Helping create App lists that focus on skills not specifics

Helping VCE Staff explore, adopt and use iPAd apps beyond the subject specific

Working with schools I often encounter iPad programs that are developed, explored and built around primary and middle years programs. But what happens when those devices make it to the VCE?

Staff may need help identifying Apps that they can use in class, but at this level of study content is so highly specialised this can prove to be a challenge.  It is not uncommon to hear 

"We have so much content to get through I can't possibly add more to it!"
"Why waste time using technology to do things when we can just do it by hand?"
"The exams are still done by hand and we need t practice this"

So I thought lets come at it from a skills point of view, rather than a specifics point of view. What this means is we identify what things unite all VCE subjects in terms of what we want to develop in our learners and what skills are we really building in addition to content understanding. That way staff could develop their capacity to enhance these skills using technology tools. 

 To give you some context  the school I was working with already had a school wide Learning Management System that was used to access curriculum documents and resources.  Every VCE student had an iPad and another device  of their own choosing if they wanted to bring it, but there was very little evidence of the iPads in use in the VCE centre. There was no set Apps and if teachers wanted to use the iPads it was up to them to request the technicians to deploy the Apps.  Some PD had been delivered surrounding finding subject specific Apps, but no follow up or action had occurred. 

So enter the Professional Learning Action Team Model and the creation of some digital champions. 

Calling for up to 8 interested staff members from any VCE faculty we met to establish what the key skills in each of our respective Study Designs were. Why any faculty? Because we wanted to gather a range of opinions and ideas rather than fall into the trap of becoming content driven. This also has a benefit later on as the tools can be applied by the teacher to their content, thus empowering the teacher to be an ongoing learner themselves. Using this information we identified a set of generic skills we all found ourselves using/developing in our learners.  These included;

Thinking
Revising
Presenting
Researching
Communicating 
Reading 

Up next was the deepening of teacher's professional knowledge . I came up with a set of Apps which fitted these areas and then we began training to understand how they work and then how they can apply to individual subject areas. This professional learning culminated with a call to action, the creation of a SMART goal  and the commitment to go and try something based on what we had learned.  

The final stage was to bring back and share the findings of the teachers and to document this. 

And the outcome? The school now has a staff selected list of Base Apps for all VCE subjects, a team of digital champions across faculties that can model and continue to innovate the use of these Apps and the school has a documented set of best practice examples that have been trialled.