How digital technology is ushering in a new age of learning

Digital disruption is driving education outside the boundaries of the classroom and into a host of new online opportunities

Comments

Collaborative, connected classrooms

St Columba is one of the first education institutions to adopt Google’s Classroom learning management system, which was released in August, and has been selected by the search engine giant to be the international case study.

Part of Google Apps for Education, Classroom allows teachers to set up different folders for each class and student, and allows students to conduct work and submit assignments online and receive feedback.

“It also utilises social networking platforms and ways of communicating. It has a stream, which is just like your thread or your home page in other social networking platforms,” Richards says. “An example is my students have been posting their project updates and other students comment underneath or ask questions.

“I’ve had students continue to participate in the class even when they are not onsite and are at home ill.”

The school is connecting with other schools and experts overseas using Google’s Connected Classrooms and Chromebox for Meetings.

“Learning needs to be global now, we are living in a global classroom. We really should be connecting with experts, so if you are learning about volcanoes you talk to a volcanologist,” Richard says.

“This is modelling 21st century skills that students are going to need when they leave school. The workforce of the future is global and being able to communicate, collaborate and innovate with people in different countries is going to be a vital skill.”

Leeming Senior High School in WA is also trying to develop 21st century skills in its students. The school’s ICT co-ordinator, Gabby Raggio, says exposing students to new and emerging technologies is important to sparking their curiosity and encouraging innovative thinking.

“We have two 3D printers used within our design and technology area. Students will use CAD or SketchUp and they will design things,” she says. Raggio is also using a free 3D modelling program called Sculptris in her digital media class.

“It’s great to just give them exposure to something like that, or just opening up ideas on how to use existing technology in different ways. That’s where schools can play a role.”

Other collaboration tools being utilised at the school include Edmodo, Schoology, Google Docs, Wikispaces, Inkscape, Audacity, Photo Story and XMind. Raggio adds open source software is crucial in education, as many government schools don’t have a huge budget to draw from.

“We do pay for licensing as well, we have the Adobe suite and things like that. But because it is quite expensive, I look at alternatives for other things where we can cut some costs back,” she says.

Gamified learning
Gamification is proving a core technology capability for several education institutions. Macquarie University, for example, has developed a game called New Worlds where biodiversity conservation students learn to explore, survey and publish data on an imagined world through tools and skills they would use while out in the field. It is set to be trialled on postgraduate students in the first semester of 2015.

“You have this game console and go to this new world that we’ve created, and you start exploring it and sharing your data,” explains Robert Parker, educational developer at Macquarie University.

Students will be able to feel like they are sitting on a pod thanks to a computer screen or monitor, and move around collecting data on species, rainfall, temperature and so on. An instrument panel will also be attached to the pod for students to conduct different surveying and sampling activities.

Parker says the game is designed to encourage collaboration and drive group participation around the specie discovery process. “No one knows what the names of these species are, [so] you would then describe the species in different ways and then you can publish that,” he explains.

“Someone else might find a species that is very similar, with similar characteristics, DNA, amino acids, and so on. You can compare and contrast, then go into another part of the game, which is the library. Normally when you are in the field you are also doing research with a library or database, looking up catalogues of species and comparing.

“The third person could then describe the species and might name it after the person who first discovered it.”

President of the School Library Association of NSW, Michelle Jensen, is also a believer in using games in educational settings. She has created a Second Life environment to hold design thinking workshops for teachers.

“Teachers and librarians are able to participate in a design thinking workshop that allow them to create 3D prototypes as they navigate a simulated 3D environment via a customised Avatar,” she says.

“Many teacher librarians are working in isolation as the only teacher librarian in the school being able to connect and participate in events. Online provides opportunities to connect and learn tougher in a simulated world environment.”