Through a professional collaborative approach between a number of Catholic Schools in the Belconnen district, Principal Matthew Garton from St John the Apostle, Florey, spearheaded a plan for over 200 Primary and Secondary teachers to participate in a Professional Learning Day at the beginning of the school year. Partnering with CSER MOOC ACT Project Officer, Toni Falusi, key Digital Champions within each of the participating schools and Bruce Fuda
Computing Education Specialist, Australian Computing Academy (University of Sydney), the aim of this event was to build teacher’s skills and knowledge in order to implement the Digital Technologies Australian Curriculum in 2018.
The Keynote address from CSER’s Dr Rebecca Vivian (Research Fellow, School of Computer Science) identified why Digital Technologies are important, unpacked key curriculum concepts, along with opportunities for integration into other learning areas and also provided an introduction to Assessment. A series of workshops, aligned to the F-6 Foundations MOOC and PL-in-a-box resources, on Data, Systems, Algorithms and Visual Programming followed the Keynote and allowed teachers to explore concepts through a no-tech approach. These workshops were led by the Digital Champion teachers who had participated in training with Toni Falusi in the lead up to the event.
The afternoon sessions were a selection of workshops on Robotics, iPads Applications and Pedagogy, Coding, 3D printing, Google classroom and a deeper look at Assessment. During this time the leadership team from each school met to discuss and develop their plans for supporting teachers to continue the momentum gained through this event.
The day was a huge success thanks to the hardworking key staff of St John’s the Apostle who worked tirelessly on the logistics and co-ordination with St Francis Xavier during the Summer break. Toni Falusi will continue to work with the participating Schools throughout the year to support the teacher’s progression through the MOOC content and continue the momentum gained to implement this new curriculum in 2018.
Toni Falusi, CSER ACT Project Officer
