Education Technology Solutions #78

FOR PRINCIPALS | EDUCATORS | NETWORK ADMINISTRATORS

Issue 78

Embracing Technology to Inspire the Next Generation

Former Astronaut Greg Chamitoff Talks About The Future of Technology in Education

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CONTENTS

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Cover Story

Embracing Technology to Inspire the Next Generation Former NASA Astronaut Greg Chamitoff turned Professor of Aerospace Engineering both at Texas A&M and the University of Sydney reflects on his experiences on the International Space Station and how his time in space helped shape his beliefs around the importance of embracing technology in education to help inspire the next generation and beyond.

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Feature

Learn By Doing Mitchell Leggo, teacher and District Scout Leader reflects on his unique approach to applying his passion for the outdoors to his exploration of the power behind immersive education, prompting students to learn by doing. He has instigated a STEAM group at his current school, led by students on real-world projects. He coordinates the Duke of Edinburgh program that has over 120 participants in this year’s cohort.

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Feature

Bored Of Education: How To Engage The Future Workforce A technology visionary, global entrepreneur, educator, author and banker, Dr Charles Cadle is probably best known for his passionate leadership and advocacy for student success in the disruptive digital economy. In this insightful article, Dr Cadle looks at ways to tackle the growing gap between what students are being taught in the classroom and the skills needed for success in the workforce.

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CONTENTS 014

Interactive Learning

Mal Lee and Roger Broadie challenge the conventional thinking around an education model built upon schooling children for the 1950s.

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Plugged In

Jane Hunter looks at the power of film making and how it is being used to help students explore humanity and compassion.

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Office Space

Matt Farmer looks at the value of the National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP) and what it means for schools.

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Next Step

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Shelly Kinash and Ron Kordyban look at seven essential skills that all teachers need to survive in a changing future.

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Let’s Talk Pedagogy

How are Mixed Reality (MR) experiences changing the way students learn in Perth?

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Professional Development

Maya Marcus of the Innovation and Creative Intelligence Unit within the University of Technology Sydney looks at ways to use STEAM education to empower women and strengthen Australia.

052 Getting Students Out Of The (Classroom) Box With Technology How can educators use technology to get students out of the classroom and re-engage with and learn about the natural world?

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Teaching Tools

Stephen Pinel, Head of Science at Unity College, Caloundra looks at ways schools can blend literacy, 21st century skills and ICT together into one framework.

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Letter from the Editor

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Cyber Chat

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Calendar of Events

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Tech Stuff

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Product Showcases

Get Connected

Dr Carol Skyring looks at ways educators can use social media to build an effective personal learning network.

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EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 05

EDITOR’S LETTER EDITOR’S LETTER www.educationtechnologysolutions.com.au EDITORIAL Editor John Bigelow Email: john@interactivemediasolutions.com.au Subeditors Helen Sist, Ged McMahon CONTRIBUTORS Guest Editor: Jackie Slaviero Greg Chamitoff, Mitchel Leggo, Chuck Cadel, Mitchell Squires, Mal Lee, Roger Broadie, Jane Hunter, Matt Farmer, Robin McKean, Shelly Kinash, Ron Kordyban, Stephen Pinel, Carol Skyring, Maya Marcus, Adrian Kumic ADVERTISING Phone: 1300 300 552 Email: keith@interactivemediasolutions.com.au Keith Rozairo DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Phone: 1300 300 552 Email: graphics@interactivemediasolutions.com.au Graphic Designer Jamieson Gross MARKETING AND SUBSCRIPTIONS Phone: 1300 300 552 Email: admin@interactivemediasolutions.com.au $57 AUD per annum inside Australia ACCOUNTS Phone: 1300 300 552 Email: accounts@interactivemediasolutions.com.au PUBLISHER

ABN 56 606 919463 Level 1, 34 Joseph St, Blackburn, Victoria 3130 Phone: 1300 300 552 Fax: 03 8609 1973 Email: enquiries@interactivemediasolutions.com.au Website: www.educationtechnologysolutions.com.au Disclaimer: The publisher takes due care in the preparation of this magazine and takes all reasonable precautions and makes all reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of material contained in this publication, but is not liable for any mistake, misprint or omission. The publisher does not assume any responsibility or liability for any loss or damage which may result from any inaccuracy or omission in this publication, or from the use of information contained herein. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied with respect to any of the material contained herein.

The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in ANY form in whole OR in part without WRITTEN permission from the publisher.

Reproduction includes copying, photocopying, translation or reduced to any electronic medium or machine-readable form.

Written Correspondence To: Level 1, 34 Joseph St, Blackburn, Victoria 3130 Phone: 1300 300 552 Fax: 03 8609 1973 Email: enquiries@interactivemediasolutions.com.au

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There is a card which sits on a mini easel beside my bed. I look at it every time I wake up. It was given to me a number of years ago by young twins whose surname is CHAMITOFF. On the front of the card are the words “Until you spread your wings, you’ll have no idea how far you can fly…”

Every day these wise words inspire me to achieve all that is possible by attempting the impossible.

We talk about ‘outside the box’ thinking. It can be outside the box of a classroom or looking out of a confined space (such as the International Space Station). Sometimes we can be sitting in front of a box, in a box and with a box on our eyes. The reality is we are far, far away. Well away from our physical location and on a journey we could only ever imagine.

What if we come to the realisation there is no box? Then what? This is when creativity flows. Imagination takes hold and we fly. Is your classroom a box that confines students or does it make them spread their wings?

As educators, our role is to provide our students with as many experiences and opportunities as possible that will equip them for a job in the future.

Just purchasing the latest widget or gadget does not cut it. What are the needs of your students? What are your needs to become a better educator?

Are they one and the same?

Earlier this year, One Giant Leap Australia Foundation was launched.

Its aim is to provide to students and educators life changing STEM opportunities that will significantly influence the future of education in Australia. With a grant from the US Embassy, a fully funded scholarship was presented to the first ambassador of the OGL Foundation – 15-year-old Emily. She has gained a scholarship to attend Space Camp with One Giant Leap in the September holidays. In her application, Emily stated: “From a young age I have been fascinated by

the stars, planets, galaxies, universe (and the potential multiverse), black holes, nebulae, theories, space travel and the possibility of travelling close to the speed of light! My passion for the cosmos has been shared with me throughout my life by my parents – particularly my Dad. He sparked this curiosity of the unknown, through discussions at the dinner table (or anywhere), films and documentaries like ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Wonders Of The Universe’ and through many books.”

Joining Emily on the tour, will be Year 5 primary students Maya and Shravya from Western Sydney. They are the inaugural recipients of the One Giant Leap/CAE STEM Inspiration Scholarships. They too have gained full scholarships to attend Space Camp with One Giant Leap Australia.

Maya has always wanted to be a pilot and Shravya wants to be a great role model and school captain next year. You can see their videos on www.onegiantleapaustralia.com.

These are shining examples of what the students of today are capable of, both now and as they prepare to take their place in the workforce of tomorrow.

They will be invited to contribute to a future edition of this magazine to share the impact of the OGL Foundation program and where it is leading them.

Professor Chamitoff told me: One of the most important contributions an astronaut actually makes during their career is to inspire the next generation.

I believe this is also true of educators and it is my mission to ensure that the One Giant Leap Australia Foundation does just that.

So – maybe we are all astronauts!

Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can fly.

Regards, JACKIE SLAVIERO Guest Editor

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shaping tomorrow with you EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 07

REGULAR

C Y

CYBER CHAT

Internet Cybersafety

| By Adrian Kumic |

With so much to see and do on the Internet, it is easy to neglect one of the most important aspects of traversing the World Wide Web – cybersafety.

While most sites and emails purport to be legitimate, how can users be sure?

In recent years, online crime has become the biggest growth industry in the world, and this trend is expected to continue. It has been estimated that the cost to the global community will be in excess of $2 trillion by 2019 and this is only in relation to what is detected and reported. In 2015 alone, there were over 1.5 million cyberattacks, which breaks down to over 4,000 cyberattacks every day.

These attacks include ‘phishing’ (emails pretending to be from trusted companies in order to collect personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers), ransomware (a type of malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid) and virus infection (software designed to corrupt data on a computer).

Whilst the use of various antivirus and malware detection programs should be regarded as a bare minimum in order to protect users online, nothing beats learning about and being aware of

the threats that are lurking out there in cyberspace.

The United States Air Force Association developed a program called CyberPatriot, which includes a number of smaller programs designed to inspire students towards careers in cybersecurity, or other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

One of these programs is called the Elementary School Cyber Education Initiative, which was designed to: • engage students in learning about careers in cybersecurity and other STEM disciplines • help students understand the importance of cybersecurity • introduce students to cybersecurity principles • equip students to better protect themselves on the Internet.

My two children, aged 12 and 15, have completed the Introduction to Cybersecurity Principles component of this program and in just a short time they were able to describe the dos and don’ts of cybersecurity, and what a virus, a Trojan and ‘worms’ are. This course also included the basic principles of who it was okay to

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share information with, and teaches ethics by using everyday scenarios not uncommon to the school environment.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have grown in popularity in recent years. Whilst these sites have made it so much easier to stay in touch with loved ones both near and far, they have also attracted the attention of cybercriminals. A majority of people using these social media platforms have been lulled into a false sense of security and carelessly post sensitive information about themselves – creating a virtual goldmine of information for cyber thieves, who often bait these users with disguised links to offers which are hard to distinguish from legitimate ones.

Though the Internet can be fraught with pitfalls and traps for the unwary, with a little bit of forethought and care, it can also be a fun and educational experience. It has definitely made the world a smaller but much more interesting place.

And remember – stay safe out there…

ETS

Adrian Kumic is an experienced computer forensic investigator working for the Australian Government.

P a r t o f t h e F l i p p e d L e a r n i n g 3 . 0 W o r l d To u r

Friday 20 and Saturday 21 October 2017 | Inaburra School, Sydney

This conference is part of the Flipped Learning 3.0 World Tour. There are big changes on the road ahead for teachers, education leaders and administrators. Attend to get a wake-up call and a Flipped Learning 3.0 roadmap combined.

Break-out sessions will focus on: • A beginner stream • Making flipped resources • Pedagogy and best practice • Subject specific • Experienced Flippers Stream • Assessment • Scaling up • Research • Flip a lesson • What happens at home The Masterclass Program includes the full conference program PLUS another 6 hours dedicated to specially designed Masterclass sessions. Masterclass sessions target mastery level and offer you an extended conference experience.

Keynote 1: Jon Bergmann IT’S TIME: Flip or Flop – 3 forces turning schools upside down, whether we’re ready or not

Keynote 2: Joel Speranza

Keynote 3: Errol St.Clair Smith

From Talkies to YouTube, the power of the Moving Image finally realised

What’s Next? – introduce new ideas without losing your mind, credibility or your job

Australian Professional Standards for Teachers For all States and Territories: This conference addresses the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

2.6.2 – Information and communication technology (ICT) 3.3.2 – Use teaching strategies 6.2.2 – Engage in professional learning and improve practice 2.1.2 – Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area (ICT) 3.4.2 – Select and use resources 4.5.2 – Use ICT safely, responsibly and ethically 6.3.2 – Engage with colleagues and improve practice In addition: Attending FlipCon Australia will contribute 10.25 hours (16.25 hours if you attend the Masterclass) of QTC Registered PD addressing 2.6.2; 3.3.2; 6.2.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.

PRESENTED BY: Contact Us: flipconaus@iwb.net.au

For more information about costs, program options and how to register go to: flipconaus.com EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 09

REGULAR

EVENTS CALENDAR EduTECH 2017 8–9 June 2017 Sydney Convention Centre EduTECH is Australasia’s largest annual education technology conference and exhibition. In 2017, EduTECH will host eight conferences, eight masterclasses, 8,000+ attendees, an official event dinner for 800 guests, 250+ exhibitors and free seminars for exhibition visitors.

EduTECH is the only event that brings together the entire education and training sector (primary, secondary, tertiary and workplace learning) plus libraries, government, suppliers and world-renowned speakers all under one roof.

As a delegate, you can choose from one of eight conferences designed for your role, ensuring you get the most out of your professional development investment. Furthermore, EduTECH works with industry to subsidise registration costs to make the conference an affordable and accessible investment in your learning.

• Access the very best speakers from Australia and around the world.

• Share ideas, successes and challenges.

• Discuss, debate and take away implementable outcomes.

• This is a second-to-none networking opportunity.

• Tailor-make your own experience and choose from eight large congresses, with multiple streams, plus focused breakout sessions, masterclasses and interactive exhibition seminars and displays (not to mention hours of networking functions).

• See what is on offer and save time by meeting with suppliers in one place, at one time.

▪ For more information, please visit www.edutech.net.au

FlipCon NZ 2017 with Jon Bergmann 23–24 June 2017 Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, Wellington NZ FlipCon NZ 2017 is an international conference embracing Flipped Learning. Emerging and established flipped educators will want to attend this concentrated, high touch, handson conference.

If you have no prior experience in flipping a class or school, the beginner track could be for you. However you will still get a great deal out of any other concurrent session, so don’t be afraid to choose from there too.

If you have been flipping your class you can choose from a range of tracks including Flip a Lesson, Making Flipped Resources, Assessment, What happens at home, Pedagogy and Best Practices, Scaling, Research or one of the Spotlight sessions.

If you have reached or would like to reach Mastery level you can select the Masterclass option, an extended conference experience.

Further information about FlipCon NZ can be found at www.ereg.me/ FlipConNZ

ISTE 2017 25–28 June 2017 San Antonio, USA Differentiate your learning Unbelievable things happen at the ISTE Conference & Expo. Groundbreaking ideas are shared, new learning technologies are unveiled and collaborations form that will impact classrooms everywhere. Claim your seat at the table among education’s most innovative change agents. You’ll have more than 1,000 opportunities to

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create the learning path that works best for you and covers what’s important to you. Want to learn by doing? Check out a BYOD. Want to ask questions of the presenters? Attend an interactive lecture. Need to get really hands on?

Join us in a playground!

For more information visit https://conference.iste.org/2017/

Leading A Digital School Conference 2017 17–19 August 2017 QT Hotel, Gold Coast The Leading a Digital School Conference 2017 is about driving and growing the inspirational and sound educational use of digital technology in your school to give your students a competitive advantage. The conference will appeal to school leaders, leadership teams and classroom teachers who lead.

Program Overview Keynote Address – Day 1: Breaking down silos: creating a culture of innovation.

Keynote Address – Day 2: Growing a culture of innovation.

Keynote Address – Day 3: Our Disruptive Journey with Digital and Design Learning.

To effectively lead a digital school, two critical ingredients must be readily accessible to the leader: • an understanding of how to lead staff to achieve superior digital technology outcomes • an understanding of the exciting yet crowded digital technology product space and the ways this can best be employed to advance teaching and learning.

The Leading a Digital School Conference addresses both of these critical ingredients ensuring that it

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REGULAR

EVENTS CALENDAR

The Education Show

Drilling down to best digital classroom practice – using digital technology is no longer an option for a teacher.

Of course, as a teacher, you are no doubt using some digital technology in your classroom for the benefit of your students. But on a scale of 1 to 10 where do you sit? How far do you still have to challenge yourself to be the best teacher you can be, using digital technology in effective ways that improve your teaching and your students’ learning? Time to “drill down” to become an accomplished digital practitioner in your classroom! The K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference will help you do that.

1–2 September 2017 Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

Visit www.ereg.me/K12DCP for more information.

rightfully takes its place as “no ordinary digital technology conference”.

Three perspecitves on leadership will be explored over the three big days; Leading from the Top, The Beautiful Synergy (leadership teams combining somewhere in the middle) and Leading from the Grassroots.

For all States and Territories this conference addresses the following Professional Standards for Teachers: 2.6.2, 3.3.2, 6.2.2, 2.1.2, 3.4.2, 4.5.2, 6.3.2.

Visit www.ereg.me/digital17 for more information.

The Education Show is a key event of The National Education Summit which draws principals, school leaders, business managers and educators from K–12.

For more information on the National Education Summit please visit nationaleducationsummit.com.au

K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference 1–2 September 2017 Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre The K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference explores best digital classroom practice to achieve superior teaching and learning outcomes. This exciting event, now in its second year, is part of the National Education Summit.

EduTECH Africa 2017 3–4 October Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg

FlipCon Australia 2017 with Jon Bergmann 20–21 October 2017 Inaburra School, Sydney FlipCon Australia 2017 is a national conference embracing Flipped Learning. Emerging and established flipped educators will want to attend this concentrated, high touch, handson conference.

If you have no prior experience in flipping a class or school, the beginner track could be for you. However you will still get a great deal out of any other concurrent session so don’t be afraid to choose from there too.

If you have been flipping your class for a while now you can choose from a wide range of tracks and Spotlight sessions, many choices to suit every level.

If you have reached or would like to reach Mastery level you can select the Masterclass option, an extended conference experience.

EduTECH Africa will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa in October 2017. With 1000s of visitors in attendance at our 2015 and 2016 events, EduTECH Africa is the symbol of just how much potential Africa holds for technology, innovation and implementation in the classroom.

