Why distance learning may not be ‘single-length’
Countless Canadians had an approximate advent of online education when the pandemic closed the study rooms this spring and forced educators to temporarily implement “emergency home learning.” Today, as Canadian school districts grapple with a physical return to the classroom in September, thousands of families across the country have chosen to pursue distance education, but there are doubts left over what that will entail.
In other regions, districts are centralizing their virtual offerings. The Calgary Catholic School District, for example, created a logo for the new virtual elementary school called San Isidoro, in honor of the 7th-century scholar and bishop whom Pope John Paul II nicknamed “the patron saint of the Internet.” Students will not be allowed to transfer between learning and online learning. In general, school divisions, districts, and councils state that families that sign up for the remote option can only end up on user at specific times, such as at the end of a reporting period.
But are the schools ready? Marina Milner-Bolotin, an e-be informing specialist, anticipates a number of challenges, starting with technological considerations for academics and teachers, from familiarity with online equipment to reliable connections to the Internet and devices. Educators will not only want to be informed about how to teach academics online, but also how to interact and compare them online, and evaluate the availability of support at home. “Online education requires parents to participate in a very different point face-to-face,” said Milner-Bolotin, a professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in coaching and STEM coaching technology.
Inconsistency in direct communication between teachers and academics this spring has sparked discussions about the need for a “live and synchronous delivery.” In general, e-learning can be synchronous or asynchronous: everyone connects at the same time or courses are ible on demand, writes CBC’s Jessica Wong. One of the benefits of synchronous categories is that academics can ask questions of teachers without delay; however, Milner-Bolotin said there may be demanding situations, such as internet outages. Asynchronous delivery, on the other hand, allows students to attend sessions at a time that suits them, which can be useful in a family that juggles with sibling devices or between parents and children. Milner-Bolotin prefers an aggregate of the two delivery methods.
However, not all teachers have previous experience in online learning. Sarah Barrett, an associate professor at the York University School of Education in Toronto, interviewed more than 760 K-12 educators in Ontario and interviewed more than 4 dozen. Barrett said he had learned that teachers were not as involved with education on express platforms; rather, they want e-learning coaches and facilitators to be available to them. “They want those teachers who have the wisdom, are qualified, and have the wisdom of e-learning, adding the express needs of the topic and the needs of the age group,” Barrett said.
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Hong Kong reports for the first documented coronavirus reinfection in a patient
A Hong Kong man recovering from COVID-19 became infected again four months later in the first documented case of huguy reinfection, researchers from the University of Hong Kong said Monday. The effects mean that the disease, which has killed more than 800,000 people worldwide, could continue to spread among the world’s population despite collective immunity, they said. The 33-year-old broke free from COVID-19 and was discharged from a hospital in April, but tested positive after returning from Spain to Britain on 15 August.
The patient in the past gave the impression of intelligent health, the researchers said in the article, which was accepted through the foreign medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which has not yet been published. It was discovered that he had contracted another strain of coronavirus from which he had contracted in the past and remained asymptomatic by the time of infection. “Discovery doesn’t mean vaccination is unnecessary,” Dr Kai-Wang To, one of the main authors of the paper, told Reuters. “Vaccination-induced immunity may be different from that induced by an herbal infection.” Researchers will have to wait for the effects of vaccine trials to see how well they work, he said.
Cases have been reported from others who left the hospital and tested positive for COVID-19 infection in mainland China. However, in such cases, it is unclear whether they contracted the virus after a full recovery, as happened to the Hong Kong patient, or whether they still had the virus in their bodies since the initial infection. World Health Organization epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said Monday that no haste conclusions are to be drawn in reaction to hong Kong.’ “So far more than 24 million cases have been reported,” Van Kerkhove said at a press convention in Geneva when asked about it. “We have to look at something like this at the population level.”
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Vaccination effort against Canadian-made COVID-19 slowed down due to delayed production
Despite long days of execution and promising initial results, Saskatoon researchers say the lack of production capacity is slowing down their efforts to obtain a Canadian-made vaccine, given considerations about “vaccine nationalism,” which can prevent you from accessing a non-home product. Fact. Researchers from the Organization of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases-International Vaccine Center (VIDO-InterVac) have been at the mercy of external points such as global policy and production capacity. Now, director Volker Gerdts said that the timing of a VIDO-InterVac vaccine in a position to be manufactured, if successful, has been delayed in both.
Before human clinical trials can be carried out, the facility should conduct further studies with higher quality tissues than necessary for its first animal studies. But waiting for busy marks to supply them delays the process. If the federal government had invested more in a production facility proposed to VIDO-InterVac before the pandemic, Gerdts said, a Canadian vaccine would lead the race. “We told the government, and I don’t need to use that as a reprimand, yet we raised the factor of Canada’s unpreparedness for pandemic diseases for some time,” Gerdts said. “You must have production capacity. He must have the ability to react quickly.”
