Technology in Victorian Schools

Our school recently had a visit from a nearby South Australian school that had a variety of focus points.

One of them was ICT in the classroom with my role being to discuss more in detail about how we use the iPads. I could not believe the shock on their faces when I referred to having my own laptop supplied by work, and that the school had even supplied some iPads for teachers.

I had no idea what they wanted to start with and was relieved when they started asking questions and I knew what to talk about. We discussed how I set the iPads up on the network, how I organised them by setting up 1 and creating an 'image' that was then installed on the rest of them, even as to how I found which apps to use. An important query was how do I monitor the content of free apps with some of the advertising being age inappropriate for schools. Most of this is resolved by having a play around with the apps and check for the content involved while the rest is resolved by discussing with students what it means to be cybersafe and what choices we find age inappropriate material. So far this year I have had one advertisement that showed up on 'educational' software that was inappropriate and upon sending a complaint through this was very quickly resolved.

This visit made me think of how lucky Victorian schools are to have such a high technology focus in the classrooms (even though I think it could still be made higher) making it easier to teach at a technological level in par with the real world that students are currently living.

It also made me think of the difference I could make in such a school. It is effectively a blank slate for ICT teaching. I don't think I will have much luck finding a similar school in Victoria but this would be an ideal type of  school to consider moving onto.

A huge success in iPads appears to be coming from the Middle Unit of our school, where teacher iPads are being extensively used for assessment. The most basic example is having a reading conference form stored on the iPad as PDF, annotating the record and storing it in Drop Box. When doing this with twenty-four students per fortnight you can imagine the number of trees we are saving, not to mention the huge amount of storage space on teachers desks.

(Please don't go into the carbon debate that we are burning fossil fuels to power the iPads, I am going to go 'la la la' while I imagine the iPads being recharged using Solar Power.)

I will finish this with a quick post mentioning my daughter Imogen and that she has great direction tracking skills for reading at the age of 5 months. It is such a shame that not all families spend time developing basic skills such as this or don't even see it as a priority.

Cheers
Rob