EduTECH Africa is where all aspects of education are brought together to deliver greater learning outcomes for learners in all environments.

Sessions will focus on: • a beginner stream • making flipped resources • pedagogy and best practice • subject specific • mastery • assessment • scaling up • research • flip a lesson • what happens at home.

For more information visit www. terrapinn.com/exhibition/edutechafrica

Further information about FlipCon Australia 2017 can be found at www.ereg.me/FlipConAUS17

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interactivelearning

A Curriculum For A Socially Networked Society

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| By Mal Lee and Roger Broadie | This article will hopefully challenge the conventional thinking – that of schooling children for the 1950s. All schools should, in their teaching today, be guided by a curriculum for a digital and socially networked society, where the young are in essence being schooled 24/7/365.

Ideally, schools need a curriculum that is current, appropriate to the school’s situation, which readily accommodates continual rapid, uncertain change and school differences, is apposite for socially networked learning, that increasingly integrates the in- and out-of-school teaching and which readies each child to thrive in a seemingly chaotic, ever-evolving digital and socially networked world. That said, the curriculum should also continue to address core learning of the type fleshed

by Pellegrino and Hilton in Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century (2012) and the values and human rights of contemporary society.

Crucially, schools will want a curriculum where teaching and learning can happen anywhere, anytime, in context in the socially networked world, and not as per the current situation, which is fixated on learning within a physical site, within a restricted timeframe, and which disregards learning and teaching occurring outside the school walls. Upper secondary students should be able to build upon their out-ofschool learning and be able to receive part of their teaching outside the classroom, in context, collaborating with the likes of start-ups, international aid agencies, tertiary faculties, theatre companies, digital marketers, hospitality, fashion houses or automotive electricians.

Allied is the necessity of providing guidance for all teachers, as they work evermore collaboratively in the 24/7/365 development of children’s cognitive, inter- and intrapersonal competencies (Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012). While the focus of the curriculum should rightly be on the professional teacher and the critical intensive teaching that occurs within the

school walls, the curriculum should also guide all those who assist to educate the young, be they the children themselves, the parents, carers, grandparents, the community mentors, or local businesses and service groups. Teaching and the curriculum should be intertwined, with the students’ needs guiding all. As schools distribute the control of teaching and learning, and work to enhance the contribution of volunteers, so the latter teachers will need instructional guidance.

The vast majority of parents would benefit from schools providing somewhat more curriculum direction and support than what is currently provided.

In looking to provide that curriculum, it is vital that schools and government understand that schools will need to: be genuinely committed to collaboration with their homes and communities, other schools and professional associations to be a successful networked school community develop and enact a digital, networked mindset have a supportive digital ecosystem and culture have the agency and agility to design, implement and assess curriculum that is relevant and meaningful for their context, by responding to and shaping societal and technological changes recognise that in an evolving socially networked society where the young learn 24/7/365, much of that learning – and teaching – will be seemingly chaotic, nonlinear, synergistic, naturally yielding often unintended benefits address equity issues regarding access to, participation and outcomes of its students in relation to technologies and learning

1 2 3 4 5 6

All are vital preconditions.

In brief, schools need to be ready to successfully teach to a curriculum for a socially networked society. Critically, that curriculum should be delivered by

a school that is digitally based, socially networked and which has an ecosystem and culture that naturally promotes and supports a 24/7/365 mode of schooling. It is near impossible to teach to a curriculum that seeks to empower the young, promote risk taking, creativity, innovation, critical thinking, reflection, agility, social networking, teamwork and collaboration in a school that is risk averse, site fixated, micromanaged, tightly controlled and where the curriculum is dated and the students are disempowered. Even the greatest of teachers will struggle to provide a 24/7/365 education in the latter environment.

Michio Kaku rightly observed at the 2016 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference that most schools, by their very nature, are still geared to educating the young for the 1950s (Nagel, 2016). It is impossible – despite the government and bureaucratic spin – for the traditional, centrally developed national and provincial curricula to provide schools a current and appropriate curriculum for a rapidly evolving, socially networked world.

Their development invariably takes years of committee work and, as such, they are dated well before implementation and antiquated by their next revision. They are a product of a world of constancy, continuity and government desire for control.

They are designed on the dated belief that all schools are the same, and will remain so for years to come. Schools at significantly different evolutionary stages (Lee & Broadie, 2016), offering appreciably different modes of schooling, are expected to gain guidance and direction from the one document. Schools that have normalised the whole-school use of digital and which are building upon the digital competencies their students bring to every classroom are expected to follow the same technology curriculum as those paperbased schools where the children are obliged to ‘learn’ how to use computers in the lab.

Globally, education authorities continue to ready the curriculum for their particular

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interactivelearning

bailiwick, their own patch of the world, very often strongly swayed by the government of the day. Little or no thought is given to the reality of the socially networked world or ever-evolving complex adaptive systems where geographic boundaries matter little as both the schools and their instructional programs naturally evolve in a remarkably common manner globally. The young are learning and being taught, whether the authorities like it or not, in a boundaryless socially networked world over which governments have limited control.

It is little wonder that the early adopter digital schools globally have chosen to largely disregard the ‘official’ curriculum and work with like-minded schools worldwide in the design of their own.

At first glance, it could be argued that the various education authorities could, in time, particularly if they adopted a digital mindset, produce a curriculum for 24/7/365 schooling. Leaving aside the inherent inability of bureaucracies to accommodate rapid change, there is also the telling reality that schools cannot hope to successfully use a 24/7/365 curriculum until the school has readied a supportive higher order digitally based ecosystem and culture, where all within the school’s community are ready to collaborate in advancing that mode of teaching.

All can see the folly of governments trying to impose a 24/7/365 socially networked curriculum on insular, inward-looking schools unwilling to genuinely collaborate with their communities, to distribute the control of teaching and learning, to network and which are lacking the digital infrastructure and processes critical for ready collaboration.

In brief, a sizeable proportion of the schools would be unwilling or unable to work with such a curriculum.

The key is to recognise that schools, even within the one authority, are at different evolutionary stages (Lee & Broadie, 2016), to understand that those differences are on trend to grow at pace and to endorse the lead of the pathfinder schools and formally support school-based curriculum design.

By all means, provide a system and national guides for the various areas of learning, and matrices suggesting which teachers might best teach what attributes,

but understand in the curriculum design that schools will never be the same again; each is unique and should shape its own curriculum. Of note is that, globally, many professional associations already provide these guides.

While some might recoil While some might recoil at the mere at the mere idea of a idea of a school-based curriculum and school-based curriculum student assessment, remember that and student assessment, there are education authorities that have remember that there are been successfully using school-based education authorities that curriculum, and indeed school-based have been successfully using school-based student assessment, for generations. curriculum, and indeed school-based student assessment, for the 80 percent plus of learning time generations. Empowering of professionals available to the young outside the school and the expectation for them to provide walls are that much more critical. Largely instructional leadership is not new. unwittingly, schooling has in its formalising Helbing, in discussing the impact of of the curriculum in the 20th century the Digital Revolution (Helbing, 2014), created highly insular, dated learning made the telling observation that the institutions, largely removed from the real accelerating pace of organisational world. It is time to heed Dewey’s advice, evolution and transformation, and the to re-establish the connection and to inability of bureaucracies to handle that create schools and provide a curriculum change, obliges the societal adoption of appropriate for a rapidly evolving, socially self-regulating units that have the agility to networked society. ETS thrive with the ongoing change, seeming chaos and uncertainty. The pathfinder The authors would like to acknowledge schools have adapted to that reality. the support and advice given by Professor Glenn Finger (Griffith University) and Conclusion Greg Whitby (Executive Director Catholic In writing this article, it is not expected that Education Diocese of Parramatta) in the most education authorities or governments preparation of this article. will relinquish their control over the curriculum at any time in the near future.

For a full list of references, email It is definitely not expected that most will info@interactivemediasolutions.com.au cede their control of student assessment and adopt procedures consonant with a Mal Lee is a former director of schools, school-based curriculum. secondary college principal, technology What they could do is revisit the warning company director, and now, author and John Dewey, one of the world’s great educational consultant. He has written educators, offered in Democracy and extensively on the impact of technology Education (1966) a century ago: “As formal and the evolution of schooling. teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split Roger Broadie has wide experience between the experience gained in more helping schools get the maximum direct associations and what is acquired impact on learning from technology. He in school. This danger was never greater is the Naace Lead for the 3rd Millennium than at the present time, on account of Learning Award. In his 30-plus years of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of working at the forefront of technology knowledge and technical modes of skill.” in education he has worked with a huge All this time later, his concerns about range of leading schools, education society disregarding the ‘more direct organisations and policymakers in the associations’, the informal learning, and United Kingdom and Europe.

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Learn By Doing | By Mitchell Leggo | Now in my 20th year involved with the scouting movement, I stop to reflect upon how this period has impacted upon me as a person. In doing so, I have found that scouting, particularly my time as a leader, has significantly influenced my approach to the classroom and interaction with students. The design of activities, approach to assessment and my interpretation of the syllabus returns to the key tenet of modern scouting – youth led, adult supported. Taking this attitude has improved the quality of my science teaching.

At its core, scouting takes the educational approach of learn, do, teach. Initially, scouts are challenged to learn a new skill, be it a new knot, the use of a compass or how to change the mantle on a gas lantern. Once this skill has been developed, scouts are then asked to demonstrate this skill for their leader.

Having now validated their learning, scouts, to achieve their final award, must pass this knowledge onto younger scouts beginning their journeys, teaching them the skill. It is here that lies the genius of the method. Youth are empowered to take control of their own learning. They are in the driver’s seat.

How does this aid in the learning process? This takes three forms: • A student (scout) that sees the relevance of the learning is more likely to engage with the task.

• A student that is in control of the learning has ownership of it and is more likely to access the learning, internalising the skill or outcome.

• A student that teaches another is challenged to review his learning, self-assessing as he goes, modifying and reworking his knowledge to communicate its components.

Take a look at this process in action. The final challenge to a scout is his adventurer expedition, a three-day unassisted hike in unfamiliar terrain; quite a task for a 14-year-old. The journey to this point is one of learning. A pioneer scout plans his first overnight hike with his patrol leader, a mentor who is most likely finalising his own award scheme. Through this process, the patrol leader is refining his own expedition skills while imparting knowledge to his pioneer. Having passed pioneer, the now explorer scout demonstrates his skills to his scout leader, independently planning their second overnight hike and leading a patrol through the expedition. Having now reached the end of his journey, the scout is now in the position to pass on his skills to others while undertaking his final unassisted expedition.

The process of learn, do, teach guides the scout through his journey, gradually progressing the level of skills in targeted areas, but also expanding upon the independence of the developing young person. This model generates young leaders and fosters a maturity that cannot be achieved through rote, guided learning.

Transferring this philosophy initially to a school setting, I undertook to adjust the delivery of the school’s Duke of Edinburgh program. Students conducted their expeditions on replanned routes, were given lists of required equipment and guided by staff members during the expeditions. This model left little room for student independence or exploratory learning. Students effectively moved through the motions of the expedition, following the recipe of the award. When questioned why they were doing things the way they were, many students replied, “We were told to do it.” No understanding had been EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 019

feature gained and minimal skills had been developed.

Opening the program to include a series of checkpoints, to which the students were required to plan their route between points, introduced student ownership of the expedition.

Furthermore, students were divided back into patrols from which to plan their menus, camping and equipment, learning from each other’s mistakes and effectively teaching each other their campcraft skills. Of course, staff continue to supervise these walks, but have now moved into the mentoring role, asking questions of the students to foster problem solving rather than giving direct instruction.

The core business of teachers, however, remains in the classroom, where the ideals of student-led, adultassisted learning still apply. Attending Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, I was shown the importance of context in classrooms. Learning outside a context has little relevance or meaning. It is simple to teach the theory behind heat transfer in materials, perform a series of experiments to illustrate conduction, convection and radiation, and have students recall these again. Although, in six months’ time or so, when students are asked again, many will not be able to apply these concepts to an unseen problem.

If concepts such as these are taught in a real-world context, that students take ownership of, they are able to work their learning into a form that takes meaning for them, are more likely to engage in the learning process and, as a result, retain the key elements of the skill or mechanism.

Reworking the above example into a context of developing a heat shield for the space shuttle or developing the Dragon capsule of the Space Launch System, students are provided with a purpose for their learning. Once again, they are in the driver’s seat of the project, experimenting and applying the set of working scientific skills through a common problem. The teacher’s role takes the form of mentor, asking guided

The design of activities, approach to assessment and my interpretation of the syllabus returns to the key tenet of modern scouting – youth led, adult supported. questions to promote problem solving instead of providing students with the answer when issues arise.

The idea of a completely studentcentred curriculum is nice; however, the realities of a classroom, assessment requirements and constraints of a school environment will always remain a challenge. However, it is not a challenge worth abandoning, it is simply a problem to work through. It is for this reason that we have developed our STEAM group within the school. Through curriculum integration, science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) come together to be taught in a real-world context. Through this extracurricular group, we have been able to trial projects between our faculties and look forward to integrating them into the mainstream delivery of lessons.

The STEAM program focuses upon the skills of each key learning area rather than their targeted content. This has allowed for students to develop their own context of interest in which learning is to occur. Within each project, students are provided a brief, move to plan their response in groups and are finally challenged to communicate their findings to an audience. Groups are formed with a range of student abilities, with students from years nine and ten mentoring younger students.

This allows our juniors to learn their content while older students self-assess their understanding as they teach. As a whole, through their final communication of the project, students demonstrate the level of their learning.

In the two years of the STEAM program, students have designed and launched rockets from the school oval, programmed robots and developed mazes for them to navigate, engineered a glove to replace the functions of a keyboard, built bridges and towers from household items and explored various

020 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

applications of light in a display reflecting a miniature Vivid exhibition. All project briefs were student-developed based upon individual interests, current events or media articles. Initially beginning with six students, the STEAM group has grown by word of mouth to include 54 students from years seven to eleven, all working together in a coherent team in a completely student-led program. I can say my greatest pleasure as a teacher was being informed by one of our STEAM year ten leaders I had not completed my homework of permission forms for their excursion to a local STEM competition.

At this point I knew the program was working as intended – student directed, adult assisted.

Having achieved a functional, extracurricular student program in STEAM, our challenge now stands as how to integrate this model into the mainstream delivery of classes. It will take the coordination of faculties across the school in order to achieve this effectively and an alignment of our individual teaching programs to address the required skills and content in each field.

These are challenges, but the value and richness of the learning that successful results will bring is worth pursuing – developing independent, mature students that have a love of learning and move on to serve as productive leaders and citizens of our community. ETS

Mitchell Leggo has been a teacher for five years and is the District Scout Leader for Yanagin in the Sydney North Region. Applying his passion for the outdoors, Mitchell has begun to explore the power behind immersive education, prompting students to learn by doing.

He has instigated a STEAM group at his current school, led by students on realworld projects. He coordinates the Duke of Edinburgh program that has over 120 participants in this year’s cohort.

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Film As Compassion:

The BEing Human Film Festival

| By Jane Hunter | Blockbuster filmmaker George Lucas once said, “Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.”

In April, students from four secondary schools competed in the final of the BEing Human Film Festival. The public schools were Canterbury Girls High School, Canterbury Boys High School, Ashfield Boys High School and Dulwich High School of Visual Arts and Design located in Sydney’s inner west. In this article, I was fortunate to be able to interview some of the festival’s organisers, supporters and one entrant; verbatim quotes from participants are in italics.

The short film festival is an initiative of parents from the Canterbury Girls High School Parents & Citizens (P&C) Association. It aims to share and promote ideas of human commonality, compassion, understanding and tolerance under the banner of Explore and celebrate what we all have in common: Being Human.

About the Festival Fifteen films were submitted to the inaugural festival, with nine films selected to screen in the final, which was attended by entrants, sponsors JMC Academy, families and the local community. A panel of industry judges voted online, evaluating each film for both content and filmmaking skill. Acclaimed Australian film and television director Cate Shortland presented the awards. Each film was between one and five minutes in length and applicants used a range of diverse filmmaking techniques that incorporated a mix of shots, sound (or no sound), colour and black-and-white forms. Readers can access the film entries at www.beinghumanfilmfestival.com BEing Human was a celebration of the film medium and its parent organisers want the event to grow, with a view to including more secondary schools, students, communities and possibly tech industry sponsorships in 2018.

This film festival is part of a larger global agenda in the www.108lives.org project that “Connects global communities through unconditional giving, facilitating change for the better – 108 lives at a time.”

Parents Supporting School Communities Evan Shapiro, festival coordinator and a parent of a student who attended Canterbury Girls High School, explained the festival’s rationale: “I wanted to do more than just fundraising, so getting involved in a venture that was about supporting people living on

the streets in Nepal was the motivation… developing compassion is the key mission of the 108lives project”. He continued: “I wanted to bring something back from the work being done in Nepal.

