
2 minute read
Managing COVID with technology
Coping with COVID in a school presents an impossible set of daily challenges. While the collective courage and resilience of students and staff were the fuel that allowed Selwyn House to deal with the pandemic, the tool that got the job done was digital technology.
From teleconferencing to the multitudes to multi-media Convocations, everchanging social distancing rules forced the Selwyn House Technology Department to constantly re-invent, not just new ways of teaching, but new ways of communicating.
Technology Director Jean-Pierre Trudeau, with the support of Media Specialist Clare Stewart and the IT team of Scott Kilbride, Jasmin Nuhanovic and Herby Frémont, were tasked with building an airplane that was already in flight.
When the pandemic struck in 2020, students returned home from March Break to a new reality: learning from home. “The school had to immediately switch to being an online school and we had to build a dedicated COVID-response website on a dime,” says Mr. Trudeau.
Teachers had to master the art of online teaching while learning the new technology that required. All classrooms were modified to allow for hybrid teaching, where some students watched the class from home on Zoom. Teachers were outfitted with portable microphones and amplifiers so they could be heard through their masks by the students in the classroom.
The entire staff—in fact, the entire community—had to adjust to online communication. “We hit a few stumbling blocks at first, but we got our teleconferencing protocol organized and made it secure and safe for everyone,” says Mr. Trudeau. Teleconferencing also allowed the Tech Department to give remote support to students and staff.
This was a unique time, defined by a demand for distance. Awards ceremonies, graduations, reunions—all types of assemblies—had to be held online. This demanded that hours of speeches and presentation videos be shot in advance to recreate online as much of the original feeling of those events as possible.
Assembling all the content for these varied presentations and then setting up and moderating Zoom reunions with 150 people online at once was a juggling feat.
When graduation came, provincial regulations still prohibited gatherings of more than one-fifth of the class, plus their parents, at a single event. But, through the generosity of Old Boy Vincenzo Guzzo ’86 and the imagination of the Selwyn House Tech Department, a plan was devised to hold five separate but simultaneous Convocation ceremonies in five separate theatres at Cinémas Guzzo Spheretech.
Linked by simulcast to all five screens, the entire class and parents watched as Headmaster Downey, Head of Senior School Neil Banerjee and the presentation party moved from theatre to theatre.
It was a unique experience for the graduates, and a fitting wrap-up to a year where technological solutions proved to be the only way the school could salvage some sense of normalcy while meeting the COVID challenge.
And it worked. The demand for distance may have brought us closer together.
J-P Trudeau received the 2020 Redpath Herald Award for “showing initiative of a creative nature in the organization or planning of some project within the framework of the school.” From left: Matt Azoulay, Hugo Culver and Max Mitleman (all Class of 2021)

– J-P Trudeau