A classroom filled with eager children and a teacher scrawling lessons onto the chalkboard seems like a lifetime ago. Today’s classrooms are lit up by interactive boards and the ability to draw on a multitude of sources across the internet.
One school leading the way with this type of learning is Silkwood School, located in Mount Nathan, Queensland.
Seeing the frustration of students and teachers alike in searching for specific resources, the school’s IT manager, Andrew Kemp, had an inspiring idea.
“If we found that key moment for students in a book – it was simple. You just dog-eared the page, and that moment was frozen in time to go back to at any point,” Kemp said.
However, doing this effectively with video isn’t so easy.
Every year, specific themes emerge within subject curriculums. ‘Human Experience’ for instance, is a current major focus in the English syllabus. Modern History, ‘Specific Moments In time’ where students explore political uprisings, election and propaganda.
However, while there is an abundance of resources that educators can give to students to inspire and educate, finding these key elements can be time consuming.
Faced with this challenge, Kemp reached out to Collaboro, a company helping schools organise images, video and artwork into one place so that educators can regain control of their content.
Kemp’s aim was to provide his own media pool – already compiled and collated – and have Collaboro’s state-of-the-art metadata tagging work to freeze these moments in time.
By doing this, Kemp was provided with immediate, streaming capability to view the scenes featuring these themes – ready for student use in their supporting essays.
With this technology in place, Silkwood continues to create and develop an incredible pool of resources that support both teachers and students.
According to Kemp, there have been huge efficiency gains reaped by the school.
Spending countless hours looking for relevant materials that perfectly match the exploration path a student has, is a thing of the past.
Collaboro is currently building out their secondary education technology set to launch this month with the aim of enriching and improving educational outcomes in schools across Australia.
Warwick Boulter, CEO of Collaboro, said that while in the last decade, there has been a “remarkable leap” in the way students digest educational content.
“There’s a plethora of online educational tools in the market. A huge opportunity exists for teachers, parents and educational bodies to use technology to support students,” Boulter said.
“However, it’s how we’re able to collate this information in conjunction to required learnings, that provides power to students and teachers alike.”