On the night we screened the films the audience got the key message. Young people educated us through their eyes of what it is to be human and through a lens of what matters to them… putting out positive messages through the screens they use all the time is important.”

Opportunities for young people to experiment with filmmaking and to participate in short film festivals are not necessarily new in Australian schools and the successful Trop JR held in Sydney annually is testament to this kind of activity.

What remains significant here is that more schools consider providing these types of openings for adolescents to experiment, create and engage with big ideas, and with public audiences, through the medium of making independent short films around important concepts that matter to them.

Where possible, parents in local communities can take the lead in such actions with backing from school leadership and teachers – this is a good thing. Principal of Canterbury Girls High School, Sue Holden, was a key supporter of the BEing Human idea, “The film festival was a unique initiative of the P&C, it has built on the important work of inclusion and belonging that reflects and respects the diversity within the inner west community. It has provided a vehicle for collaboration between families, across a range of local schools, and enhanced opportunities for students to participate in a forum that reflects their interest, skill and capacity in this artistic area of endeavour.”

Learning with Film Filmmaking provides a moment of experiential learning that Professor David Kolb (1984), an education theorist suggests “is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”. In the High Possibility Classrooms (Hunter, 2013) research, Kitty, who taught in a large southwest Sydney secondary school, was a visual arts and technology head teacher and a filmmaker. Kitty made her first film on Super8 when she was just 15 – soon after she left school to start an independent film production company which she ran for two years. Eventually, Kitty returned to school to complete her high school education and gain the tertiary qualifications to teach in high schools.

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 023

pluggedIn Now a head teacher, Kitty described the importance of teaching film as text to young people. “Students must learn the conventions of film first and they only understand this by being involved in the whole process.” She continued, “Digital technology and film in particular is the prefect medium for learning. Students learn through active engagement – they can recap, review and edit – the product of a film brings learning together for them” (Hunter, 2015).

Winning Entry from Canterbury Girls High School In the BEing Human Film Festival, secondary school students had the option of working on their own or in a group – most chose the former. Lily May McCormack, from Year 9 at Canterbury Girls High School, directed and produced the black-andwhite film Humanism that won the debut competition. She spoke about making films as a form of self-expression, “It can be therapeutic… if students are interested they have the option to do something creative… it is a very accessible medium.”

Lily explained the film’s main positions, “As people we have similarities, all humans have emotions… even though we are all different we are in the same world – I tried to make connections to the natural world too. It is important right now when the world is so divided that even though we have enemies there is much more that we have in common.”

Young Men and Filmmaking The young men in Year 10 from Canterbury Boys High School who entered the competition chose to work on a group film, buoyed by interest from their school principal, Belinda Giudice, and local poet and former English teacher Richard Short from the Sydney Story Factory who supported the group to submit a collaborative final product.

Richard spent two weeks with 23 students writing poems as a lead-in activity, and he helped the boys to do practice readings of their scripts prior to making the film. “It was an interesting puzzle the idea of being

Filmmaking provides a moment of experiential learning that Professor David Kolb (1984), an education theorist suggests “is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”. human – I had to make sure everyone was involved so we looked at the Andy Warhol screen tests and that became an idea that would work to involve everyone.”

He added, “Some boys really latched on very deeply – others struggled with the abstract ideas – they remained descriptive but others who worked at a higher level could work with these students – it gave everyone’s voice equal weight.” Richard spoke about the way that film was a useful medium to convey ideas of humanness and masculinity, but there were other benefits, “The action of making a film created a coherent group in the classroom to relay a powerful message – it shifted the usual school mode of storytelling – it made students think about how to investigate a topic in multiple ways.”

The Australian Curriculum and Media In the Australian Curriculum, the Digital Technologies syllabus picks up production of short films in its outcomes as does media education, which forms a mandatory component in Media Arts. Furthermore, in the English and History curriculums, film techniques, critique and production is a focus and the channel is present in key aspects of language study like Spanish and Turkish.

General capabilities in the Australian Curriculum include the essential skills of information and communication technology (ICT), intercultural understanding, and critical and creative thinking – these elements are expressed in content areas reinforced for all students by the Melbourne Declaration on Educational

024 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008).

Industry can Assist Schools in the Film Space Learning that involves filmmaking as a core activity in the school curriculum is an occasion for various parts of the tech industry to assist with providing hardware resources for education communities.

Access to film, recording and editing equipment is expensive and finding ways to be involved in such worthwhile projects like school-based film festivals would be welcomed by schools, principals, teachers and communities.

What started as a small gesture by one parent to support poverty for homeless people living on the streets of Nepal is evolving as a potent mechanism to bring young people, deep ideas, technology and diverse communities together.

As George Lucas reminded us at the beginning of this article, tackling the hard topics is the tough part in making films. The BEing Human Film Festival shows that young people in secondary schools are up for the challenge. ETS Jane Hunter PhD is a former teacher and is currently conducting postdoctoral research in STEM education in the School of Education at the University of Technology Education. Follow her on Twitter @janehunter01 To follow up details of the film festival, contact Evan Shapiro via email info@beinghumanfilmfestival.com

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 025

coverstory 026 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

g n i c a r b m E o t y g o l o n Tech e h t e r i p s n I n o i t a r e n e G Next

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 027

coverstory

| By Gregory E. Chamitoff, Ph.D. | Never in human history has the pace of change been so rapid as it is today. In the 21st century it seems that everything is driven by change, and in fact, our modern society welcomes it, works for it and waits for it. In everything from our politics to our mobile phones, we are looking ahead for the next (hopeful) improvement. In our time, we expect medical research to create new and better cures for our ailments and hope that we can benefit from these advances when the need arises. We expect to get places faster and safer than ever before. The newest technologies of today, such as robotics, drones and virtual reality become our toys, our tools, and eventually, part of the fabric of our society tomorrow. Within a generation, the Internet has massively changed our world. Our children are not growing up in the same world as a generation ago. With instant access to all of humanity’s knowledge, and with instant communication with nearly anyone on the globe, comes a massive shift in our culture, awareness, and the possibilities of even faster change on a global scale. As events unfold anywhere on Earth, most of our species is now engaged and reacts simultaneously. The stock market, worldwide protests, and outbreaks of disease are all examples of how interconnected we now are on a planetary scale. This is unprecedented in history and could not be more different than how humans have experienced life in the past. By comparison, for most of human history, one could expect to learn the basics, perhaps master some specialised skills, and then live out one’s life with very little change in the environment.

Technological advances came very slowly for thousands of years until the industrial revolution. Since that time, the pace of change has grown exponentially.

Today that change is so dramatic that the life experience of our children is dramatically different than our own. It is against this backdrop of change, that we must consider how to interact with, guide and teach the next generation.

Looking down on Earth from the International Space Station, I could not help but be overwhelmed with questions of who we are, how did we get here, and what the future will hold. It’s incredible to realise that the advancements of only the past 100 years or so (since the Wright Brother’s figured out how to achieve powered flight) have given us the knowledge and skills to leave our planet altogether and explore the cosmos.

While standing on the surface of the Earth, it is sometimes difficult to visualise the future. However, looking at the Earth from the Space Station, it is much easier to see that humanity has an incredible future ahead if we can only embrace it.

In the same way that we have explored and colonised nearly every part of the Earth, our solar system beckons us to take the next giant leap and colonize other planets, eventually other star systems and the galaxy. It seems like science fiction, but we are already there. The Space Station is a massive, football-field size, outpost – the pinnacle of our current technology, and is the doorstep to a positive and prosperous future for humanity. It is a flagship of our collective capability, a result of collaboration on a world-wide scale, and an output of our society embracing the change that technology brings.

The view of Earth from Space stimulates more questions than answers, but one thought became clear to me eventually.

The most important thing we can do in our time is to inspire the next generation to create that positive vision for humanity.

Such a vision includes more than the exploration and colonisation beyond Earth. It includes peace, prosperity and collective growth toward a global society with a common purpose. Perhaps the most important accomplishment of space exploration is bringing together people, organisations and countries to work peacefully toward such a common purpose.

Perhaps one of the most important things we do from Space, is to talk with thousands of children around the world, and help inspire them to see that

028 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

they can be part of something greater than themselves and with goals to benefit all of humanity.

After nearly 20 years with NASA, and visiting hundreds of schools around the world, I now find myself in the classroom teaching students about engineering and technology at the university level.

Having accomplished the goal of living and working in Space, my purpose now is to inspire the next generation to take the next steps to create a positive future.

When it comes to teaching, I believe that this must be done by embracing the change and new technology around us. The students embrace this change wholeheartedly and automatically – it is the fabric of their time and their lives. In order to communicate with them, reach them and inspire them, we must engage them with the excitement and power of the new tools that advance our society and education itself. These tools are not only helpful for teaching, they are also the tools that will evolve into those they will need and use in their future careers and to accomplish their dreams.

As a parent of 12-year-old twins, I find myself constantly torn between the idea of encouraging my kids to use technology and the desire to take it away. Concerns about social media and exposure to unwanted influences are very real. The perception that electronic devices get in the way of real-life activities and face-to-face interactions in the realworld is ever present. But for them, the connection to the real-world is also through these devices. Even more, their connection to information and learning is there too. More than once I have seen my kids watching a YouTube video and asked them why they are not doing their homework. In fact, they were! At times, I’ve asked for a phone to be put away, but rather than chatting with friends, I found that the actual activity was programming something in Python. While video games do steal too much of their time, despite all family rules, like it or not, the skills to find information, discern credibility, and learn

Thursday 17, Friday 18 and Saturday 19 August 2017

Digital Schools

Leading from the top

3 perspectives on leadership over 3 big days

6 Spotlight Sessions Breakout Sessions

QT Hotel

leadership teams combining somewhere in the middle

St Mark’s Primary School and Campbells Creek and Guilford Primary Schools, VIC

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The beautiful synergy

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Gold Coast

Leading from the grassroots

St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls, WA

Key Considerations Catering for difference Digital fluency Equitable access Data driven schools Networked communities Parent participation Computational thinking Design thinking Key trends Significant challenges Important developments Social media Smart pedagogies Scaling innovations

For all States and Territories: This conference addresses the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

2.6.2 – Information and communication technology (ICT) 3.3.2 – Use teaching strategies 6.2.2 – Engage in professional learning and improve practice Ian Jukes and Nicky 2.1.2 – Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area (ICT) 3.4.2 – Select and use resources Mohan Program and 4.5.2 – Use ICT safely, responsibly and ethically Dinner also available 6.3.2 – Engage with colleagues and improve practice In addition: Attending the Leading a Digital School Conference will contribute 13 hours and 15 minutes of QTC Registered PD addressing 2.6.2; 3.3.2; 6.2.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.

Find out more about the costs, program options s ader e and how to register @ www.ereg.me/digital17 l l o o r sch OR Email team@iwb.net.au FoSOLUTIONS EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY 029

coverstory

how to use new resources and tools, and to keep up with the advancements in these tools, are critical skills for students today.

Better ways to do everything, and the skills required, are evolving so fast that it is difficult to keep up with the names of tools, let alone how to use them. As a professor with graduate students working in my lab, I see the skills of the most successful of all students. They are masterful with computers and programming, always upto-speed with the latest software tools for collaborative development and design, and they keep informed about parallel developments world-wide. By the way, these are not computer science majors!

The students of today are not afraid of technology or change, quite the opposite.

They embrace it and are stimulated and motivated by it. Inspired by watching my own kids play MINECRAFT, which is an online collaborative and creative game, I recently launched a project called SpaceCRAFT. The idea is to enable worldwide collaboration in creating that positive future for humanity in Space. Virtual Reality (VR) is one of those technologies, like the Internet, that will be transformative in the way our society works and connects. SpaceCRAFT is a platform for virtually creating and experiencing our future, so we can try it out, before we actually build it. The combination of this new technology and the dream of our future in Space has been an electrifying catalyst for motivating students, and since the project began this year, there have already been hundreds of students involved on two continents (America and Australia). In VR you can build anything, and you can test it out,

in combination with things built by others, and in any imaginable environment.

Wood shop and metal shop have been replaced entirely with VR design tools and 3D printers. But the true value of this technology is the collective learning and collaboration that is possible on a worldwide scale.

While more advanced students may be creating possibilities for the future, younger students can be engaged by experiencing them. Whether it is visiting the Eiffel Tower or standing outside your habitat in a spacesuit on the surface of Mars, it is now possible to explore and experience the universe virtually. The creativity that will come from large scale collaboration in virtual reality will bring a new level of explosive advancement (and change). From pictures on a page to the experience of virtually being there, the change for education and learning will also be tremendous and one that cannot be ignored.

VR (and AR – Augmented Reality) have fantastic potential to transform education and the learning process.

These technologies are already radically changing the way we convey information, perform complex tasks, and interact with the real-world. Imagine studying anatomy by climbing around inside a virtual organism, or learning about other planets by virtually visiting them.

Pilots are already using AR to see in any direction around their aircraft (effectively seeing through the aircraft) for enhanced situational awareness. Engineers are performing complex tasks following interactive procedures that appear before their eyes guided by visual recognition of the hardware they are working on.

Astronauts are experimenting with the teleoperation of robots for exploration, and telepresence to perform remote controlled surgery.

For education, VR/ AR has the potential to dramatically change the

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way students access and interact with collective human knowledge and experience. Today it is common to watch a video to learn how to do something.

Soon it will be common to perform and experience the entire process virtually.

Even further, intelligent agents will be able to monitor and guide you through the steps to accomplish anything, much like we follow voice guidance on Google Maps today. The classroom itself is likely to be transformed into a virtual experience, with few people actually being physically collocated. Such changes are coming, and there is little choice but to embrace them and determine how to assure they improve and not detract from the learning process.

While technology doesn’t equal progress, it promises great potential for a prosperous future. Inspiration, however, comes from people, and it is very important to remember that it is the teacher who inspires the student, not the tools. Expertise with the current technology is a critical skill for our students, and as such it must be continually embraced and utilised as a normal part of learning. It can also offer fantastic possibilities to accelerate learning and experience. However, in the same way that the world was changed when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon, we are inspired by the sharing of human stories and experience. Students want to grow up and be like their heroes (i.e. teachers). In the classroom and in the real-world, we (heroes) must find ways to use our advancing technology to inspire the next generation to build that positive future. ETS Gregory E. Chamitoff, Ph.D. is a former NASA Astronaut and Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M and the University of Sydney.

INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS & EXPO

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feature

Bored Of Education: How To Engage The Future Workforce | By Dr Charles R. Cadle | Rapid advances in science and technology, coupled with global competition, are driving new opportunities within the emerging global science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) economy. Cisco is projecting that the Internet of Things (IoT) will account for nearly half of connected devices by 2020. The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that computer and mathematical occupations will be the fastest growth segment, and the Project Management Institute estimates 15.7 million new project management roles will be ‘created’ by 2020. Yet, teachers are losing student engagement at a time when it should be at unprecedented levels. There exists a huge strategic hole in the educational ecosystem, and if the future workforce is going to be inspired and engaged, educators need to re-imagine their methods of teaching.

The gap between what students are being taught and the skills needed for success continues to widen.

In a recent study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the findings highlighted that 93 percent of the employers (non-profit and for-profit) surveyed felt that thinking, complex problem solving and communication skills were more important than a candidate’s undergraduate major. Since classroom instruction generally focuses on content transference rather than using metacognitive and experiential strategies, to enable students to gain competence and efficacy with innovation, curriculum and instruction methods need to include metacognitive and experiential components. This article suggests that a solution to this problem would be to engage students with projects that connect them to opportunities emerging in STEM. This should not only be an important goal of the educational ecosystem, but also a strategy to inspire 032 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

and equip students with the top 10 skills highlighted by the World Economic Forum.

Changing The Educational Ecosystem For STEM education to be effective, students should be provided contextual linkage to bridge abstract concepts to authentic scenarios and be taught to question the further value of existing processes and products. The IoT, voiceuser interfaces, machine learning, artificial intelligence, 5G wireless and other emerging technologies are influencing the future of work. Student skills such as adopting thinking tools for sagacity, learning to use project management principles to reduce risk and as a process to manage openended projects, learning how to develop prototypes to prove concepts, and learning how to make a successful pitch on the value of the project should be part of the educational offering.

The gap in knowledge of the myriad of emerging STEM career options is also preventing students from exploring opportunities that may be more in line with their interests and passion. In a recent study, researchers learned that student interest was the highest rated influence on pursuing a field of study; however, their choice depended on the student having knowledge of that area. Therefore, more educators should be engaging students with awareness of emerging career opportunities as a teaching strategy.

Unfortunately, at a time when STEM engagement should be at the forefront, high-stakes testing and lecture formats are at centre stage, and this is not only causing a loss of student interest and imagination, but it is also teaching students that only one right answer exists for questions. If the goal as educators is to develop a creatively skilled child, then differentiated instruction that fosters imagination, thinking skills, grit, courage and curiosity should be added to the curriculum. The world is becoming increasingly complex and, therefore, the need to teach students how to think and how to use their creative juices to

become the next ‘problem finders’ must be a priority for society. Developing a student’s creative imagination should be a significant component of 21st century learning.

