Digital Teaching and Learning

As we continue to develop our Tech Hub we have included two HTC VIVE sets. We open this to classes (booked by the teacher) for use and during lunchtimes for Student bookings. As you can imagine there was great demand and waiting lists to begin with and now we are seeing the same students booking every week or two. As a leader in digital learning I am doing what I can to source VR experiences, and as Steven quite rightly says is that these experiences don’ t have much of the “replay” appeal and other than the 360 experience it is not really something that couldn’t be experienced on a flat screen with a great deal less cost involved. Don’t get me wrong…I love the VR experience and I have seen some students experience things that they would never be able to experience in real life. One student who is wheelchair bound has journeyed to places in outer space, climbed Mount Everest and will soon walk the Kakoda Track (we have just downloaded this Australian Experience. As I read throu...

As I recently set to correct some assessment pieces that my students have worked on. I began to reflect on how they have demonstrated their skills, knowledge and understanding through a standardized test as opposed to their demonstration of skills throughout lessons during class time without the pressure of exam situations. With time pressure and lack of ability to discuss learning, to develop ideas and knowledge or collaborate, students regularly underperform. This kind of testing was developed at the beginning of the Industrial age to help employer score and sort workers into groups and categorise their skills to put them into the most appropriate areas of the factory. Fortunately our world has developed and now this kind of categorisation is redundant. Unfortunately the education system has not developed it's methods to reflect this development. Without the pressures of these testing situations we observe more authentic student abilities. It is disconcerting to me that as l...

I have been an educator for more that 20 years in both primary and secondary education. Over the last 10 years I have had an emphasis in my teaching on the use of technology in education for both adult and student learners.  In recent times I have been reflecting upon work, education and the processes that enable me to support all learners. I have reflected upon these practices and decided that some of my practices are very good pedagogy and other areas have room for improvement. I am writing this blog to share my courses, practices and reflections on a daily basis. I believe it is important to reflect regularly. Daily reflections will bring to light the small things and the reflections for both successes and failures. As it is my belief that these are equally important in education and sharing these demonstrates both the development of new ideas and the ongoing learning for the improvement of both my practices and the learning options in the classroom. I look forw...