MONTREAL -- With schools shut down, many parents are coming up with creative ways to keep their children learning. One Montrealer is helping on that front, designing a website that acts as a streaming service for education.
“Having a child at home, the days are very long and the days can turn into amorphous blobs of time,” said Neale Van Fleet, the designer of Everywhere School.
Van Fleet said educational live streams have helped keep his family on a routine, but it could be hard to track where and when all the streams would go live.
“We found we really benefitted from having things on a schedule,” he said.
With the help of a web programmer, Van Fleet put together the site, which compiles a selection of streams into a calendar, allowing families to organize their classroom times.
Educational content includes conventional educational material like book reading, but also some less ordinary topics like cooking. The site even includes streams from zoos and acquariums which teach kids about their animals.
The site curates 20 to 30 streams per day. One recent one featured a lesson on the stars with Montrealer and amateur astronomer Trevor Kjorlian, who started the Plateau Astro series, which is meant for children and adults alike.
“Monday, Wednesday and Friday I start at 7 p.m. on Facebook,” he said. “At 8 p.m. I go to Instagram and we usually have a little Q&A afterwards.”
Everywhere School isn't the only resource for parents hoping to keep their kids engaged with education. The Quebec school boards and education ministry have also launched online learning tools while Tele-Quebec's French-language educational programming will be available online as of April 13.
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