Creative imagination is a thought process which involves divergent and convergent thinking relating to a problem, need, motive or desire, and a person’s creative imagination can be enhanced by context, thinking tools and experience. A creative imagination is reflective and attentive, and manifested by taking action toward the realisation of a creative idea.

Lev Vygotsky referred to imagination as an “extremely complex process”.

Neuroscience research has found that the strength of neural impulses actively transforms thinking and focus. These stronger impulses can lead students to persevere and to take educated risks.

An example of this type of behaviour is that demonstrated by Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver.

Fry, an engineer with 3M, participated in his church’s choir where he would routinely place pieces of paper in his hymnal to provide easy access to selected hymns. As can be imagined, he was frustrated when these placeholders would routinely fall out of his hymn book.

Fry happened to attend a seminar led

by Silver, another colleague with 3M. Silver had been working with various types of adhesives and had developed a version that could be used to temporarily bond substances together but had not found a market strategy for his invention. Fry’s imagination put his hymnal placeholders and this new adhesive together to develop Post-It® notes and the rest is history.

By providing students with informal learning experiences that invoke the use of creativity, courage, collaboration, communication and curiosity, educators can engage and inspire them in new ways. If students practise problem finding, possibility thinking and proper habits of mind, they will become more confident and efficacious. Vygotsky surmised that creation is “always” based on lack of adaptation, which gives

rise to needs, motives and desires. The presence of needs and desires (John Dewey referred to this as disruption) thus triggers the working of the creative imagination. The outcome of creative imagination is a thought process which guides actions and activities toward resolution, and integrates the environment, previous experience and possibility thinking together in a connectionist or information processing strategy.

Dewey also suggested that a person’s enhanced cognitive ability was gained through an inquiry process beginning with disruption and uncertainty and continuing with problem thinking, development of a working hypothesis, reasoning, testing the hypothesis in action and concept formation, and ending with problem resolution and action. Without this type of training, students will not be challenged to remain creative and will ultimately lose their ability to think divergently. Working on project teams builds emotional intelligence and enables students to have a positive selfconcept. Ed Catmull from Pixar offered an interesting comment on creativity: “Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach.

Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.”

The future workforce will need employees who are constantly looking for the better way, who become innovative problem solvers, and who have the experience of working on creative projects.

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feature The Solutions: 1. Experiential and Inquiry-guided Instruction Traditional educational methods are appropriate when developing literacy in a new field of study; however, to provide contextual linkage between abstract concepts and real applications, experiential and inquiryguided instruction can provide a proven prescription for helping students gain understanding and competence. The current educational ecosystem suffers from entrenchment in archaic structures and learning theories. This expanded view of learning combines the work of experiential learning theorists – Dewey, Lewin, Piaget and Greene – to emphasise the creative process from imagination to innovation. For cognition and behaviour to evolve, students must interact with and test theories against conventional thought.

Questioning current processes and products for continued relevance could lead to discovery of new innovative products, processes and services. The process of experiential learning includes problem finding, inquiry and research, creativity, decision making, complex problem solving and competence in the creative process. Project-based learning can enhance mental agility and create expert intuition by enabling students to practise and perfect the creative process. By providing students with fun and engaging open-ended projects that enable them to gain competency in 21st century skills, mastery of STEMrelated content and a connection to real-world opportunities, educators could inspire the next generation of leaders and innovators.

Student-led projects benefit students by allowing them to discover their interests and passion for a specific field of study. The Partnership for 21st Century Learning performs research on in-school project-based learning initiatives and has found that these initiatives improve student engagement and learning.

One non-profit organisation that uses experiential and inquiry-guided learning strategies is Destination Imagination, Inc. This organisation provides STEM

and arts-related projects as informal learning experiences to teach curiosity, courage, creativity and the creative process from imagination to innovation.

Embedded in this organisation’s projectbased learning program are project management principles, 21st century skills development and activities that develop mental agility and expert intuition.

2. Project Management Instruction Learning how to manage a project is important to STEM education and student engagement. How to initiate, plan, execute, monitor/control and close projects is a project-management skill that is valued by industry. Currently, there are more than 52 million project managers, and this industry occupation is set for significant growth as smart cities address urban population growth, as technology disrupts industry processes, as the IoT changes consumer behaviour, as global warming and environmental factors grow in importance, and as the need for lowering costs and improving efficiency become increasing important.

3. Virtual Reality Instruction Benjamin Franklin posited, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

Never has this quote been so true when applied to improving instruction.

Multiple studies have confirmed the learning improvements of virtual reality instruction. The aerospace industry, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), public safety and the U.S. Army now use virtual reality in training with extremely positive results; however, the educational ecosystem has been slow to adopt virtual reality as an instructional tool. This could be due to the high cost, low availability, novelty of the technology and the low number of relevant courses. For example, a recent study over a twoyear period investigated the impact of stereoscopic virtual reality technology on student academic achievement, retention of content knowledge and student engagement. The findings

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demonstrated significant improvement in all areas.

Students could have virtual experiences and learn in virtual reality environments, which could inspire and engage them in STEMrelated opportunities for careers.

Could experiential learning move to the virtual world to train students in STEM opportunities? This technology has a bright future in education and educators should consider the benefits to enhance the educational experience for students, and the potential to use virtual reality to engage students in STEM subject matter.

Conclusion This article was written to heighten the sense of urgency related to inspiring and preparing the future workforce for STEM careers. Industry and government will seek to hire new employees that have the relevant STEM knowledge and the requisite 21st century skills required to be productive in their roles. By engaging students with STEM projects, those that have been bored in school will learn skills that will prepare them to be effective and relevant in the future workforce. Let’s do this! ETS A technology visionary, global entrepreneur, educator, author and banker, Dr Charles Cadle is probably best known for his passionate leadership and advocacy for student success in the disruptive digital economy. He has a doctorate in education, a masters in leadership and an undergraduate degree in accounting and finance. He is licensed as a school superintendent and business teacher, and he holds certifications as a certified public accountant and as a project management professional.

Charles serves on the executive board for Share Fair Nation, the advisory council for the Project Learning Network and the Board of Trustees for Destination Imagination and for the Student Research Foundation. He is an active member in the Project Management Institute, the APA, the American Chemical Society and the American Institute of CPAs.

™

Friday 1 and Saturday 2 September 2017

Your professional practice?

| Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre

Accessibility?

Digital resources?

Digital Classrooms

Digital environments?

Digital curriculum?

What are the big questions?

Digital literacies?

Digital mentality?

Digital technologies?

• A Jukes and Mohan special feature • 2 day intensive workshop (7 sessions) • The inspiration you need to boost your own professional practice Keynote Day 1: Nick Jackson

Elements and approaches to teaching that will challenge thinking on the Digital Technologies curriculum

Keynote Day 2: Eleni Kyritsis Get back on that horse and take that next step

For all States and Territories: This conference addresses the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

2.6.2 – Information and communication technology (ICT) 3.3.2 – Use teaching strategies 6.2.2 – Engage in professional learning and improve practice 2.1.2 – Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area (ICT) 3.4.2 – Select and use resources 4.5.2 – Use ICT safely, responsibly and ethically 6.3.2 – Engage with colleagues and improve practice In addition:

Conference Sponsor

Attending the K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference will contribute 8.5 hours of QTC Registered PD addressing 2.6.2; 3.3.2; 6.2.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.

supporting digital classrooms, digital schools

rs Find out more about the costs, program options teache tcomes m o o r s u s and how to register @ ereg.me/K12DCP For cla | superior o e ic t c a OR Email team@iwb.net.au best pr EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 035

officespace

The Right Information In The Right Place At The Right Time

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EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 037

officespace | By Matt Farmer | Digital technology has had a major impact on school education. Innovative gadgets and tools continue to surprise and challenge, but the greatest potential of technology in education is its power to capture, transform and communicate information – about things, about people and about the process of learning.

Schools can reasonably aspire to having ICT tools that provide a holistic view of learners and the learning process, enabling: • a personalised learning experience for every student • a consolidated view of learner needs and progress, and intelligent planning tools for teachers • reliable and secure home-school communication • reduced administrative burden for teachers and office staff.

Managing information in schools, however, is no simple business. By comparison with the stable workflows of commerce and industry, school education is a chaotic system.

Teachers and school leaders need to make decision after decision based on information from many sources and in many forms to deliver and improve the learning experience for students.

Achieving a holistic view of education data means dealing with a growing number of potential sources, not to mention the trend from school-provided IT products to bring your own devices. Behind the scenes, the exchange of information between IT systems is often messy, error prone and labour intensive. Teachers can find themselves spending a lot of time entering and updating data to get their students learning online.

What is needed is a way of integrating and exchanging data from a growing array of IT products that is reliable and, from the user’s perspective, invisible – an approach that provides the capacity to extract meaningful insights from the countless data transactions that occur in schools every day.

The National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP) was established by education

ministers in 2010 to support the development of digital learning infrastructure nationally and improve access to information for all involved in school education. The NSIP has worked with education authorities and key education product suppliers to develop a Learning Services Architecture which provides a common national approach for schools, school authorities and service providers to exchange and integrate education information.

Figure 1: Mobilising and making sense of education data

Learning Services Architecture The Learning Services Architecture includes a data model, interoperability standards, business processes, data sharing agreements, technologies and infrastructure patterns that are common or aligned across the Australian school education sector. It provides software developers and IT decision makers with the blueprint they need to design or select products that can work together and exchange data faithfully, efficiently and safely.

Above all, it provides a consistent, learner-centric approach to managing and exchanging education data across the range of IT systems and organisations involved in school education.

Information for Learning and Teaching Teachers are working hard to provide an individualised learning experience based on evidence of need, capability and progress.

Learning resources are as likely to come from the cloud as from the school library and evidence of learning exists increasingly in a digital form. The available data includes measures of engagement and wellbeing as well as grades on tests and assignments.

The Learning Services Architecture enables the sharing of up-to-date information from the school administration system with all other systems – to manage the timetable, attendance, network access, welfare, communication and, of course, learning. It also provides for data from disparate sources to be combined, providing insights into learner needs and achievements.

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Information for Improvement Improving educational outcomes depends on the availability of high-quality information to benchmark the current position and to set and monitor progress towards goals.

The measures used range from academic performance to behaviour, to collaborative skills and wellbeing, and are likely to change over time.

The Learning Services Architecture provides a framework that allows for all of the data transacted in the learning and administration processes to be utilised as potential measures of progress and improvement. New data sources can be introduced and new perspectives provided.

Analytical and support tools can be added, interchanged and upgraded.

Managing Relationships Parent involvement in schooling and the reliance on IT-based systems to enable home–school communication is a developing trend. Whether it is updating emergency contact or health information, obtaining parental permission for a school activity, managing attendance, conducting financial transactions, reporting on progress, or communicating with teachers, there are few situations where accuracy and reliability of information, and information exchange, are more critical.

As part of the holistic view of student information encompassed by the Learning Services Architecture, relationships between each student and the significant individuals,

groups and events in their journey through schooling are central. These relationships, which are typically managed through different IT systems in the school (student admin, timetabling, learning and assessment platforms), can be brought to bear to support learning and enable effective and safe communication across the school community.

Good News for Principals and Administrators The Learning Services Architecture is also making it possible for schools to mix and match ICT products in a way that provides data integrity across multiple administration and learning tools and reduces risks associated with data exchange between organisations. If a new student enrols, or family details or class groups change, the updated information needs to appear wherever it will make a difference, with minimal delay, risk and human intervention.

Government school authorities and a number of Catholic school networks are in the process of implementing school administration systems based on the standards in the Learning Services Architecture. This means that schools have the benefit of local choice of ICT products, while still benefitting from economies of scale and data mobility within and between schools.

The Learning Services Architecture is also providing opportunities to streamline reporting of school data to school authorities.

Inside the Learning Services Architecture The Learning Services Architecture is based on internationally recognised interoperability standards designed specifically for school education (www.nsip.edu.au/learningservices-architecture). It includes a data model that captures nationally agreed definitions of education data used in schools and the relationship between key data elements. This not only provides a consistent understanding of what the data means, but also helps to maximise the efficiency and

fidelity of data exchange between IT systems.

The data model, which also allows for local elaboration where required, is maintained by a coalition of school authorities and leading software providers (www.nsip.edu.au/list-sifassociation-au-member).

The Learning Services Architecture is underpinned by a localised version of the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF).

SIF allows for secure, two-way web-based exchange of rich education data, and can be implemented on various levels of scale, from the direct integration between two applications at the school level to fully featured education data hubs such as those being implemented by school system authorities.

Hub – A complete managed environment for data; provides access, security, analytics and all internal and external data.

Broker – A hybrid environment for data; provides access, security and data orchestration, but capabilities such as analytics and business processes are delivered by connected services.

Adapter – Purely local environment for data; provides access, security, orchestration and limited service integration, typically used in individual schools or small school systems where no central data services exist.

Figure 2: Models for integrating education data systems based on the Learning Services Architecture

The NSIP is working with the school authorities and product suppliers to ensure that other interoperability standards are incorporated into the Learning Services Architecture as required. The aim is to mobilise education data while maximising the quality, value and security.

National Interoperability Roadmap The interoperability standards are applicable to all schools and are progressively being adopted nationwide by school authorities,

product suppliers and government-provided IT platforms, such as the system being developed to deliver NAPLAN Online.

The NSIP is in the process of developing an interoperability roadmap, indicating the timeframes in which school sector authorities will offer or require integration of third party products using the standards defined in the Learning Services Architecture.

How to Get Involved For schools that are part of a government or Catholic school system, the Learning Services Architecture is likely to be coming to them in conjunction with upgrades to school administration systems or changes to procurement policy for ICT products. If schools are considering purchasing a new ICT product or making better use of existing ones, they should contact their school authority or product supplier and ask about the national interoperability standards and the Learning Services Architecture.

Independent schools should make contact with the product suppliers or contact the NSIP team.

The NSIP team will be on hand at the EduTECH Expo in Sydney (8–9th June). It is a great opportunity for principals and school administrators to talk with the NSIP and suppliers currently supporting the Learning Services Architecture. The NSIP will also be running the annual Interoperability Challenge at EduTECH. Further information about the NSIP, the Learning Services Architecture and the Interoperability Challenge is available at www.nsip.edu.au ETS

This article was a collaboration between Matt Farmer, Program Lead – Products and Market Engagement, National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP) and the NSIP Team.

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 039

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1. Online Content Curation

Modern Skills For The Modern Teacher

About the skill:

Learning how to quickly and efficiently find relevant and quality information online is a must-have skill in an age of information overload.

Why it matters:

With so much material available online, why reinvent the wheel? The culture of teaching means that most teachers are open to sharing, particularly when they experience success with students, approaches, innovations, curriculum and assessment. This means that there are significant digital learning resources online such as videos, podcasts, worksheets and articles. In addition to being quicker and more efficient than creating new material for every lesson, using the works of others can provide a refreshing new perspective, or alternative view, thus effective in setting up student debate and critical discussion. Teachers’ use of sourced resources can also illustrate the importance of both research and citation of works to their students.

How to obtain it:

Be aware of general research databases and websites such as ProQuest, Ebsco and Web of Science, and practise using them efficiently. While Google Scholar is less academic and discipline-specific, it has a broad reach and built-in tracking and ranking tools.

2. LMS Competence

About the skill:

There are many different learning management systems (LMS) and, no doubt, new ones will appear and evolve over time.

Having a general understanding of what your institution’s LMS can do is important. Long-standing research has shown that most teachers/academics under-utilise the various LMS tools, particularly those designed for communications and interactivity. Do not forget formatting and visual appeal (white space, picture, colour scheme and so on). These elements can make a significant difference in the overall effectiveness and appeal of your subject’s site. Other important and often overlooked skills relate to the planning, integration and instructional design elements which enable educators to build a synergy and seamless integration between their faceto-face in-class elements and those online.

Why it matters:

Understanding the basics of LMS will enable teachers to operate in the modern age. Mastering your LMS will allow you to excel and lead the way, directly benefitting your students with a richer online learning experience. Practice accelerates your learning to apply the host of tasks which your LMS now handles, from announcements, content delivery and assessment recording, all the way to setting up group work and peer assessment. Another benefit of this skill set is that you can become a department or faculty champion and share your knowledge with colleagues, establishing you as a school leader and mentor.

How to obtain it:

Practise, experiment and try new tools, features and approaches within your LMS. Do not be afraid to play a little and get creative and try new features. See what others are doing and ask for ideas and examples from your colleagues with commendable subject sites.

Devote your initial efforts to developing a single site and then use this one as a template for some of your other sites. Take advantage of the training that is provided by your school or university. If there is none, then request it. Many LMS providers offer training, resources, tours of exemplar sites and other supports. There are also online forums, user groups and other communities for questions, answers and inspiration.

Try viewing and participating from a student’s perspective (for example, study something in a Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] in the LMS). See what activities, elements and structures you like as a student to help make you a better teacher.

| By Ron Kordyban & Shelley Kinash | The digital educational revolution continues to offer new challenges and opportunities for those who can adapt. This is a time where changes and developments in learning technologies are both frequent and unpredicted. It is an age where traditional teaching/ academic jobs are disappearing and exciting new ones are being created.

