Helping develop staff outside of the city

Using Apple Teacher as a PL tool

Having  a residential campus 3.5 hours from Melbourne presents some unique PL challenges, especially when introducing iPads to a campus. The 2 major challenges are the fact that getting staff together is nearly impossible owning to the residential 24/7 nature of the campus and also providing access to solid, on demand resources to support their growth is challenging.

​So then Apple Teacher was released and things got a whole lot easier. Using their Apple ID the staff can now work through iBooks that support their understanding any time that suits them and the best thing is the courses also support them developing new ideas as they often use real classroom ideas and examples to showcase what they mean.

Using this as a starting point we have more scope to use our face to face time to clarify their understanding and to workshop application of skills which is far more effective and beneficial. We also set up a question board where staff can post questions/ideas any time and we can all respond and help build understanding that way. It empowers those a little further ahead in their explorations  to help their peers and also provides a mechanism for staff to see and interact with what others are doing and to receive support in a timely manner. 

There is the option to take a quiz at the end of a unit to gain badges, but at this stage the resource themselves are the real gold! For future reference the quizzes require participants to apply what they know across a series of 5 questions per topic. Once you have completed 8 topics in iPad or Mac (it's the same qualification) you are awarded the Apple Teacher Badge and the Swift Units become available.