Shared task, shared ability !

Watching students at work you can see situations where a technology has a shortfall or feature set that doesn't match the student across all tasks. A student in a chair who might enjoy the IWB in most tasks, can find themself unable to reach the top of the screen. This shouldn't be a limit to learning and watching students at work you see them coming to their own solutions. Our students help each other. It's the conversations and interactions around the uses of technology that hold much learning. Beyond the tool itself, the hardware and software is a world of new understandings. New experiences that are negotiated and ways of accessing knowledge, turn taking, helping/volunteering, multiplayer experiences, shared uses, workarounds, fixes, all extend the personal social skills and social networks to create learning.

Wednesdays we Tech together

From time to time

you will see this sign

at our school

Touchdown !

Our Secondary students are refining their skills.
Each day the DER 1:1 laptop program provides students with a means to develop fine motor skills. Students develop these in real world learning and leisure situations at the keyboard. It is not easy. Students do have to try try again ! The steps and keystrokes are small and the journey is long. Each child has varying ability and varying need. Each child has differing stamina for the tasks at hand. But each student has the chance to pursue their choices and interests at the keyboard. It's an interface with the changing world around.

Heroes Journey

Jim is your strong silent type of hero.
A young man of few words.
But when he wants to, he can wield a gadget.

Learning Tablets

This week at Halinda we have been setting up iPads for some student programs.
Where to start ? As always the most basic switch is the on and off. This is mastered quickly by most willful learners here ! We had to soon find a makeshift hack that focused students attention on preferred learning activities. Once students jump in on tablet learning there is a lot of engagement ready to be channelled with the device. Now we move onto the familiarisation and prolonged engagement hoped for when we introduce an activity to stimulate student attention.

A Touch of Learning

This term is really gearing up. The gear we have for use in some student programs is tablets and educational Apps. Parents are increasingly interested in the use of a student's own tablet (usually an Apple iPad at this point in time, but this year a plethora of devices is coming to the market). The engagement they generate is useful to the teacher in the classroom. To find and focus on a student's learning strengths is a beautiful thing. The right device, be it a DER laptop, a mouse switch, an iPad or pencil, can be a boon to the learning at hand.

Halinda is part of the P.L.A.N

Halinda is now part of The Mt Druitt P.L.A.N.

Halinda School is situated in the Mount Druitt District. We have a cohort of student tech users that range from k-12. Our staff are lifelong learners. We not only participate in Interactive Computer Technologies for education, we have established a record of constantly refining that use of technology for the enhancement of outcomes built on curriculum.

Some schools in the area are developing their journies in ICT and forging links with other learning communities in the Western Sydney Region. Halinda is a part of this.

The Mount Druitt Professional Learning Area Network is a project that is growing. Teachers developing and sharing ideas, building access to the curriculum, increasing engagement in its delivery and linking know-how are working across schools.

Halinda sits on the steering committee of the P.L.A.N. along with lighthouse schools and curriculum innovators. Expect to see more of this professional network of schools working in partnership.