An Introduction

This term is an exciting one for learning technologies here at BIS. For the first time we are able to provide the infrastructure necessary to support every student within the secondary school bringing a laptop into school for use during the school day. With the great advantages this provides comes the responsibility to support our students to become safe and responsible users.

For students in years 10-13 this is not new, they have spent at least the last year adjusting to 1-to-1 access throughout the school day. Additionally, our new year 7’s who have arrived from the TX or AP1 campuses have enjoyed 1-to-1 access within their classrooms for at least a year now and have engaged with the key elements of enhanced learning and digital citizenship in this context. We look forward to further developing these skills and working with our year 8 and 9 students to ensure we support all our students and meet this responsibility.

Instead of rushing to blindly embrace technology at the expense of current excellent practice, we have been cautious, casting a critical eye over its place in education. We have sought advice from other schools, and drawn upon academic literature conscious that every school has it’s own particular context. At BIS our educational objectives are expressed in our mission statement and it is this that should guide us as we integrate learning technologies into school life.

Over course of the year I will try to communicate how learning technologies will support us in meeting our mission, specifically:

1. How we intend to fulfil our responsibility to develop personal qualities of integrity, caring and respect and how these naturally extend into the digital domain as our students engage as digital global citizens.

2. How it is important to remain conscious of individual online presence, safety and the need for “disconnected” time.

3. How this increased connectivity and ubiquitous information allows us to nurture students natural desire to enquire. Placing increased demands on the skills necessary to source, assimilate and synthesise new knowledge.

4. How technology can create enhanced, creative learning experiences, utilising connectivity and online tools to encourage learning together.

5. How we can support our students to utilise technology to support them to reflect and demonstrate perseverance through the employment of online resources.

I will also be discussing broader topics which cover what it means to grow up digitally.