Last week held a Parent Information Evening for our current Year 3 and 4 parents.
The topic of the evening was about the evolution of the program into 2015 which will be that we invite all parents in Years 4 and 5 to send their children along with their own iPad as a BYO device.
This decision has been made on the basic of our experiences and discoveries from this year’s trial. We value this device as one which has the potential to support, enable and extend children’s learning. The screen recording in the post before this one does highlight some of our findings in this regard.
CONTEXT
Introducing the night we put the BYO trial into context as a school by talking about the TPack model – the model which gives a framework for the blending of curriculum, pedagogy and technology, our own TOPS – pedagogical framework and our own ICT vision.
We then talked about the impact of technology on the world and education.
The rate of change was discussed especially as pertaining to the last 10 years.
Ken Robinson was referred to and a quick clip of him talking about technology and education was shown:
A UNIT OF WORK
Mrs Sansness and I then talked about History as an example of a unit which allowed us to show how the technology enabled, supported and extended learning in the 4SS class this year. A gaming app was shown and we demonstrated how its use engaged the children right at the beginning of the unit. We showed two iBooks that we had created as as school to support exploration and research by the children. We demonstrated how the use of these multimedia resources enabled differentiation. We showed creations by the children. It is worth mentioning that many of these things are explained in greater depth in posts preceding this current post.
THE TRIAL – FINDINGS, CHALLENGES AND RECOMMENDATIONS
We talked our way through the iBook we have created to showcase the findings. A screencast of this is shown in the blog preceding this post.
QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION
Our policy document was the subject of conversation and this is available under ‘documents’ on this web.
Many questions were asked and much discussion had.
Parents were encouraged to take advantage of some support frameworks:
- joining our BYO Facebook page
- taking advantage of the iTunesU course we offer
- visiting the ‘Showcase of Learning’ event we will hold later this term.
We also encouraged parents to return the “Expression of Intent’ form to use ASAP.