Covid Open Day event were conspicuous by their absence.
Yet, it was a quite remarkable event. From our isolated chairs around the Hall we could see one of our hugely proficient IT technicians working his alchemy with computers, cameras, microphones and a panoply of other tech to create a seamless programme for parents and their daughters. Beyond the Hall other staff were watching and feeding back about sound checks and quality. Interspersed between live presentations were a series of video shorts with staff, shot and edited within the last 10 days.
Despite the many challenges it has produced, Covid has, given us an Open Day better than anything we would have imagined this time a year ago. It is hugely exciting seeing what we can do in formal events such as this as well as in our day to day lessons with girls as we move to our Mixed Model Learning with most girls in the classroom whilst some continue to join lessons over Teams from their homes.
Of course, we would all much rather have our full complement of girls in the classroom in front of us. Producing mixed model lessons is time consuming, delivering them exhausting but the power of being able to continue educating our girls, uninterrupted, is phenomenal.
I talked this morning of the GDST value of encouraging girls to be fearless. We too will continue to be fearless in our pursuit of combining the best in technology with our priority of ensuring we put girls first in everything we do.