For the 21st century teacher, the idea of lifelong learning has become more important than ever before. Below are seven modern skills that will serve the modern teacher well in this exciting, ever-changing landscape.

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Nextstep

3. Online Publishing and Blogging About the skill:

Getting your voice out there matters even more now that we live along the information superhighway. Whether it is an academic online publication, or a less formal article on a blog, digital media has made it easier than ever to contribute to the ongoing global conversation about students, technology and learning.

Why it matters:

There are several reasons why digital contribution is important.

As the vast majority of information online is created/posted through blogs, this is a fundamental modern skill requirement.

Being able to blog also means you are much more likely to establish a name for yourself in a given area. Blogging also facilitates networking and collaboration at the global level.

How to obtain it:

Start a blog and keep with it. Read and follow others online and keep up-to-date in areas that pique your interest. Be aware of emerging online publishing options and experiment. There are numerous epublishers who are looking for contributors for their online journals and websites.

4. Web-based Assessment and Surveying

About the skill:

The modern version of a show of hands, creating a class survey is a great way to add interactivity and engagement to learning. It is also a student-centred way to enable you to better understand the learning needs of your cohort.

There are several options to manage student responses, such as polls or surveys and online assessment. Many software offerings such as PollEverywhere, Socrative, SurveyMonkey, and Kahoot! offer varying features and characteristics suited to different learning contexts and outcomes.

Why it matters:

Making learning more student-centred is always a win.

Furthermore, class surveys can be designed to enable formative assessment in a fun and engaging mode. Most programs now automatically mark and display the questions for you, making these approaches easy and efficient.

How to obtain it:

See what is out there. Select one option which best suits your class and what you want to achieve and dip your foot in the ocean of web-based assessment and surveying. Socrative is a great place to start for teachers looking to begin their adventure in formative assessment or gamified learning.

If you are more geared towards class surveys, then try PollEverywhere or Kahoot!

5. Video Recording and Editing

About the skill:

We live in a visual world and education is no exception.

Infographics and videos are increasingly popular. With modern applications and software, making videos is now easy and anyone with a smartphone and an app can do it.

You do not need a fancy expensive camera or a degree in film and television. An iPad and the iMovies tool will produce high-quality videos which can then be shared through YouTube.

Why it matters:

There are many applications for videos in the field of education, including making subject introductory videos, videoing special guests, showing on-location shots from industry, or taking a flipped learning approach by using videos to deliver some core content to students before class. For those who have entrepreneurial inclinations, video channels such as on YouTube can also provide an alternative income stream.

How to obtain it:

Barriers to becoming an amateur videographer have been nearly eliminated over the past few years. Almost all smartphones and tablets have the capability to record quality video and sound, and editing software and apps are likewise easy to use and readily accessible. Consider beginning with a small project such as family videos or videos of a hobby and then expand into what you are teaching.

For more skills and understanding, join online communities and forums, work with a more experienced teacher or take advantage of the many MOOCs, training videos and other online resources.

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For the 21st century teacher, the idea of lifelong learning has become more important than ever before.

6. Online Collaboration, Networking and Social Media Usage About the skill:

In this global knowledge economy, being connected and being able to work effectively with others is essential. This would include the use of key social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as a host of other collaboration tools in various applications.

Why it matters:

Using social media and networking platforms are critical skills which allow and enable you to connect, share ideas, collaborate and develop larger and more meaningful learning and professional communities. Professional social media such as LinkedIn also allow you to grow in workrelated areas and engage in professional networking and collaboration.

How to obtain it:

Become active on various social media. If you have not used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube or LinkedIn, then now is a good time to start. Also be aware of other forms of online collaboration and networking within your school or university. Consider social media managing platforms such as Hootsuite.

7. Researching and Referencing

About the skill:

Finding information online is about more than just Googling it. With so much information, it is necessary to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, and recognise ulterior motives (sales, politics and so on). Equally important is being able to properly list, credit, recognise and acknowledge authors and sources and be aware of the various academic protocols (for example, American Psychological Association [APA] referencing style).

Why it matters:

The Internet has provided us with an overabundance of information, so being able to find the right bits of quality information quickly (thereby being information literate) is very important. It is also important to be able to properly reference sources, thereby respecting academic intellectual property, abiding by relevant legal copyrights and modelling practices to your learners.

How to obtain it:

Do your homework. Study and practice efficient and relevant means of retrieving quality academic resources, either through online or face-to-face courses. Learn the referencing system/s appropriate for your industry or discipline.

In a dynamic modern world where technological developments occur at an ever-increasing rate, identifying and mastering new skills is critical. Teachers would all do well to heed the words of Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 book Future Shock, who wrote, “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.�

Modern educators are facing an increasingly diverse group of students who are not shy about expressing their high expectations regarding the use

As the educational landscape continues to evolve, teachers need to be aware of the new modern skills so they can best leverage exciting new possibilities.

of technology in their learning. As the educational landscape continues to evolve, teachers need to be aware of the new modern skills so they can best leverage exciting new possibilities. ETS Dr Shelley Kinash is the Director of Learning and Teaching at Bond University. She can be contacted via email at skinash@bond.edu.au Ron Kordyban is the Blending Learning Coordinator & Blended Learning Designer at Bond University.

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Let’sTalkPedagogy

Heritage Perth and the Mixed Reality Makeover | By Robin McKean | Students today are routinely becoming virtual tourists – entering simulated worlds to experience curriculum content or to have their real world augmented with layers of information designed to hook into curriculum and improve learning opportunities. Is science fiction really becoming science fact or are teachers virtually just travelling ‘back to the future’ as they embrace immersive digital technologies in order to deliver Digital and Design Technologies as part of the Australian curriculum – Western Australia style?

Panoramic murals and paintings, my Grandma’s stereoscope viewer and stereoscopic postcards, and flight simulators (1920s) were the earlier indicators of attempts to fully immerse oneself vicariously in a world both real and imagined. In the early 1980s, I was often escorting students into the magical Kingdom of the Mountains, where six children (sons and daughters of the King and Queen) had gone missing. Students were all captivated by Granny’s Garden as they travelled the realm, solving a variety of simple logic puzzles, spelling tests and maths quizzes. Many other simulations were to follow and, by the 90s, they were even engaging mum and dad and older siblings as well. Gaming came into the equation as students were transported onto a dock in a mysterious world where they were unsure of what they were supposed to do or why they were there and challenged to solve more puzzles and unlock pieces that ultimately told the story of Myst.

At the turn of the century, students got to enter a multi-user 044 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

virtual environment (MUVE) and, as avatars, travel back in time to River City using their 21st century skills, knowledge and technology to address 19th century problems. Virtual learning had acquired the rigour of a scientific investigation thanks to the research team at Harvard University. River City was a town plagued with health issues, and students had to work together in small research teams to help the town understand why the residents were becoming ill. This virtual environment allowed students to manipulate variables to help determine the cause of the epidemic as they collected data, formed hypotheses, developed controlled experiments to test their hypotheses, and made recommendations based on their findings to other members of their research community. The pedagogical bar was raised and virtual learning became a game changer. In time, more transdisciplinary Quests in Atlantis were developed

by Indiana University and a sense of global citizenship was developed as students travelled through time and in different worlds and environments to perform a range of educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. Completing Quests required that members participate in real-world, socially and academically meaningful activities, such as conducting environmental studies, researching other cultures, calculating frequency distributions, analysing newspaper articles, interviewing community members and developing action plans.

Virtual adventures with learning and thinking became an expectation as teachers began to use virtuality and

computers to assist learning, connect with the curriculum and consequently justify the enjoyment and place for learning activities such as these in a timetable that was beginning to bulge.

The 21st century story is now even better. Myst is back in virtual reality (VR) crowdfunding and Kickstarter campaigns have ensured the development of a newer technologically enhanced experience in Obduction. Abducted far across the universe, you find yourself on a broken alien landscape with odd pieces of Earth… with a pair of VR goggles not too dissimilar to Grandma’s stereoscope.

Those collaborative online virtual worlds have made a resurgence, allowing students to immerse themselves in learning environments augmented with layers of curriculum-connected information. VR now blends with augmented reality (AR) and these mixed reality (MR) learning opportunities offer a sliding virtuality scale of choice. Under the umbrella of mixed reality, they allow interactive and empathetic learning and, most importantly, a synthetic link to authenticity that would be otherwise unachievable in a classroom. Entering these realms of mixed reality enables participants to synthesise information, begin to understand, and then use this knowledge to ideate and construct solutions to real-world problems.

Project-based learning can now integrate these MR possibilities and, in the words of Dr Seuss, “You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away!”

The best part, of course, is that students can steer themselves in any direction they choose because these MR opportunities are proving as invaluable in the history, geography, art, language and literacy classroom as in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and Makerspace lab, inside the classroom or outside in the real world and in 2D and 3D environments enriched by virtual tour guides, videography and multimedia, archival information, digital assets and data sets, and audio recordings.

MR is dramatically amplifying the educational focus with Heritage Perth ‘Genius Loci’ or Power of Place

Project-based

Learning

Scenario:

Power of Place Learning Scenario:

STE(A)Ming to Mars

Light up the City

The Spacecraft 3D app starts students

Science Immersion

STE(A)Ming to Mars. In flight VR makes

Students are familiarised with the City of

the journey even more authentic before

Perth tribute to John Glen and interact

activities

with simple circuits using interactives,

from

the

virtual

platform

at NASABeAMartian enable them to

123D

become citizen scientists while getting

Classroom DC simulator and AR Circuits

the

latest

Mars

news,

images

lab

simulations,

the

Physics

and

Augmented Reality Electric Circuit Kit

information as part of a community of

allowing them to interact and toggle with

explorers. Students make their own 3D

switches, adjust resistance with bulbs

glasses and examine the Mars scape

and resistors, adjust battery voltage,

image database in more detail and

experiment with five conductor materials

create a Google Mars tour of their

and measure voltage with the voltmeter

researched top tourist spots, completing

tool.

their first formative assessment tasks

Synthesis:

using an array of immersive journalism

labs and in the real world with squishy

tools to report on the journey thus far.

conductive and insulator play dough;

There is time to enter Kodu GameWorld

paper circuits with copper tape and

and further explore with the rover and

surface-mount LEDs and then take it

the Mars simulator so that students are

further in the Exploratorium.

create

circuits

in

virtual

ready to create their own game before

Draw and print circuits in the circuit

they return to the classroom and use

scribe editor. When functional, print and

Lego EV3s to build personalised robotic

use with Circuit Scribe pens.

vehicles and become spoilt for choice at

Technology Immersion

NASA Mars Makers. This is the ‘place for

Work

invention to be celebrated’.

(CAD) simulation 3D design tutorials in

There is also time to help The Martian

with

computer-aided

design

Tinkercad.

do the maths. The Ares III mission was

Synthesis: create a simple model and

supposed to last 31 sols (a sol is a 24.5-

download for 3D STL file for print or export

hour Martian day). Just to be safe, NASA

to Minecraft.

sent 68 sols’ worth of food, for six people.

Maths Immersion

For Watney alone, that will last 300 sols,

Work through TLF Cities Taking Shape

extended to 400 if he rations. How much

Module and develop student knowledge

will he need to survive?

of 2D and 3D shapes, and the relationships between them. They learn about how a

digital learning activities. It engages the audience, engenders alternative meanings and builds deeper relationships with the historical past, the present day and possible futures.

As time travellers, students can explore in 360 virtuality, augment walks with apps and web-based discovery trails, step inside VR locations of historical and cultural significance, virtually link to historical Panotours, 3D stereograms, Drone’s eye view panoramas and Google Story Spheres. They can visualise the settlement of the Swan River Colony then and now and from anywhere at any time. Embedded digital technologies and digital data sets are creating a plethora of holistic MR learning opportunities around the heritage precinct.

3D shape can look different when viewed from different positions.

Synthesis: Design and construct a model city.

Engineering All of above.

Design Brief: Design and construct a paper or 3D printed ‘model’ of the heritage precinct streetscape or building city or town block and Light Up the City.

Ideate: go solo to start.

Prototype: as a team.

Product/Working Model.

Activities can be mapped to both traditional and technology integrated learning models AKA Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, SAMR and TPAC and the Design Thinking process. They are easily integrated at any of the hierarchical

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 045

Let’sTalkPedagogy

Gamification Learning Scenario: CSI –

Coding Learning Scenario: ANZAC MR

Cold Case Digital Breakout

Story

Students are introduced to digital game

Students

play and the ‘cryptic’ nature of historical

tutorial.

investigation and time travel through the

Students will:

Mystery of the King Tut Breakout. They

• use Twine software to write and

are virtually transported to the Valley of

code a simple interactive historical

the Kings to trace Howard Carter’s steps,

narrative of how WW1 ANZAC

crack the codes, and break into Tut’s

events may have looked ‘from the

tomb.

ground’

To

undergo

inquiry,

they

the

are

main

historical

transported

to

an

will

complete

the

Twinery

• extend their story with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS and

unknown Australian location shrouded

JavaScript

in a mystery of enormous magnitude. By

• publish their Twinery directly to HTML

using GIS information systems, Google

• locate or create multimedia

Maps,

primary

representations of the people, ships,

source documents, and through critical

battles, backstories, medals of valour

document analysis (embedded Year 7

and courage, monuments and

History formative assessment tasks) and

relevant primary source artefacts that

detective work, they have to ‘unearth’

would enhance the story

the mystery and solve the case. Who is the

• embed using VIAR360 as an immersive

mystery man? What is the chronological

and interactive 3D world experience.

Google

significance

of

Docs

the

and

investigation?

How has the crime scene changed over time? What were the causes and consequences? How significant is this discovery?

Students will collaborate to create their own digital breakouts using Google Docs, Google Maps and tagged Thinglinks.

levels of complexity and specificity while augmenting and enhancing that very sweet spot where technology, curriculum content and pedagogy converge.

Gamification in mixed modes has also become a valuable pedagogical tool.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Scheller Teacher Education Program provide a veritable moving feast of wide-ranging technologically enriched learning opportunities. Heritage Perth uses Radix Endeavour for STEM learning in maths and biology, with over 100 quests in five different biomes and students are easily lured to a labyrinth (Lure of the Labyrinth) to participate in a narrativerich, mythological world laced with pre-algebra, computational thinking and maths puzzles. Taleblazer is used to

code Heritage Perth’s own interactive historical narratives and scavenger hunts. Another very interesting recent addition to the gaming repertoire is the Digital Break Out. This immersive digital game-based strategy is centred around specially designed and classroomspecific problem/project/challengebased learning activities that demand demonstration of a growth mindset while demanding resilience and perseverance. These ultra-engaging learning games teach teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and troubleshooting by presenting participants with challenges that ignite their natural drive to problem solve.

The deepest and most meaningful learning is of course achieved at the level where students are creating, not consuming. To this end, a variety of software-based technologies are used by the students to digitise content and design their own interactive scenarios.

They use immersive journalism tools such as Google Tour Builder or Story Spheres to highlight people, the places visited and the experiences had along the way.

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Creating auras with Aurasma, coding non-linear adventures using Twine, Quest Adventure, Inklewriter or Taleblazer, adding special effects with multimedia tools including Filmora and Moviavi and developing VR with Thinglink or VIAR360 are the right fit for purpose at this level of creativity and in combination are allowing students to produce interactive adventures of their own that can be viewed anywhere – in a web browser, downloaded to a PC, or turned into an app that can be viewed through Google Cardboard goggles for the ultimate immersive experience.

Science fiction is now science fact as students have travelled back to a future where digital technologies can make what is old new again. They are in a learning space that allows new things and new experiences to become virtually real and where immersion encourages discovery, empathy and problem solving, while developing a better understanding of time and place. As Dr Seuss would say if asked why we should use these technologies meaningfully, “Oh, the places you’ll go!”

ETS

Robin McKean is currently working with Heritage Perth, helping in the development of a digital learning portal, and as a sessional tutor in The World of Mobile Learning at the University of Western Australia. She is a passionate advocate for the invisible and meaningful use of digital technologies across all curriculum areas. Her digital delivery of the Western Australian History (HASS) curriculum has evolved into a thematic and empathetic thread for the STEM learning activities. These and Heritage Perth Digital Learning Design projects and place-based transdisciplinary learning activities have enhanced student learning and piqued teacher enthusiasm and interest at Teachmeets, workshops and conferences at local, state and national levels.

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Using STEAM Education To Empower Women And Strengthen Australia EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 049

professionaldevelopment

| By Maya Marcus | Barely a day goes by in the media without a new report on the expanding science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills gap in Australia. Simultaneously, girls’ interest in science, technology, engineering and maths study and career paths is seen to be dropping. The number of girls taking maths for the Higher School Certificate (HSC) is at a record low and, despite strong performance in technology subjects, girls lack confidence in their STEM abilities.

