Maybe it won’t be very effective - I’m more interested in given those cadets who want to continue to engage the opportunity to do so rather than try and retain those who would drift off anyway.
Now that the schools are closed and exams are cancelled some of them are going to be crying out for even a crumb of normality. If we can provide that we should.
Plus I’m a post-grad student whose entire world has been thrown upside down in the last week through the effective closure of my uni - I need something productive to do as much as anything else.
What it has done is stifle the creativity of those building solid and robust training methods via other tools under the very loose - but ultimately trumpcard - of “safeguarding”.
Stuff people have been actively using for the last few years to deliver and enhance the cadet experience and shelve shoddy PowerPoint in favour of better classroom tools and techniques. Lots of these people are educators in schools who routinely use it for their classes and experience no safeguarding issues whatsoever - because they are built that way!
Yes the move to a single platform delivered via Bader is good. And I commend the speed with which it’s been it in place.
But I cant help but think its going to alienate people who’ve been all over this - and suggesting and promoting it to the higher levels for years!!!
All these people working from home,
The bbc opening up a special Kids channel on iPlayer.
Schools going to e-learning for some stuff.
Add in people stuck at home bored surfing the net watching YouTube
Then various organisations like the cadets going to e-learning as well
Do you think the networks will cope with all this added data usage?
Or for those in isolation (be staff or cadets, be because they or a family member has symptoms, or are in a high risk group) it’s something else, it’s a bit of routine in the middle of a very long time, it’s collaborative working in a time when individual working is at its highest.
For me it’s nothing to do with retention of cadets, but everything about providing something to them. They are still members of our organisation, their mental health is still important. If we can do something why the hell wouldn’t we?
But there are potential issues - and with people all trying to do their own thing, with the best intentions, it could easily have turned into chaos.
If we can keep to one system for now it simplified a whole host of issues; if there are cases to be made for other apps to supplement Teams then we can do that when stage one has bedded in a bit.
Do people really think that cadets in the 21st century need us to give them something to do?
Our kids are well practised in self isolation and are in contact with their mates all the time, like me and the wife through email.
The question to ask is how many cadets have spent time at home doing all the ultiflop stuff before and do you think they are going to start now? I suppose people can put fear into them that unless they do things they will be treated badly by staff and the ATC in general, in comparison to those who do.
Do not compare us with schools, they have a legal responsibility to educate and will set up what ever they need to maintain this. We are 99% about social interaction for teenagers and in that face to face. I think a concern is that HQAC and all points in between will fail to acknowledge this bizarre situation and accept that some things won’t happen and they need to reevaluate their rules.
I’ve had a couple of emails from cadets asking if I can register them for the courses needed to reach Master cadet - one of the cited the lack of school work as a reason to nail Master cadet over the coming months.
You just need to read the comments on the Facebook-page-that-mustn’t-be-named to realise that there are quite a few kids out there who do want to do electronic cadet stuff. Some have even been organising stuff between themselves.
We had a conference call last night about this and we are getting overwhelming requests from our cadets to keep providing opportunities and engagement to help them through the lack of other activities, i.e. school. It would be completely wrong for us to not respond positively. Our entire staff team are onboard.
Just one small question regarding using Teams. Obviously CFAVs such as OC, Adj, TOs have own logins for BADER etc, but what provision is being made for other CFAVs like CIs who don’t have their own accounts and rely on using squadron general accounts?
As I understand from my experience with Teams, you can’t have 2 people login using the same account. So are we expecting online training being delivered by only those with unique accounts?
The Bader team are looking in to this. They are trying to get it suitable for all and usually take time to test and design these implementations. They’ll be working on this for a little while I think.
We discussed, last night, the split of using one account for the presenter and the second cfav can be invited using the invite tool. It isn’t perfect but it might work for the moment.
We’re starting back next week so we can then review after night one.