August 2009
Update
Education 24-7
Twenty-four-seven education will soon be available to Indigenous students in remote Northern Territory schools.
@Schools NT, an online program of Senior Secondary and Vocational courses, will be offered to DET students beginning at the start of the 2010 school year. It will be the first effort by any Australian education department to mainstream virtual learning.
Utilising recent expansion and investment in broadband services, @Schools NT will improve educational access for remote students, and to those wanting to do specialised subjects not offered by their school.
Initial trials of virtual Japanese and Indonesian language courses in Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy High Schools and Centralian Senior Secondary College are already complete, and initial results suggested that @Schools NT will prove both efficient and successful.
Courses, to be offered online and led by qualified, expert teachers, will be accessed by students from their school or home. A consortium of DET high schools will operate as hubs for course delivery.
The initial set of courses will blend online interactive components with residential components, such as workshops and lab work. Residential components will be timetabled in advance to give parents and schools time to organise student travel.
DET’s Chief Information Officer Greg Moo said @Schools NT was designed to increase opportunities for all students.
“This program will give remote students access to a wider variety of school subjects and VET courses, and reduce the need for students to relocate to larger or better resourced schools or centres of education. This is good for the students, their families and school community alike,” he said.
However, even if students are enrolled in an @School NT course, it will remain the responsibility of their home school to offer students a mentor to provide support, advice and guidance.
Beginning in Term 1 next year, Phase One of @Schools NT will see a progressive roll-out over an 18-month period, starting with the following Year 11 and Vocational subjects:
- Chemistry
- IT Visual Programming
- Languages (Indonesian and Japanese)
- VET Hospitality
- Specialist Maths
- Geography
- ESL English
- Philosophy
The @School Project Director Andrew Street said that Phase 1 of the program “will pilot the new delivery approaches and give teachers time to explore different technology and teaching approaches to refine delivery before more subjects come online in the future.”
Look out for the @School NT course catalogue later this year.
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Facebook to help teacher professional development
The Northern Territory Department of Education and Training and Charles Darwin University are working together to trial a program of online professional development for Accelerated Literacy teachers in remote settings.
Using interactive distance learning (IDL) software, blogs, and social networking websites such as Facebook, the e-learning professional development (ePD) aims to facilitate teacher learning through an online community.
A trial, delivered for one term to up to 20 teachers in remote NT schools participating in the National Accelerated Literacy Program, will inform the design and effectiveness of the ePD.
Teachers will participate in a live online community once a week using IDL software, followed up with independent web-based interaction on blogs and social networking websites. A Sharepoint website will be used to share professional readings and videos of teachers in action.
Teachers will analyse student assessment data, set learning goals, share strategies and then apply their new knowledge by working with individual students with specific learning needs. They will also give their opinion of the ePD to improve future trials.
Designers of the ePD, CDU researcher Claire Bartlett and DET Accelerated Literacy Education Officer Donna Robbins, hope the trial will reveal how technology might overcome obstacles for professional development in remote NT schools. They also hope ePD will help schools with high staff turnover maintain quality teaching.
“Some teachers work hundreds of kilometres from an urban centre. To go into town for half a day’s training might actually mean two to three days away from their class. If we deliver professional development electronically, then we are able to give teachers more support, while at the same time reducing negative impact on their students,” Claire said.
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ESP: no imagination needed
The Department of Education and Training is responding to school, teacher and parent feedback about the new online Electronic Student Profile (ESP) system currently being rolled-out to DET schools.
As the first online student profile offered in Australian public schools, ESP effectively broadens the walls of Northern Territory classrooms by giving parents access to their child’s homework, class timetables and academic progress.
ESP streamlines both school administrative and teacher reporting tasks by grouping a student’s education history, daily attendance, assessment details, certificates of achievement, and awards within a single portal.
ESP will assist remote schools with the teaching and administrative challenges of student and staff turnover. A student’s electronic profile will last the student’s entire school life and will go with them when they transfer between schools. New teachers will have immediate access to their students’ academic progress—a great benefit for creating individual learning plans.