This could have a devastating impact on Australia, as strong STEM industries promise many economic benefits and will help drive innovation and productivity. At the same time, technology organisations in Australia are increasingly realising the need for graduates with transdisciplinary skills and entrepreneurial mindsets.

The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australia stresses the need to help equip students with the knowledge and skills that maximise their potential to succeed in existing and emerging industries. The declaration acknowledges the complex environmental, economic, social and technological change occurring across the globe and asserts the value of the ability to use transdisciplinary thinking and new technologies to innovate and solve problems.

It is, therefore, the ideal time to explore the potential to bring more experiential and creative components into technology education. STEAMpunk Girls is a program emerging from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) aiming to do exactly this.

STEAMpunk Girls will expose young women (ages 12–16) to the science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) industries, and give them the chance to apply transdisciplinary knowledge and skills to different problem areas. It will give young women a platform to carve out their own study and career paths, whilst also developing STEAM skills and learning about the array of relevant study pathways available to them.

The participants will have a safe space to experiment with new technology and ideas, giving them the chance to imagine career paths in emerging industries and

figure out how they can find sustainable study and career pathways that align with their passions and interests. STEAMpunk Girls hopes to empower young women to pursue tertiary education and become active members of the workforce, participating in and shaping the conversation around innovation in Australia.

The concept of STEAM provides an integrated approach to education that will help students develop the critical thinking skills, creativity and transdisciplinary knowledge that they need to face contemporary societal problems. However, the development of an entrepreneurial mindset is also becoming increasingly important. The graduates of the future will need to be able to reframe problems and imagine new possibilities in an everchanging world. They need to be able to prototype, ideate and iterate solutions – the underpinnings of an entrepreneurial skill set.

STEAMpunk Girls will draw on content and approaches from the UTS:Hatchery to introduce participants to entrepreneurial methods and ways of thinking. UTS:Hatchery is an extracurricular program that supports UTS students in developing entrepreneurial skill sets.

Students from this program will be used as coaches for STEAMpunk Girls and help to guide the young women through their projects and help to support their understanding of STEAM and entrepreneurialism. They will also act as role models for the participants, highlighting different pathways from high school into tertiary education.

STEAMpunk Girls will use the fields within the STEAM acronym as a foundation for a broader transdisciplinary approach to education. It will use a broad interpretation of ‘arts’ to include humanities and social sciences to help provide contextualised learning experiences that connect education to real-world problems.

UTS’s approach to STEAM avoids creating further silos within education by encouraging cross-pollination with other fields. STEAMpunk Girls encourages students to imagine STEAM education as a space for them to explore new possibilities and develop skill sets and approaches that will apply to all of their future study and work.

050 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

STEAMpunk Girls hopes to empower young women to pursue tertiary education and become active members of the workforce, participating in and shaping the conversation around innovation in Australia.

Research suggests that the solution to improving Australia’s STEM skill gap is collaboration between businesses, government and the education sector.

STEAMpunk Girls brings together UTS staff, high school students, teachers and, soon, industry partners, to figure out how to effectively engage girls with STEAM. These partners are being engaged through a codesign process that positions young women at the centre of the problem development.

This co-design process began with two workshops in November 2016. High school teachers and students came to UTS to hear from UTS researchers about how STEAM can be used to approach and reframe challenges and learn about design thinking.

Students were equipped with interview skills and then interviewed their school peers about what engages young women with STEAM and how it can be effectively communicated.

They brought their findings back to UTS where they were unpacked and the girls participated in a facilitated workshop to help them design the future of education.

The findings, themes and ideas from these workshops have been used to build a framework for a pilot program. This framework will be taken to UTS researchers and industry partners who will work with the program team to develop a five-touch-point program that engages girls with STEAM, entrepreneurial thinking and project-based learning.

High school teachers were a vital part of the co-design process. They identified significant barriers to implementing transdisciplinary education, project-based learning and exposure to STEAM industries.

These barriers are preventing teachers from supporting young women to be the innovative, entrepreneurial leaders they should be, and will be focus areas for future educational interventions developed by UTS. One of the key barriers identified by teachers was a lack of adequate time, expertise and resources for teachers to develop transdisciplinary activities and projects.

Research suggests that the solution to improving Australia’s STEM skill gap is collaboration between businesses, government and the education sector.

Teachers also recognised that the pressure to achieve a high Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) is impacting the subjects that students choose, whilst the teacher running a subject or a school culture can also have a strong influence on what electives girls choose. Additionally, pressure on teachers to stick to traditional models of teaching and follow strict curriculum guidelines are making it harder for teachers to incorporate creativity and transdisciplinary activities within their subjects.

The challenges identified by the STEAMpunk Girls’ teachers are supported by recent literature examining STEAM education. This literature identifies several things that can be implemented to support teachers in implementing STEAM education, including professional development and specialised training, customisable programs, ongoing guidance, flexible assessment rubrics and partnership and collaboration opportunities. Research will be conducted during the pilot program to further examine teachers’ attitudes towards STEAM education and potential solutions to the challenges they face.

The STEAMpunk Girls’ pilot is an opportunity to test STEAM and entrepreneurial content with a range of year groups and schools from across Sydney. It will be a mixture of think tanks and project-based learning that will create an immersive experience for the students.

Teachers will be a vital resource during the program, supporting students throughout their projects and providing feedback on the content and its application to the curriculum. The next stage of STEAMpunk Girls, once the pilot is complete, will involve developing scalable educational interventions that can be run in schools across Australia to empower and educate young women. These interventions will use a multi-targeted approach focusing on high school girls, their parents and their teachers.

ETS

Maya Marcus is the program coordinator, STEAMpunk Girls and Hatchery DIY at the Innovation and Creative Intelligence Unit within the University of Technology Sydney.

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 051

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Getting Students Out Of The (Classroom) Box With Technology | By Mitchell Squires |

With her hands cupped, Mia parts her fingers slightly and peers through the crack. She needs to part her hands just enough to see the creature, but not so far that it can fly away. “It’s so weird looking, what is it?” she asks, full of anticipation.

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 053

feature

One of the clichés of modern teaching is that we need to get our students out of the box that is the four walls of the typical classroom. We often do this using technology, Skyping classes overseas, videoconferencing with museums interstate, and collaborating on class blogs around the world. We often forget the great delight it can be to get outside the classroom walls literally, not just digitally.

Getting students outside is a great way to engage them in building a relationship with nature. There is an ever-growing array of technology available in both hardware and software that can help students tune in to the natural world and gain insights in to life, the universe, and everything.

Looking at the creature cupped in Mia’s hands, it has a narrow, brown body about 2 cm long, six long legs and a pair of long, narrow wings. There are a number of yellow spots on the body where the legs join the torso. It resembles a giant mosquito but it doesn’t have the same piercing mouthparts.

A stream of curious kids wanting to know what it is begins to grow around Mia. “I’ve never seen one of these before” she comments.

This is where the digital world meets the outside world in such a beautiful way. Within seconds I have my phone out, the NSW Field Guide App from the Australian Museum guiding my way. With over 950 species described, categorised and displayed in pictures, it is hard to find a native creature that isn’t there. Scanning through lists of categories, it’s not long until we think we have an I.D. Invertebrates > Other Insects > Flies > and there it is – a Cranefly! The app is full of helpful and fascinating information that immediately satisfies student curiosity on one hand, but also leaves them wanting more.

Is it dangerous? No. Is it native? Yes. What does it eat? Decaying bark and leaves, mostly. Where did it come from? Now there’s a question that will need some further investigation.

The questioning now moves on. “We know what it is now, but how many points is it worth?” a student now asks. Enter Questagame, a citizen science app that mixes Pokemon Go style location-based searching with real insects, birds, mammals and reptiles. The idea is simple – see a creature, take a photo or five, and send them off to Questagame. The payoff comes

soon after, when Questagame experts identify your creature, send information about its life-cycle and habits, and award points based on the scarcity of the creature.

The more rare the creature, the more points you get. Submissions are then added to the Atlas of Living Australia database.

Each year during National Science Week, Questagame runs a biodiversity challenge, offering prize money to the school or educational institution that scores the most points over the week. My students have revelled in this involvement, and taken it as a starting point to learn about all of the creatures in their local environments.

They track the interesting species that they see on a regular basis, making behavioural observations about them, like the family of plovers who seem to roam much further from their nests when it’s wet, or the ladybugs who hide in damp bark on very hot days, or even the praying mantises they track just to watch their swift front limbs as they strike their prey.

The engagement is powerful as they learn to examine the world around them and the relationships of the creatures who inhabit it.

To stoke the fire of these interests even further, a good digital microscope goes a long way. A fascinating find is made even more exciting when you can see the details magnified 40-100x. Looking at the hairs on the leg of a roach, the saddlebags of pollen a bee carries with it, the tiny legs on a freshly hatched silkworm, all open students up to seeing the complex world around us through new eyes.

But it’s not just limited to wildlife.

Technology is there to help students learn about other aspects of how the world works too, and beyond. Teaching primary students about astronomy can be difficult when classes all fall during the day time, with the

that night. Much discussion can be started by pointing out the movement of the planets compared to the Moon, or the conjunction of two of the brightest ‘stars’, which turn out to be the planets Jupiter and Venus. Students can learn where to look and what to look for through the day, then put their learning in to practice at night.

Taking this to the next level is when students want to share their observations. The easiest way to make this happen is through a simple series of photographs, but many students want to do more. A simple app such as Lapse-it allows students to set up their phones or tablets and track the movement of celestial bodies across the night sky.

Many students are able to tell you that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West, but it is not until they do this sort of viewing that this statement really gains meaning, as they realise that all of the stars, planets and the Moon follow a similar trajectory.

When they are out and about and observing the sky, there is plenty to help them get their bearings. The Planets app will show them which planets are above the horizon and visible in the night sky, and Skyview will act like an in-their-hand version of Stellarium, pointing out constellations, stars and planets using Augmented Reality against the night sky.

For those students who want to observe more in the night sky, a relatively inexpensive piece of hardware that can help them is the Galileoscope. A simple to use and relatively inexpensive telescope designed for kids from age 8 and up. The excitement when a student comes to school to tell you about their crisp view of the craters on the Moon, seeing the Galilean Moons of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn is wonderful. It has certainly provided a gateway to amateur astronomy

beauty of the planets and stars hidden away by the bright light of the sun. This is where the technology can again lend a helping hand.

Using a free planetarium program such as Stellarium is an excellent starting point for junior astronomers. The software simulates the view of the skies from anywhere on Earth, and time becomes your plaything as you skip forward to the best viewing times. Just set your location and fast forward to that evening. You have a ready-made preview of that night’s skies.

Students love picking out bright or significant objects and looking at where they will be, only to go home and try to find them

for many of my students.

From exploring the microscopic worlds of insect life, to animal behaviour in your local environment, all the way up to gazing out upon the wonders of distant other worlds, there’s so much to be gained by getting students out of their classroom box, and the tools to do it are at your fingertips. ETS

054 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Mitchell Squires is a star-gazing gardener who loves to photograph bugs, who also happens to teach year 6.

For a full list of references, email info@interactivemediasolutions.com.au

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EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 055

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Bringing It All Together: Literacy, ICT and the 21st Century Skills

056 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

| By Stephen Pinel | Literacy, 21st century skills, ICT and a common pedagogical framework – these four seem to be flavours of the month in many schools, including mine. What is not evident, however, is how schools blend all of these disparate strategies together into one framework.

Too often, the professional development (PD) delivered for each of these strategies is delivered separately, in a piecemeal approach, and in ways that can contradict each other.

This article shares a framework that integrates these four important strategies, so that units of work can be prepared that take students from learning basic skills directly from teacher modelling, right through to collaborative application of these skills against realworld, authentic problems.

It is assumed that people reading this article are across strategies for teaching literacies and are onboard with the use of ICT in education, so it starts by looking at the 21st century skills briefly, with a more detailed look at a pedagogical framework called The Gradual Release of Responsibility. Note that literacy and ICT skills are already explicitly identified in the 21st century skill set used for the purposes of this article.

ICT and 21st Century Skills The 21st century skills have been hashed over by quite a few different groups over the last 20 or so years. Fundamentally, the 21st century skills are those that employers and the community in general see as valuable for people to contribute economically and socially, as leaders or as active participants, and as entrepreneurs in society.

This article uses the 21st century skill set as defined in 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics (2014), written by the ITL Research Group and funded by Microsoft philanthropic organisation Partners in Learning Network. Their six 21st century skills are: • collaboration • knowledge construction • self-regulation • real-world problem solving and innovation • the use of ICT for learning • skilled communication.

Their definition of the skill set also provides specific examples, and describes what teachers will see students doing at different levels as they develop. As an example, collaboration is defined as follows: Students work together when the activity requires them to work in pairs or groups to: • discuss an issue • solve a problem • create a product.

Examples of Collaboration

A Rubric for Measuring the Level of Collaboration in an Activity In this learning activity: 1. Students are not required to work together in pairs or groups.

2.

Students do work together but they do not have shared responsibility.

3. Students do have shared responsibility but they are not required to make substantive decisions together.

4.

Students do have shared responsibility and they do make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work but their work is not interdependent.

5.

Students do have shared responsibility and they do make substantive decisions together about the content, process, or product of their work and their work is interdependent.

The rubric also assists teachers in identifying how their unit can be improved in each particular dimension.

The Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) Pedagogical Framework GRR is a structured pedagogical framework that, as the name suggests, gradually moves the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student. There are four distinct phases in GRR: 1. Focused lesson: the skill or process to be taught is explicitly modelled by the teacher, with students passively observing.

2. Guided instruction: students attempt the skill or process modelled in the first stage, one step at a time, with teacher support or guidance, rather than modelling.

The first two phases are generally the easy part of GRR for teachers, because they control the classroom activity entirely, and students do not need to be highly engaged for success. It is enough that students are motivated by the desire to avoid negative consequences (detention, parental contact and so on) for them to succeed at learning activities at this stage, if the activity is within their capacity. Strategies such as learning intentions and success criteria will not generally be helpful for students as they are simply

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 057

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mimicking what their teacher is showing them. Philip Schlechty describes this level of engagement as ritual compliance.

3. Collaborative learning: students continue to improve their skills at their own pace, but work collaboratively with their peers rather than the teacher.

In this phase, teachers start to let go of control of classroom activity, and set differentiated goals and tasks for their students. Working collaboratively is a key element of this phase. This is not something that students do well at naturally, so teaching students how to work together to achieve common goals becomes an important role for the teacher. Phase three requires students to be more engaged in their work, as they are under less direct teacher supervision. As students start to take ownership of their own learning, learning intentions and success criteria also start to become important elements of teaching at this phase. Flipping can be a useful technique in this phase to allow more classroom time for collaboration and peer coaching. Philip Schlechty describes the level of engagement required for success in this phase as strategic compliance.

4. Independent tasks: students apply their learning in new situations.

Phase four is the point in learning where teachers invite students to apply their knowledge and skills in new situations that are authentic and involve real-world problem solving. It is in this phase that students have the first real opportunity to choose an application for their new skills that are of personal interest to themselves, with guidance or advice from their teacher.

For success in this phase, students need to show the full characteristics of engagement as described by Schlechty; that is, both high commitment and high attention to the task at hand. Students must be intrinsically motivated, so it is important that the teacher does not arbitrarily assign a task, but involves the students in identifying a task to work towards that is seen to be authentic for the students. That is, learning intentions and success criteria must be co-constructed. Problem-based learning, or project-based learning (PBL) can be a good a teaching technique that meets these requirements.

Integration of GRR with 21st Century Skills In an initial attempt to integrate GRR with 21st century skills, Table 1 shows a mapping between specific activities related to each 21st century skill and the GRR phase in which that activity should be observed. ETS 21st Century Skill

Phases of the Gradual Release of Responsibility model of pedagogy Phase 1

Collaboration

Phase 2

No student collaboration

Phase 3 Students work together Students have shared responsibility

Knowledge Construction

Students do not construct knowledge

Activity requires students to interpret, analyse, synthesise or evaluate information Knowledge construction is not the main activity

Real-world Problem Solving and Innovation

Students are not solving problems

Self-regulation

Skilled Communication

The Use of ICT

Phase 4 Students make substantive decisions together Students’ work is interdependent Knowledge construction is the main activity Knowledge construction is interdisciplinary in nature

Students are solving problems, but they are not necessarily authentic2 problems

Students innovate1 to solve authentic2 problems

Learning activity is not long-term, or students do not access3 Learning Intentions or Success Criteria

Learning activity is long-term

Students have the opportunity to plan their own work, and have access to feedback to improve their work

Students are not required to produce extended or multi-modal communication

Students are required to produce extended or multi-modal communication, but are not required to provide evidence, or write to a particular audience

Students are required to produce extended or multi-modal communication

Students use ICT to practise basic skills or reproduce information

Students require the use of ICT to construct knowledge (or create a product)

Students do not use ICT

Students access3 Learning Intentions/ Success Criteria

They must either provide evidence, or write to a particular audience

Students are required to produce extended or multi-modal communication, provide evidence and write to a particular audience

Students require the use of ICT to construct knowledge and use ICT to create a product for an authentic user

1. In the 21CLD document, innovation is defined as putting students’ ideas or solutions into practice in the real world.

2. The authenticity of a product/problem can only be decided by the audience or client, in this case, students. This reinforces the idea that students must be involved in planning which problems to solve, as the students themselves must see the problem as authentic, not just the teacher.

