At Scotch College the SEQTA Suite (Teach, Learn and Engage) is used as our Learning Management System (LMS) to provide students with the resources needed for their learning. The subject lessons, documents, media, instruction, homework, upcoming assessments, assessment submissions, release of results and reports, are all available directly from the LMS.

Access to the SEQTA Learn is available anywhere, anytime via a web browser so your son has ready access to resources and materials to help him complete his tasks and his learning. Similarly, SEQTA Engage allows a parent to access the same materials and to monitor their son’s progress.

In the Senior School coding skills are developed through the school’s STEM programme, our WACE programme, and by participation in a variety of clubs. In 2017, the ILT team will begin the after school Code Cutter club supporting a variety of programming languages using various coding methodologies.

Through technology teachers can move freely through a class while creating solutions on their devices that are both projected and simultaneously shared with students. Teachers and students can directly interact participating in lessons by sharing devices and resources. The accessibility of shared instruction in the cloud is a significant positive as reported by our students. The wireless projection of class instruction is by AppleTV, but increasingly we are using the Vivi system. Vivi supports the wireless transmission of ultra-high definition media.

Flipping instruction occurs when learning is better undertaken if the delivery of subject content is interchanged with homework. The learning of content is completed at home via systems and resources, which leaves in-class teaching time free for differentiated one-to-one learning, refining understandings, or for more novel teaching pedagogies.

Teachers source or make instructional vodcasts for teaching, explaining specific details and for creating sample solutions. The videos are constructed via a laptop, iPad Pro, as well as pen and paper with a document camera. Scotch College teachers have created hundreds of vodcasts in this way.

Flipping isn’t just vodcasting. For example, we also flip using Verso, a discussion board that encourages brainstorming and sharing of ideas and viewpoints between the students. When this is undertaken out-of-hours it frees the class time up for detailed discussion, review and refinement of the ideas presented.

We use formative assessment to continuously review the effectiveness of our programmes. Formative assessments inform teachers of an individual boy’s learning, but by analysing the collective results also informs them of their teaching. We use online instruments that enable the rapid (real time) reporting of teaching and learning. The technologies inform the teacher of where they may need to place more emphasis or clarify their teaching, and inform the student of their learning – where they may have a misunderstanding of the subject. The instruments we use include traditional quizzes, but also include flip cards, timed games to match descriptions to keywords etc. These systems provide extensive reporting of student activity but also open the assessments up to gamification, encouraging engagement.

Examples of a formative assessment tools used at Scotch College include Socrative, Kahoot, Quizlet and Quizlet-Live. In the classroom these provide instant feedback on student understanding and if used at the beginning of a lesson can define the content and direction of that lesson. These systems encourage more frequent and often shorter formative assessments so that teachers remain informed of progress in understanding.

Quizlet and Quizlet-Live add a layer of gamification over the assessment process. In Quizlet-Live the quiz becomes a timed game between groups of students. The system encourages collaboration and active discussion between members of the group to arrive at a correct answer. The best performance in the quiz cannot be achieved without peer discussion and collaboration.

When appropriate, we use peer instruction as means to improve the learning experience. The findings of Mazur (MIT) on peer instruction indicate what we already know, that collaboration between students in their learning significantly improves learning and understanding. On occasion students can better interpret, articulate and answer questions by students – using their experience as peers to communicate in the same language, at the same level and having had experienced the same misunderstandings.

We have tested this methodology in class by having students complete a quiz on their understanding of a topic as individuals. Results and answers remain unseen. Students as groups of three repeat the quiz but can only jointly submit one answer, on which they must agree after discussion and collaboration. The results indicate significant improvement in a group as compared to individual efforts, consistently the group score improved on each individual score (i.e. the better students also did better) and it has been frequently observed that questions answered incorrectly by all members of the group, can be correctly answered as a group (by collaboration they navigate to the correct unknown answer).

The view of gaming is usually that of a first-person shooter and hence there is misunderstanding in the use of games in learning. We primarily use learning resources upon which a gamification layer is added. They are educational tools for which the gaming layer adds enjoyment but more importantly increased engagement. To “win” in these games you have to master the content; learn a technique; develop a skill; argue a position; collaborate; cooperate; manage your time; many of the skills the boys must develop to succeed at school and in the future.

Many of the formative assessment tools have additional gaming layers that can be employed to reward collaboration, reward correctness and speed or encourage deeper mastery of a subject with timed quizzes.

We live in a world where information and knowledge is growing and changing and where its communication is better achieved by more than the written word. In the Senior School textbooks are often eTextbooks, and these are not just digital copies of the printed version. They include video and audio explanations, quizzes, extension material for deeper understanding and are coupled with websites to provide greater assistance and resources. In some cases, the eTextbook is a website. Publishers are now adding data analytics to these eTextbooks to track to progress of each student’s learning. The goal is to automatically present material and resources to each student based on their individual need.

eTextbooks are considerably cheaper, considerably lighter and since your boy always has his laptop with him, he also has his textbooks.

Scotch College requires our teaching and learning to be available as digital content as much as possible. In addition to content we use digital resources where possible to assist in our teaching and learning.

The learning management system within SEQTA Teach is used extensively via shared programmes to deliver lesson material and learning resources in a consistent manner for each subject. The programmes in Teach are detailed, with lessons or weeks of lessons complete with instruction, a multitude of resources, including embedded video from YouTube and ClickView, online quizzes and a variety of online materials. This is vital for the anytime-anywhere delivery of teaching and learning.

For Years 9 to 12 students use the digital resource Mathspace to assist their learning and understanding of mathematics. This can be used as prescribed testing or self-paced and is able to check understanding and correctness for quite complex mathematics, including proofs. It provides hints when students have difficulty, including full video solutions and is able to provide questions on a topic until a prescribed level of mastery is achieved. It provides a rich set of data analytics to report back to teachers the individual progress of each boy.

In the Diploma programme the digital resource Kognity is used to supplement texts. Kognity contains high quality subject materials and challenging questions and answers that match the requirements of the International Baccalaureate. Kognity is used by students as prescribed by teachers or as a self-paced resource.

In the Language Acquisition subjects the digital resources Language Perfect and Ecoutez Bien are used. These widely popular web-based resources provide the opportunity to listen, speak and interact with native speakers, as well as worldwide quiz competitions.

Office 365 moves the MS Office suite and many other programs into the cloud to support document and resource sharing between students, between teachers and between teachers and students. The ability to access any shared resource at any time greatly facilitates learning. It also facilitates greater collaboration since the resources can be simultaneously edited by several authors. The documents for student group assignments can be developed by the group members with greater ease and simplicity. The use of this cloud based repository enables real-time sharing, greater collaborative interactions and changes to teaching pedagogy to suit.

The laptop image when issued is preloaded with much of the software he will need for his studies. However additional Scotch licensed software including anything from the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite can be freely accessed and installed onto his laptop using the Self Service application.

You will not need a personal App Store account to install or update Apple software that is provided by Scotch. This is all completed through the Self Service application on his laptop.