By the end of Term 2, there were 32 NT government schools using ESP and 14 600 student profiles were created.
ESP will enter Darwin and Palmerston primary schools in Term 3, then regional and some remote schools in Term 4. Electronic Student Profiles will be used system-wide by mid 2010.
In response to feedback, the ESP project team are currently making improvements to the system. Release 2.0 of ESP contains enhanced presentations of the Attendance and Portfolio sections of a student’s profile, and significantly, it streamlines the creation of class groups and timetables by allowing these to be downloaded from the Student Timetable module in the Student Administration and Management System (SAMS).
ESP feedback from Alawa Primary School staff
Alawa Primary school, in Darwin’s northern suburbs, is leading the primary school roll-out. This is a summary of what some of their staff had to say:
Things I liked:
- Easy access to whole student information
- Great long term data collection
- Easy to navigate and use
Things I did not like:
- No editing component for portfolio
- Parents without internet have no access
- Time consuming, but not more so than the ‘old’ way
Recommendations:
- Progress reports are on pdf so they cannot be edited
- Keep it simple: minimise reporting components
- Tick boxes for student behaviour/general comment
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New system to replace Student Tracker
Student Tracker is set to be replaced by a more powerful and user friendly web-based tool, the Student Master Index (SMI).
Using Google-type search functions to retrieve student records, the SMI will save school administration staff both time and frustration when it comes to student enrolments and transfers.
Using a search engine that automatically searches across various fields (first name, last name, legal name and known name), the SMI will replace Student Tracker’s time consuming search that required categories of exact data in order to retrieve a student profile.
For example, if school administration staff were to search for student ‘Bill’, the SMI would generate a list of matching profiles, which could then be refined by additional names or by school.
Administration staff will have access to a student’s full enrolment history, and will be able to print pre-populated enrolment forms when a student transfers from another NT Government school.
Additional time-saving benefits will include the ability to generate files to upload students’ details to the Student Administration and Management System (SAMS), and an automatic email that informs a student’s previous school when she enrols elsewhere. With these benefits combined, DET hopes the SMI will lead to a dramatic reduction in the effort required to remove duplicate student enrolments.
For teachers, the SMI will provide a quick and efficient way to access their students’ academic history.
At the system level, reduced errors in student data will lead to more efficient analysis of NT student turnover and academic progress.
DET will trial the SMI for six weeks in Term 3 in urban and remote schools. During this time DET IT staff will iron-out glitches, improve the search engine, and make improvements according to feedback from participating schools.
All schools can expect to be using the SMI by September this year.
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Centralian Senior Secondary College future proofs new computers
Many NT schools are among the first in Australia to benefit with new computers through the Federal Government’s $2.1 billion National Secondary Schools Computer Fund (NSSCF). One school in Alice Spring has found an innovative way to maximise the benefit.
In addition to providing computer funding for Year 9 to 12 students across the country, the NSSCF provides schools with on-costs for local area network extensions, software licensing and general support. Centralian Senior Secondary College is spending some of their on-costs money to upgrade the new desktop computers and laptops it received through the fund.
The school has doubled their new computers’ hard drive and memory capacity, added a graphics card, and upgraded from 19 to 22-inch screens.
Centralian’s IT Coordinator Clifford Riley said, “It’s about maximising our investment and providing for the future. We’re talking about a significant performance improvement.”
By upgrading now, the school is saving money down the track.
“Enhancing the battery is half the price now than if we did it in a year’s time,” Clifford said while stating that money would be saved on other upgrades as well.
Centralian will also rotate its computer fleet according to need.
“We used this to upgrade in the areas we needed the highest capacity and we moved the computers we replaced to enhance other areas of the school,” he said.
The school will now have a fleet of computers that will remain highly functional until their replacement in four years’ time.
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At 30 June last year, of the 3321 computers used by Year 9 to 12 students in NT government schools, almost half were more than four years old. However, the NSSCF will do much more than just boost the NT schools’ stock of ageing computers. It aims to achieve a one to one student to computer ratio for Year 9 to 12 students by 2011.
