By Michelle Dennis, eLearning manager at Mentone Girls’ Grammar School
One of my immense joys about working as the eLearning manager at Mentone Girls’ Grammar School is also the greatest challenge: to keep one eye focused on the future. Education must not just prepare students for the world we know now, but the one that our students will be living and working in 10, 20, and 50 years’ time.
The wonders of the ‘Magic School Bus’ are closer than you may think – in fact, some of our students are already experiencing some magical field trips. With Virtual Reality Headsets, we can transport our students into other worlds; they can follow red blood cells through vessels, land Apollo 11 on the Moon or have encounters with dinosaurs. To introduce students to this new way of thinking, we are currently developing a program in Year 9 Geography where students will use contour maps to construct Australian landscapes to explore in Virtual Reality.
Sewable electronics, 3D video games and dancing robots are some more ideas being explored as we develop new courses for Digital Technology at Years 8 and 9. Students will generate creative and fun solutions, engaging with new technologies and learning computational thinking skills. These core new subjects will be introduced in 2017 and will provide a platform for our students to become global leaders in the ideas economy.
It’s also imperative that students have a solid introduction to STEM-related studies in their early years of learning so they can develop their digital technology skills. For example, our Prep students have been abuzz after meeting the newest members of the school: the Beebots, which provide our young students an accessible and fun introduction to sequencing and algorithms. Meanwhile, our Years 2–6 students recently participated in Code Camp Australia, where they had the fantastic opportunity to build their own iPhone apps.
From OneNote in Japanese to the gamification of Accounting, these are just some examples of how schools can embed technology, coding and virtual reality into their curriculum.
Mentone Girls’ Grammar is one of the finest girls’ schools in Melbourne with the best results on the Bay. As a […]