Beau Vallon secondary school develops successful app |17 February 2021

Home school has become the norm since the start of the pandemic. Last year schools in Seychelles closed their doors for 6 weeks. But since the start of the year, schools have not resumed physically but all students are being given work to do at home. This has come with its challenges and we are all still learning how to get better at this. To cater for the needs of its students, Beau Vallon secondary school (BVS) has developed an application and all teachers have posted the homework. So far this method has been proving successful.

Seychelles NATION spoke with the head teacher of BVS, Philip Morel, to know more about this app.

“The idea for the app came as a result of the school remaining closed due to the increasing number of Covid-19 cases in the country. The school had drawn from its previous experience of the first lockdown last year and how so many parents turned up to collect materials at school, hence, we wanted to avoid all that and minimize potential contact in the school campus,” said Mr Morel.

Through his close working relationship with his staff, the head teacher learned that Sir Danushka (one of the school’s physics teachers) had developed a physics app for his class. “Therefore, as soon as I heard that school will remain closed, I called Sir Danushka and asked him to meet up with me. Together we discussed the possibility of him developing an app for the school with work for all levels. We discussed all the pros and cons of the app and we both agreed that we wanted it to be as simple as possible. I took Sir Danushka working day and night for around one week to develop the app. The app is designed for Android phones only. This is because it is the most common types of smartphone we have in Seychelles,” explained Mr Morel.

“Also one needs to have google drive installed on their phone for them to be able to open the PDF files. Credits go out to all teachers of the BVS for the tremendous amount of efforts in producing materials as per our respective syllabus and being able to upload them within the first week of operation. Teachers are putting up materials for two to three weeks. Therefore parents need to ensure that they revert to the app every two to three weeks for new materials.

“However, the biggest credit goes to Sir Danushka for the quality of work he did within one week. It just shows how dedicated the teachers of our school are towards student learning. I am launching an appeal to all our students to show appreciation to all our dedicated teachers. They are really doing amazing jobs and I cannot thank them enough for without them there would be no Beau Vallon secondary school note app,” concluded Mr Morel.

With this pandemic, many people are coming up with easier ways to reach out to a majority of people and hats off to the BVS for taking such a step to ensure the continuity in learning for their students.

Vidya Gappy