Section 1
When originally deciding to carry out Notate Create Innovate music workshops, in my mind I had a picture of them happening in person. In October 2020, I knew where and when I wanted to carry them out. I had decided on a decently sized church hall local to Deptford, an area I wanted to engage with the workshops.
My aim with these workshops was to offer free musical workshops to disadvantaged and BAME communities. I wanted to offer the chance for this group of children to experience quality musical experiences and to bring the local community together whilst having fun.
I had already gotten a quote and was in the process of securing the church hall when it was announced: we were going into another national lockdown. Not what you want to hear when you're trying to plan community activities.
With lockdown due to continue for a considerable amount of time, I had to adapt. This led me to decide to move the workshops online. This wasn't ideal: I would have to rethink the content of the workshops, try to stand out from the saturated online world and rethink my marketing strategy.
Section 2
It was time to start planning. After having abandoned many Gantt charts due to the constantly changing restrictions, I decided to settle on a simpler method of organising. For this I chose to create a Kanban board in my journal. This was an easily adaptable method where I could move post-it notes from one section to another depending on what stage the project element was at.
I found this method quite flexible and adaptable which was great. It allowed me to see at a glance what I needed to complete to move forwards with the workshops. In the future, I may break down the elements further as the topics on them were sometimes a bit broad. This did, however, allow me to move forwards with my workshop planning.
Section 3
Online workshops create a lot of new challenges I hadn't considered. The first I had to tackle was online platforms and safety. The platform I chose to host the Notate Create Innovate workshops on was Zoom. This was for several reasons:
I was comfortable using Zoom from previous teaching I have done.
Zoom has gallery options, useful for group sessions.
It has lots of features including; mute, annotations, chat, screen sharing, audio sharing and the hands up function.
It has a waiting room for safety.
It also allows scheduling and personalised links for each session.
To make sure I had access to all the features I needed, I subscribed to Zoom Pro. This allowed me to carry out longer sessions and also cloud recording.
Section 4
I then created a risk assessment, including online dangers and staff DBS checks. I took inspiration from the ISM templates and reviewed other safeguarding areas on the Gov.uk website. In the risk assessment I included Display Screen Equipment Safety as having children at desks and on laptops can cause strain if not seated appropriately.
Section 5
The next step was to figure out exactly when these workshops should happen. Originally, I had planned for the workshops to be over February half term so that children would have activities to do to fill their time up. My hope was that this would increase the amount of participants we could have.
With the move to online learning for children across the country, the question was: is this still the best time?
I talked to some parents and other teachers that I knew to ask about their online schooling and what they would feel the best times would be. Many mentioned that children were only getting a couple of hours contact a day from their school and, even after months, the teachers were not teaching in interactive ways. This was leaving some children with not much to do, very little social contact and a bad impression of online platforms.
I decided that 4:00pm would be a good time - a time when children were unlikely to have school work but their parents may still be working or cooking dinner. I think this went quite well as we didn't have too many issues with availability.
Online workshops were not my first choice, with familiarity with in-person learning, but I believe they were a real success!
Read my next blog Advertising is Still Just Word of Mouth for a breakdown of my online advertising strategies.
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