3. Accessing learning intentions and success criteria is defined as these being both available to students and actively being used by students. Simply having them available for students is not enough to say they are being accessed by students.

Table 1: Student activities evident at different phases of the GRR model of pedagogy, mapped against 21st century learning design

Stephen is Head of Science at Unity College, Caloundra. He was previously Head of Science at Proserpine SHS where he was heavily involved in eLearning, leading a team of eLearning Mentors to develop innovative and engaging curricula school wide. Stephen has taught in both the independent and state sector in Queensland, as well as abroad in the UK and at the Rotterdam International Secondary School. He blogs on engagement at http://wsen.edublogs.org

058 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

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getconnected 060 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Using Social Media To Build Your Personal Learning Network

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 061

getconnected | By Dr Carol Skyring | Your personal learning network (PLN) connects you to a vast array of people so that you can harness their collective intelligence to enhance your own learning.

The old saying is that two minds are better than one. If that is the case, then how much better are dozens (or hundreds) of minds and how can you harness these minds to your own advantage? Harnessing the collective intelligence of other educators gives you access to vast amounts of knowledge and experience which you can use to find answers, help, resources and advice for your own teaching.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence Collective intelligence has been most simply described by Jenkins (2006) as “a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows is accessible to any other member upon request on an ad hoc basis”. Harnessing collective intelligence through a personal learning network (PLN) can enhance your learning.

Social media extends your PLN by enabling you to harness the collective intelligence of a wide group of peers and experts from around the world. Part of knowing how to learn involves knowing how to create and exploit social networks and the expertise of others within those networks (Pea, 1993). It has been found (Lalonde, 2011) that social media provides teachers a way to access the collective knowledge of their PLN through sharing links, posting questions and facilitating collaborative projects among their PLN. Creating your PLN Educators who have a PLN have told me that they have learnt more from their PLN in a few months than they did in four years in their degree course! The nature of a PLN, as the name suggests, is that it is personal.

Your PLN will be uniquely yours and not like any other person’s PLN – although you

might share many common contacts. Start your PLN slowly and build over time – an avalanche of information in the early stages can overwhelm you.

The right social media tool will depend on your subjects of interest. The more wellknown sites that are used by educators include Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Facebook. However, others can be useful for specific topics – for example, Instagram for photography or art. A social bookmarking site such as Diigo is useful for finding resources collated by others, as well as for storing and organising the numerous website links you will receive from your PLN. Digital curation sites such as Scoop-it and Pinterest can also be useful for finding and storing resources.

To find the best site, run a search on some keywords of interest on several sites.

For example, type ‘astronomy twitter’ into Google and you will be rewarded with dozens of people and organisations who share astronomy ideas and resources.

Searching ‘maths google+’ will give you similar results for maths people and communities in Google+. Once you have run your search, check out a few of the people or groups to see if they share information that would be useful to you. If so, sign up for an account (if you do not already have one) and start building your PLN. Building your PLN Once you create your PLN, build it by adding valuable people. Choose a few interesting people from your chosen social media site and follow them. Have a look at their profile and see who they follow – it is most likely that the people they follow will also be of interest to you. As you find people of interest, follow them to add them to your own PLN. A number of social media sites use hashtags (#) to isolate topics of interest.

For example, #edchat is a well-established hashtag in Twitter which has live meetups (via Twitter) as well as being used to denote resources of interest to those who follow

062 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

Educators who have a PLN have told me that they have learnt more from their PLN in a few months than they did in four years in their degree course!

Slowly build up your network, but do not let it become unmanageable – better to have a smaller, high-quality network than one including hundreds (or even thousands) of people who are not sharing useful resources.

#edchat. To build your PLN, check the posts of people you decide to follow to find any hashtags they use. Click on the hashtag to discover what topics and ideas are shared.

If these appear to be of interest to you, add them to your PLN. Most sites have some way for you to organise the people within them. In Twitter, you can create lists. For example, I have a list named Gurus which contains the people I regard as experts in my field of interest. This is a good technique to quickly filter these people from the mass of people and information in your network. Facebook also allows you to categorise people and then post to just chosen groups – another valuable way to manage your PLN. Slowly build up your network, but do not let it become unmanageable – better to have a smaller, high-quality network than one including hundreds (or even thousands) of people who are not sharing useful resources.

A PLN can be a valuable resource, but it needs tending. Check in with it regularly, but do not feel that you have to read everything that everyone in your network shares – this will certainly drive you crazy.

Advantages and Disadvantages Harnessing collective intelligence has advantages and disadvantages for professional learning. The great advantage is the access to a pool of colleagues and experts from whom you can collect resources and ideas. Conversely, these large amounts of information can become problematic to manage and become a disadvantage if you do not have an effective process for managing the information. Exchange of information alone is not enough – you need to filter, select and categorise information

for your own purposes. Having a PLN and harnessing collective intelligence should not be an exercise in compiling vast amounts of information which you will never use.

Managing Information from your PLN Develop your own system for storing and labelling information. Much of the information from social media sites is here today and gone tomorrow, so you will need to save valuable resources to another source.

Social bookmarking and digital curation sites mentioned earlier are ideal for this.

Key words, tags or categories are a good way to have your information easily searchable. It is worth taking the time in the beginning to think through some tags that you are likely to use and implement them immediately. Over time, you can add to your list of tags or categories, but it is a timeconsuming exercise to go back and apply these to previously saved resources – far better to start as you intend to continue.

Good PLN Etiquette There are a few unwritten rules. Building a PLN requires that you not only seek to learn from others, but also that you help others in the network to learn. First and foremost, you should be generous. Nobody likes someone who just takes – they are often referred to as leeches! Share resources and ideas freely – you will always receive more than you can give. Some examples of resources that are useful to others are websites, articles and videos. It does not take much to share these with your PLN as you find them in your daily activities. If you are on-sharing resources and ideas from others, be sure to acknowledge them – this recognises the value of others in your PLN.

Engage with your PLN. Commenting on other people’s posts is one way to do this. Everyone likes to think that someone is listening to them, and commenting is one way that you can indicate this. You might merely thank them for a valuable resource, or perhaps engage by adding your thoughts to create a discussion. Asking questions is another way to engage with your PLN. People love to answer questions and their answers will give you a broad, but qualified, view.

There are also some do nots for your PLN. Most importantly, do not share information or links that you have not checked yourself – even if they come from a trusted source.

It is always possible that a spammer has been at work, so you do not want to spread false or even malicious information to your network. And be sure not to be a spammer yourself. Bombarding your network with the same message is a form of spam in PLNs – particularly if it is of an advertising nature.

Finally, learn the language of your chosen social media site/s. They all vary, although there are often crossovers. By not knowing the language you could, at best, look foolish and, at worst, be missing out on valuable resources. Whether you are just starting your PLN, or you are a seasoned PLN user, enjoy creating, building and learning. ETS

For a full list of references, email info@interactivemediasolutions.com.au Dr Carol Skyring researches and writes about the use of social media for professional learning. Her papers and articles can be accessed at www.carolskyring.com

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 063

TECH STUFF

066 PRODUCTS TRUCAST 3 Wireless Interactive Presentation Smart Collaboration Schoolbox TOUCHSTONES Bring coding to life with NAO! Carrier 40 Parallels RAS Edval Timetabling Solutions

070 NOTICEBOARDS Ultimate 3D CA Technologies Leading a Digital School National Education Summit and The Education Show K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference

064 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER @EdTechMagazine EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 065

showcases TRUCAST 3 Wireless Interactive Presentation A Brighter Image recently released the Newline Interactive TRUCAST 3 wireless interactive presentation solution, which connects multiple devices to a central interactive classroom display.

Any device such as laptops, tablets or smartphones can be connected.

By eliminating the need for cable connections, TRUCAST makes any room a completely unlimited, interactive space and allows for connection of up to 64 WiFi enabled devices and provides bidirectional touch capabilities.

TRUCAST lets a teacher display up to four different devices at the same time as a split screen onto the main classroom display. This enables teachers to broadcasting the work of several students at once so that their classmates can see what they are working on to make meetings and classroom lessons truly collaborative.

The teacher or presenter can have full control over whose device is displayed on the main classroom interactive display.

The software to operate TRUCAST needs to be downloaded onto each participating device. It is a free download and there’s no limit to how many downloads are required, so everyone can participate at no extra cost.

TRUCAST works just like a wireless router, but does so much more. Connect to Ethernet, use your own WiFi or use TRUCAST’s independent, private WiFi network. Connectivity is easy and secure.

Once you are connected to TRUCAST, you can share your screen with anyone on the network.

See what is on the display of your own device, or pass control to anyone in the room. TRUCAST gives everyone the power to connect and share ideas easily.

TRUCAST is platform independent. That means any operating system you use can be part of your company’s future. Whether you prefer PC or Mac, it is easy to add TRUCAST to your device, making your work easier and more seamless than ever before.

TRUCAST is available through A Brighter Image’s dealer network.

Contact A Brighter Image 02 9938 6866 or email info@abimage.com.au

Smart Collaboration Just Got Smarter The modern classroom should be exactly that, a technologically modern and integrated space where multiple people congregate to share ideas and collaborate. As such, today’s classrooms

panels and above projectors, while its HDMI connection makes it compatible with virtually any display.

need to support easy-to-use technology so the focus can be

AV managers can save money by leveraging existing

on collaboration and productivity rather than managing the

network infrastructure within the school (via wired and/or

equipment.

wireless connections) or deploy the device as standalone WAP.

With Coalesce, any number of users can wirelessly connect,

Furthermore, accessing new features and upgrades on Coalesce is

share, and control content from any device. Coalesce can

made simple thanks to one-click software updates.

be used to encourage involvement, drive collaboration, and

Teachers and students can hare desktops with synchronous

increase productivity. It‘s easy to setup and even easier to use.

audio, app windows, web content, video files, images, and more

Participants can share within seconds and start real collaboration

while drag-and-drop control makes moving media in/out of view,

in conference rooms, classrooms, and huddle spaces.

layout arrangement, and full screen viewing of any source breeze.

Amongst its many features, users can create a wireless

An important feature for any educator is the moderation mode,

presentation and collaboration environment in any room using

which supports live preview and control of media items before they

laptops, tablets; share from Windows®, OSX, Apple iOS, and

appear on a Coalesce-enabled display.

Android devices and stream unlimited media sources.

For more information contact Blackbox on 1300 734 455 or visit

The unit’s compact form factor is easy to deploy behind flat

066 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

www.blackbox.com/en-au Unless otherwise expressly stated, the review of the product or products appearing in this section represent the opinions of the Editor or relevant editorial staff member assigned to this publication and do not represent the views or opinions of Interactive Media Solutions or the advertisers or other contributors to this publication.

Schoolbox Billed as “Technology to transform K-12 Schools”, Schoolbox is a mature, robust and sustainable platform designed to connect your entire school community with a view to powering innovative teaching and learning.

One of the many features that sets Schoolbox apart, is the fact that it delivers industry-leading integrations. In simple terms, this means that Schoolbox have developed strategic partnerships with a number of notable student information systems, ensuring a seamless flow of data across your systems.

According to Alaress team (the brains behind Schoolbox), their product development is driven by leading and forwardthinking educational pedagogies. Schoolbox provides a holistic platform that supports the development of the whole student; their academic growth, extracurricular involvement and wellbeing.

From a user experience point of view, Schoolbox has a clean,

More than just an LMS, Schoolbox provides a foundation for teachers to build interactive and engaging virtual classrooms. With

efficient and easy user interface with a responsive design

Schoolbox, teachers can collaborate to build meaningful reusable

and single sign-on authentication, enabling access anytime,

courses that can be used across classes and years. Content can be

anywhere and on any device! With dynamic components that

continually reviewed, analysed and improved to ensure relevance,

can be customised, or automated to display relevant information,

quality and consistency.

Schoolbox delivers a personalised experience for each individual user.

One of the features we particularly liked about Schoolbox was

And perhaps most importantly, Schoolbox’s simple and efficient assessment and reporting cycle reduces the need to double handle data – ultimately saving teachers time! Automated

how easy it is to administer. A powerful, back-end administration

analytics feed the continuous improvement cycle and help

area enables users to manage and maintain the system with

teachers to individualise learning journeys.

minimal resources. What’s more, their professional support team monitors and maintains the system, boasting 99% up-time.

For more information visit www.schoolbox.com.au

TOUCHSTONES Designed to provide direction for professional learning, Touchstones embeds a proven process of evaluation and goal setting into a unique and easy to use online environment.

Using a simple five-step process, the software guides staff as

For a Senior Leader, Touchstones helps to manage

they gather and review feedback, set goals and reflect on their

paperwork associated with professional development by

progress and achievement. The supportive coaching methodology

gathering, collating and presenting data which adds richness

encourages collaboration and interaction with peers.

to coaching conversations as well as improving the tracking of

With Touchstones, schools select their own measures of best practice. These then act as reference points along the path of

staff professional learning.

For Principals, Touchstones helps align individual goals

reflection and action. They are the focus for learning and growth,

for professional learning with the Australian standards and

guiding self-evaluation and goal setting and helping to align

the school’s priorities. It also builds learning momentum by

individual effort with strategic intent.

fostering a culture of individual accountability and success

For teachers, Touchstones is a great way to introduce the use of multiple feedback modes to assist in better understanding their

and generates reports on whole school data to inform strategic planning.

own learning needs.

Touchstones also encourages openness and collaboration as teachers engage with, and contribute to, each other’s learning.

For more information contact Circle Education on +61 (0)2 8064 9595 or visit www.mytouchstones.com

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 067

showcases Bring coding to life with NAO! NAO is the world’s leading and most widely used humanoid robot for education and research. Standing 58cm tall, NAO is fully programmable, autonomous, can walk, talk, listen to you, and even recognise your face.

Suitable for beginners and advanced students alike, NAO’s intuitive drag and drop programming interface, ‘Chorégraphe’, introduces basic algorithmic logic and coding. As students progress in their coding skills, they can begin coding using industry standard languages such as Python, C++, Java and Javascript. Chorégraphe’s inbuilt virtual robot simulator means that an unlimited number of students can program and test their applications concurrently in a virtual environment.

Robots, particularly humanoids, have long fascinated people and featured heavily in popular culture. This fascination with robots makes NAO a powerful platform for captivating students imaginations and engaging them in coding. The ability for students’ to seeing their code come to life, in real-time, makes NAO all the more appealing.

NAO is not only an ideal platform for teaching STEM subjects, it also embodies the concept of ‘STEAM’, whereby technology is

In addition to STEM education, applications have been

not seen in isolation from the Arts and Humanities. As such, NAO

created to use NAO in Autism therapy, special education,

can be used to differentiate almost any type of lesson to provide

counselling, paediatric rehabilitation, elderly care, and retail

novelty and engagement. For example, NAO’s ability to speak

customer service. Along theses lines, students can use NAO

19 different languages means that students can work together to

as a platform to create applications to assist people in their

program interactive conversations in LOTE classes or even program

community.

new renditions of Shakespeare’s plays. Furthermore, project-based learning with NAO stimulates deeper inquiry, problem solving, and

For more information contact Brainary Interactive (03) 5229

teamwork.

2260 or visit www.brainaryinteractive.com

Carrier 40 Introducing the Carrier 40 Cart by PC Locs. The Carrier 40 Cart is

for a secure storage device

capable of charging, storing, securing and transporting up to 40

to span its network of seven

devices, including Chromebooks, Laptops, Tablets, iPads and more.

libraries across Southeast

The Carrier Carts are designed and manufactured in Australia to

Victoria, following the

meet the needs of an increasingly mobile learning environment.

introduction of mobile

PC Locs focus specifically on developing products that meet

devices at these facilities.

students’ and faculty members’ expectations for supporting and

“We were looking for a

securing mobile devices on campus. They know that schools and

mobile but secure storage

universities face challenges with the proliferation of mobile devices

solution for our range of

within these environments, which is why they focus on designing

newly introduced mobile devices. It needed to be both portable

products aimed at taking the deployments of mobile technology –

but able to be secured to prevent unauthorised removal. It also

whether institutionally owned or BYOD – to the next level.

needed to be able to store a range of different devices, including

Their engineering team has produced a next generation cart

tablets, iPads and e-book readers.

that is strong and durable, as well as modular and future proofed.

“PC Locs Carrier 40 Cart was the only option that met these

The Baskets incorporated into the design offers a high degree

varied criteria. Each library will have their own trolley to secure

of flexibility as it allows users to deploy banks of mobile devices

and use to charge a variety of devices, as well as any new mobile

quickly, safely and without the need to take the whole Cart.

devices we will be purchasing in future for use by both library staff

Michelle McLean, Information Services Librarian at Casey-

and library users,” said Ms McLean.

