Hong Kong has been conducting remote schooling for nearly 12 weeks. In that time Hong Kong International School (HKIS) has delivered over 200 hours of daily lessons online, across all subjects, from language arts to culinary arts, PE to science, religion to Chinese.
But a couple of Wednesdays a month, middle school students at HKIS push aside their laptops and turn off their tablets. These are Wellbeing Wednesdays, which means no screens all day.
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Skipping the screen: A virtual lesson from Hong Kong
Pulling the plug on classroom time was not an easy decision – it took time and some trial and error. Adjusting to virtual learning, which was implemented in little over two days at HKIS, has required us to upskill, develop new strategies, and consider radical solutions more than ever before.
Back in February, when virtual learning began, we went through several iterations of our schedule to make learning as efficient as possible, and we consciously took proactive steps to make sure that our students, and our faculty, could have productive offline time.
