Duration: 1:47
Allistair Williamson, e-Learning co-ordinator at Pakuranga College, discusses what enabled Pakuranga College to successfully implement e-learning across their school. He explains that they started with the development of a framework which guides all of the work that they do. He highlights the importance of e-mentors who support staff with professional learning.
The first thing we decided on once we went BYOD was making sure that we took the fear out of e-learning. We put together a framework and that’s something that’s been adjusted and moved along over a number of years and that framework we call our teaching and learning progression rubrics and they have SAMR in the background and they, you know, guide what we’re doing.
One of the first things they did when they put the e-learning coordinator role in place was to make sure that they had an understanding of where the school was placed in terms of its e-learning saturation so we did a school wide audit and from there made some critical decisions about what we were going to do and what direction we were going to take. The first thing was making BYOD compulsory for both year 9s and 10s and starting off with the year 9s in 2014.
We went device agnostic so we didn’t dictate what device students had to bring to the college. And, that raised a fair few concerns from our teachers in the sense that that opens up for a wide range of different technologies to be brought into the school. So, one of the first things we did as a school was, Term 4 every year was dedicated to professional learning around e-learning and creating a team of teachers who would be faculty based and we called them our e-mentors. That team took on different roles across the school. Primarily around their own faculties and from there we created a plan for each term 4 programme.