Cardinia Library Corporation, was impressed by the safety and flexibility the Carrier 40 Cart offered. The Corporation was looking

068 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

For more information, visit www.pclocs.com.au or call 1300 725 627.

Unless otherwise expressly stated, the review of the product or products appearing in this section represent the opinions of the Editor or relevant editorial staff member assigned to this publication and do not represent the views or opinions of Interactive Media Solutions or the advertisers or other contributors to this publication.

Parallels RAS empowers schools with mobility and the cloud Technology is a critical tool in the arsenal of modern pedagogy.

Thanks to affordable laptops and smartphones, it has never been easier for educators to connect with their students, leading to improved learning outcomes.

Many schools offer some sort of laptop purchase programme, while others encourage their students to bring their own favourite devices to school. Add to this the plethora of smartphones that students are bringing into the campus IT environment and it all adds up to one massive headache for IT administrators.

What can an education institution’s IT department do to overcome these challenges on a limited budget?

Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) stands out as a clear,

Imagine running AutoCAD on a Chromebook, or Microsoft Word

proven, and simple-to-use solution praised by both IT managers

on a Raspberry Pi – Parallels RAS enables access to these popular

and end-users.

education apps to any device with an Internet connection.

Parallels RAS is a virtualisation solution that hosts critical

This also means IT administrators can easily update operating

applications and desktops on a central server or the cloud, then

systems, apps, and conduct other troubleshooting support remotely

delivers them to all staff, students and faculty anywhere in the

without having to touch one end-user device, greatly improving

world with an Internet connection, on any device they choose. This

efficiency and productivity across the board.

includes coursework materials, homework files, educational apps, and more.

By consolidating desktops, applications and data in a central server or the cloud, Parallels RAS frees education IT from technical complexities, so that teachers can focus on teaching, and students

Parallels RAS protects staff and student data with highly granular permission capabilities combined with data restriction, encryption, and two-factor authentication.

These are just a few in an extensive list of features Parallels RAS has to offer.

can concentrate on learning.

This opens up a whole world of possibility for both on- and offcampus learning.

For more information, visit www.parallels.com/ras, and download a full featured 30-day free trial to try it out for yourself.

Edval Timetabling Solutions Edval have been providing timetabling software, solutions and support to schools across Australia, Ireland, the UK and Asia for 20 years. Over 700 schools and hundreds of thousands of students rely

results in higher running costs for schools. Instead, timetabling

on Edval Timetables every day.

should be based around requirements, a model Edval delivers

The technology behind Edval Timetables, using advanced and

through the use of powerful proprietary algorithms for block line

complex algorithms coupled with complex business logic, allows

generation, spread management, staffing allocations and rooming

users to specify precisely what they need within their school and

assignments. Their software will unlock opportunities you never

provides optimal, automatic solutions based on their input. Through

thought possible in your schools and empower your timetable

years of consultation and working in partnership with hundreds

committee to explore more possibilities in how you structure your

of schools, Edval’s software is packed with features that make

curriculum.

a real difference to a school’s operation in the areas of cost

Featuring flexible tools for curriculum planning and structuring,

effectiveness, student elective choices and outcomes, efficient use

fully integrated daily changes, relief teachers, room swaps,

of resources, staff satisfaction and more.

excursions and events, it is no wonder Edval is the preferred

Edval Timetabling System’s unique support of ‘optimising costs’

timetable and daily management software provider for many

as a core business function means schools find Edval to be a cost

school corporations and governing bodies such as over 60% of NSW

negative solution, providing financial benefits that consistently

Government High Schools, South Australian CEO, Sydney Anglican

exceed operating costs.

Schools Corporation and more.

At the centre of every school is its timetable. Edval believe that rigid timetable generation is an outdated method and one that

For more information, email to sales@edval.education or visit www.edval.education EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 069

noticeboards

Noticeboards

Educators, 3D Printing Starts With You.

Ultimate 3D has worked with the ACT Government Education department, the Australian 3D Manufacturing Association (A3DMA) and the University of NSW, to create the first turn key solution for educators wanting to implement or further develop 3D printing at their school. We call this solution 3D4Ed.... and we are proud to bring it to you.

How 3D4Ed can help your school Most efforts to introduce 3D printing into the classroom have faltered.

Inadequate equipment, insufficient training for teachers and lack of sufficient support arrangements are the main causes. All these issues have been addressed in our education packages. This means that once you commence teaching 3D printing and design, you can be assured that you

will be able to offer complete lessons.

We offer a total solution that incorporates support (on-site and phone), A3DMA endorsed training and equipment, safety enclosures and access to industry experts and other teachers.

We are setting a new standard in additive manufacturing The 4th industrial revolution has started and experts from all over the globe are predicting we will see more change over the next ten years than we have seen in the past one hundred years combined. Additive manufacturing will be at the forefront of this industrial revolution. Ultimate 3D was setup to not only make the transition as smooth as possible but to help Australia be a global leader of this technology.

070 EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

3D4Ed comes with equipment to match We have been testing and testing dozens of 3D printers in the last 12 months together with the A3DMA, the University of NSW and teachers from schools all around the country. We offer the best equipment found in the market, specifically to meet the needs of your classroom.

Get in touch We are here to understand your school’s needs and offer you the best solution. Contact us and one of our consultants will be happy to help you.

Call 1300 979 429 or email us at info@ultimate3d.com.au

Unless otherwise expressly stated, the information appearing in this section represents the opinions of the relevant advertiser and does not represent the views or opinions of Interactive Media Solutions or the other advertisers or contributors to this publication.

CA Technologies teams up on grants project with Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne

Research to focus on service virtualisation and machine learning CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA), in partnership with Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne, has been awarded an Australian Research Council grant for a new project focused on service virtualisation and machine learning.

The three-year project combines the domain expertise of CA’s research arm – CA Strategic Research – in service virtualisation and predictive analysis, with the world leading expertise of Swinburne University in software engineering and The University of Melbourne’s in machine learning.

The project follows as an extension of the successful service virtualisation grant project between CA and Swinburne in 2014, which focused on allowing a service to be virtualised in the absence of expert knowledge and explicit documentation.

Today’s project is focused on three new extensions with the aim of increasing the reliability of software deployment and reducing the delivery time for software applications from development to release.

The extensions include: 1. Using machine learning to automatically derive a service virtualisation model - CA is the first organisation in the world to adapt machine learning for service

virtualisation. By using machine learning, development teams can write software without needing all the other systems within their environment.

This will ultimately increase software development speed and reliability.

2. Bringing the human back into the loop – whilst machine learning has its many strengths, trying to completely replace humans means that there can be errors that then must be fixed by a human. The objective of this project is to effectively combine machine learning and human input so that the two are working harmoniously.

3. Modelling the whole network – whilst previous service virtualisation projects have focused on modelling single services in isolation, this grant project expands the scope to consider interdependencies between services – i.e. allowing them to talk to each other.

“Only about a third of applications for research grants are successful and this grant is an acknowledgement of our commitment to the area of service virtualisation and what we’ve been able to offer the industry to date.

We’re glad to be able to embark on this new journey and hope the result is new DevOps solutions that help our customers more efficiently and effectively run their organisations,” said Steve Versteeg, vice president of Research at CA Strategic Research, Melbourne.

The research team comprises four

professors from across the two universities, including Professor Jun Han, Associate Professor Jean-Guy Schneider, Professor Chengfei Liu and Professor Chris Leckie, four PhD researchers, one research fellow and a team of domain experts from CA Technologies. The grant comprises financial and in-kind funding from CA Technologies, the Australian Research Council, Swinburne University and The University of Melbourne.

Jun Han, Professor at Swinburne University of Technology said, “Our previous service virtualisation grant project with CA aided product development to the point of being included in new service virtualisation products that are now being sold to customers across the world. That’s a compelling prospect and our aim is to achieve similar success.”

Christopher Leckie, Professor at The University of Melbourne said, “We’ve worked with CA Strategic Research many times on grants projects over the years and there have been some extremely compelling outputs. I’m confident that our combined effort will result in new developments that become commercially available via CA products.”

CA Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne, have been partnering in research since 2006.

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 071

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Leading a Digital School – Strategy and Tactics

The leading a digital school conference is: • A leadership conference • A digital technology conference.

It offers a fantastic opportunity for school leaders who wish to position and market their school as a leading digital school.

The conference offers strategic advice to assist school leaders achieve superior digital technology outcomes for their school. If you are a school leader reading this, why not attend yourself or send a member of staff involved in steering the strategic direction of your digital technology programs!

Strategy and Tactics Every school needs a person or team of people championing and pushing a school’s digital capabilities and direction. Who has the responsibility in your school? You need a strategy you need smart tactics. Your digital program and direction is one of the most important considerations for a school leader in a contemporary digital society.

In one location over 3 days share and learn about the strategy and tactics you can employ to drive powerful change in your digital school – a very convenient way of saving you a lot of time and a lot of stress in your quest to move your school forward.

Keynotes, spotlight sessions and

breakout sessions focus on strategy and tactics: • How to develop new skillsets and mindsets • How to breakdown silos • How to create a culture of innovation • How to adopt future focussed pedagogies • How to restructure school wide initiatives to effectively lead improvement, innovation and change in digital schools • Learn practical techniques and strategies for developing, and sustaining innovations in your school • What are the necessary conditions required for a culture of innovation and for positive school advancement to flourish?

• What are the critical and interconnected roles of the school principal, leadership team and classroom teachers?

• How to maximise the human, physical and financial capital along the way • How to deliver scalable trans disciplinary opportunities in the innovative use of digital technologies • How to evaluate the readiness of your school to embrace digital age learning • How to move from ‘tinkering’ to integration and cultural infusion • How to create unimagined possibilities and solutions in the “in between” - the space in between people where minds collide

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• How to use social media to interact with students, engage parents and promote your school to the world • How to distribute leadership from top to bottom and bottom to top • How to build personal learning networks and connections with likeminded educators across the world.

And the most exciting thing about all of this is: • This comprehensive and cutting edge agenda is presented by principals, deputy principals and other very influential school leaders who are either experimenting with meeting these challenges right now, or who have successfully navigated their way through some of them – learn from your colleagues to avoid some mistakes and undue stress and to save you time.

Learn more The conference is no ordinary digital technology conference.

If you wish to learn more about what it takes to lead in a digital school in today’s challenging educational climate, why not attend the Leading a Digital School Conference to be held at the QT Hotel, Gold Coast on 17, 18 and 19 August 2017?

For more information and to register go to: www.ereg.me/digital17

Unless otherwise expressly stated, the information appearing in this section represents the opinions of the relevant advertiser and does not represent the views or opinions of Interactive Media Solutions or the other advertisers or contributors to this publication.

National Education Summit and The Education Show

SEPTEMBER 1– 2, MELBOURNE CONVENTION & EXHIBITION CENTRE A key event on the academic calendar, the National Education Summit returns to the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre on September 1–2, 2017 offering concurrent conferences, masterclasses and interactive seminars tailored to principals, school leaders and business managers and educators from K-12.

Co-located with the National Education Summit, The Education Show is the official free exhibition of the Summit and will feature over 100 exhibitors showcasing school resources and products as well as services and technology for classrooms, schools and careers.

As part of The Education Show, there will also be a free seminar program featuring leading experts.

Presenting a unique opportunity for education and teaching professionals to strengthen their skills and stay ahead of the curve, the National Education Summit also presents a comprehensive seminar program which encourages new ways of thinking and problem solving.

A cross-section of Australia’s most prominent industry leaders will speak across some of the most pertinent and timely topics in the education and learning sector.

Autism in every classroom (September 1) Jamie Coombs and Cressida Crossley, founders of Necessary Educational Strategies for Teachers and Students (NESTS), Richard Eisenmajer (psychologist, The ASD Clinic), Sarah Wood (psychologist, Autism Behavioural Intervention Association), Kate Koullas (Partner & Founder, Yellow LadyBugs and Miles Glaspole (student and comedian) Learning and Teaching Symposium (September 2) Dr Lyn Sharratt (Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto), Nicholas Hall, Jasmine Ryan and Lucy Keath (primary principals, Catholic Education Diocese of Sandhurst), Danielle Purdy (Senior Education Officer, Cairns Diocese – Catholic Education Services) and Dr Jared Cooney Horvath (Science Of Learning research scientist and lecturer at The University of Melbourne) Teaching Adolescent Girls Conference (September 2) Dr Michael Carr Gregg (leading Australian child psychologist and Managing Director, The Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre), Dr Jared Cooney Horvath (Science Of Learning research scientist

and lecturer at The University of Melbourne), Kathryn Taylor (Director, Turning Point Consulting), Sally Rigley (psychologist, The ASD Clinic) and Elle Steele (Director, Create Believe Achieve) Additionally, G9 Education will again present a Master Class for Principals and School Leaders (September 1) and the K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference (September 1 & 2) will explore best digital classroom practice to achieve superior teaching and learning outcomes.

Professional Development hours are available on all events attended at the National Education Summit and The Education Show’s free seminar program.

For more information or to register your interest, please visit: www.nationaleducationsummit.com. au or www.theeducationshow.com.au To keep up to date with news from the National Education Summit and The Education Show: www.facebook.com/ NationalEducationSummit/ or www.facebook.com/ theeducationshowau

EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS 073

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K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference – that critical infusion

Quality digital classroom practice takes much more than delivering the occasional lesson through an exciting digital technology medium. It is also much more than conducting most of your lessons with routine, low impact digital technology.

What quality digital classroom practice requires is that critical infusion of digital technology in to your teaching most of the time. You need to introduce this quality practice to your teaching, sustain and grow it as new practices emerge.

What are some of the valuable technologies available to you to use in your classroom– taking your teaching and your students’ learning to greater heights?

Here is a snapshot of what the K-12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference offers: Explore the digital curriculum through a range of practical sessions presented by teachers of digital technology; directors of learning technologies, innovation; and university tutors: • The ‘forgotten element’ - see how you can introduce the Data and Information strand of the Digital Technologies Curriculum to your students • In an immersive workshop discover as a learner how connected toys make learning come alive • See how coding promotes thinking strategies • Learn how amazing little toys can

engage and ignite thinking through discovery and play • See plenty of innovative examples of pedagogy and practice associated with the digital curriculum • Discover digital curricula and online resources that offer a wealth of possibilities for extending and reinforcing student language and cultural learning • Embrace STEAM, (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) in your teaching • Appreciate how the Maker Movement, Makerspaces, Design Thinking and even the Internet of Things can be included in your teaching programs • Explore modes of instruction that facilitate differentiation in the classroom Build your confidence in setting up different digital environments for your students through sessions presented by ICT consultants; heads of e-learning; and directors of technology: • Upgrade your skills for creating projects in AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) • Learn about the pedagogical and curricular benefits of multimodal text creation • Discuss the merits and challenges of developing and delivering online teaching/learning content using hand-held devices via QR code triggers, image triggers, GPS triggers and VR viewers • Step out onto the road-lesstravelled and try something a little

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more challenging, especially in 1:1 and BYOD classrooms • Review research that provides a rich picture into the efficacy of digital technologies and whether they have improved in their effectiveness over time, or whether there is any noticeable return on investment (video, simulation, gaming, computer assisted instruction, flipped learning, etc) • Learn how to take researchbased steps to ensure that digital technologies are used effectively and enhance student performance Include digital literacies as part of your digital program presented by ICT integrators; teacher librarians; and directors of technology: • Look at how to teach a progressive set of digital fluencies skills as a continuum across curriculum areas.

• Understand place of social media in schools as an area of Digital Citizenship • Examine ambitious ways digital and design technologies can be leveraged to improve the practical applications of mathematics and scientific learning Review some smart digital resources that can help you get your job done, presented by classroom teachers; software and hardware companies; music specialists; science and digital teachers: • Learn seven essential components students need to be fully empowered to tell digital stories • Explore practical ways to integrate

Unless otherwise expressly stated, the information appearing in this section represents the opinions of the relevant advertiser and does not represent the views or opinions of Interactive Media Solutions or the other advertisers or contributors to this publication.

digital resources appropriate to the needs of your students across the school • Understand how to run full-class learning activities that allow for every student involved to print a 3D object conveniently • Explore the potential of digital equipment to make music “beautiful noise” relatively instantly and easily • Delve into formative response tools and other online applications that you can use to personalize instruction and assessment for the various proficiency levels found in your classrooms.

Last but certainly not least attend

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to your own and your team’s digital professional practice. A range of sessions presented by classroom teachers; digital teachers; and training consultants will give you some great practical ideas: • Unpack the many features of Hapara Workspace and the way in which it promotes differentiation and learner agency for both the teacher and student • See how to create and track professional practice strategies digitally • Learn how to reinvent team development through the application

of effective digital resources.

Learn from your colleagues! Join us on Friday 1 and Saturday 2 September 2017 at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre (MCEC) to see the amazing ways digital technology can be used in your classroom to deliver the curriculum to your students and to unlock their learning potential.

Leave the conference armed with plenty of information to really push that critical infusion.

Further information can be found at: www.ereg.me/kdcp

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