EPPING: School introduces virtual learning (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

EPPING: School introduces virtual learning

4:12pm Monday 22nd August 2011 in News By Tom Porter

AS Rod Stewart and his family move to Vegas this winter, his five-year-old son will have no escape from his maths homework as his school introduces a new virtual learning system.

Last year Rod, 66, and his wife Penny Lancaster, 40, moved from Los Angeles to a mansion in Epping Forest.

The couple and their two children Alistair, five, and Aiden, five months, have moved back to the United States until November while Rod takes up residency at the Ceasars Palace casino in Las Vegas.

Despite being thousands of miles away from the classrooms of Epping’s Coopersale Hall School, where he is a pupil, September will still mean a return to the exercise books for Alistair as his school introduce a new internet-based learning system, in which pupils will be able to talk to teachers, download class work and have their exercises graded remotely.

The school’s principal, Matthew Haggar, said: “This system means that it is far easier for pupils and teachers to keep in touch when pupils are not able to attend school.

“We have a wide mix of children at the school and sometimes pupils have to be away for a few of weeks over term time. This system sits very well with their time and needs.”

He said that the system allows pupils to download class work, discuss it with a teacher, then have it marked and returned all within the same morning.

“I must stress that this is no substitute for classroom teaching, it is really a new way of using technology to help children to learn," said Mr Haggar.

He said that members of staff at Coopersale were currently being trained how to use the new system which will be available to all pupils when the school reopens on September 7.

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