The VIDO-InterVac vaccine is made from the outer protein of SARS-CoV-2. If successful, it would work by using this protein to trick the immune formula into believing it has COVID-19 to generate the antibodies and T cells that fight the virus. In June, Gerdts presented his ideal schedule for human clinical trials and then production, if all went well: start production in the new year to have 10 to 20 million doses until March or April 2021. But now he expects production to begin in June. 2021 at the earliest. Gerdts said he wasn’t involved in others being able to make a vaccine first, because the world wants several vaccines with other abilities. But losing momentum, he fears, can lead the government to invest in other vaccines that are advancing faster, potentially from foreign corporations outside Canada.
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Manitoba announces $52 million for back-to-school costs as COVID-19 cases rise
Manitoba schools will have another $52 million to pay for masks, transportation and additional cleaning as academics prepare to return to elegance amid the growing number of COVID-19 cases. The new cash “will mean that there will be significant resources to meet the demands that the pandemic is imposing on our schools,” Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen said at a press conference Monday morning. Some of this money will be used to hire more staff to cover the expected accrual of absenteeism.
In addition to filling the gaps created through the instructor and staff license, the new budget can be used to cover additional prices related to the acquisition of non-public protective equipment, disinfection and transportation of students to and from the school. The province has acquired 4.7 million masks for schools to distribute to students in need, families are invited to provide their own mask to students. Today’s announcement comes after a record-accumulating weekend in the number of new COVID-19 instances. Goertzen did not say whether a growing number of sales options like Brandon would require returning to home learning, but said school divisions had already developed plans to do so, just in case.
The union representing Manitoba’s teachers, educators and parents has asked the province to provide investments to rent more to reduce elegance and ensure a sufficient number of alternates and coaching assistants. Today’s ad didn’t mention hiring more to reduce the elegance of sizes. Public fitness officials said students are kept at least two metres away whenever possible, however, existing rules establish a minimum distance of only one meter in the rooms of elegance. Goertzen would not be dedicated to restricting the number of schools in which substitutes can work, saying that the interaction between teachers and academics is not the same as in other contexts, such as non-public residences, where the physical distance between clients and clients is complicated to maintain.
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WHO distrusts the COVID-19 plasma remedy after the U.S. issued an emergency authorization
On Monday, the World Health Organization was cautious about approving the use of recovered plasma from COVID-19 patients to treat patients, and said evidence of its effectiveness remains of “low quality” even when the United States has issued an emergency authorization for such treatments. The so-called convalescent plasma, which has long been used to treat disease, has the last political flashpoint in the race to locate treatments opposed to COVID-19.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Sunday legalized its use after U.S. President Donald Trump blamed the company for preventing the deployment of vaccines and curative products for political reasons. The strategy is to take antibody-rich plasma from patients who have edited COVID-19 and give it to those with severe active infections in the hope that they will do so more quickly. The U.S. National Institutes of Health announced this month that they will award several million dollars for a medium-term convalescent plasma test.
WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said that only a few clinical trials with convalescent plasma had produced effects and that the evidence, at least until now, was not convincing enough to approve beyond its use as experimental therapy. Although some trials have shown benefits, he said, they were small and their knowledge so far is inconclusive. WHO Senior Adviser Bruce Aylward said that beyond the effectiveness of plasma, there are also potential protection hazards that need to be addressed. “There are a number of side effects,” Aylward said, ranging from mild fever to severe lung damage or circulatory overload. “For this reason, the effects of clinical trials are incredibly important.”
Worried about not having enough PPE for a return to school? A Toronto teacher organization tries to help
A Toronto high school instructor and a peer organization have introduced Love Masks, an initiative that takes new masks and distributes them to schools, networking organizations, or directly to families in need. “I know we have many academics whose families don’t have enough mask to wear safely,” said Rachel Thomas, who teaches history, geography, and special education at St. John Paul II Catholic High School in Scarborough.
People can donate home-made or store-bought masks at designated locations, which are indexed on the initiative’s website. Needy families and school staff will pick up the mask at those locations or touch the organizers to have the mask delivered. Since August 19, the day the initiative was officially launched, Thomas said he had been able to purchase 165 masks through donations.
But what about the loose mask provided through school forums? Toronto’s public and Catholic school forums say they’ll be provided on the loose, but Thomas says it’s probably not enough. “The mask will be the new lost glove or the lost pencil this year,” he said, adding that he knew personally many families who were already in monetary difficulty. “I don’t need the protection of young people – parents have to buy masks – [to be] another barrier for low-income families.”
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