Teaching and Learning in the Senior School

NSW Curriculum Review – you’re invited to have a say

Professor Geoff Masters has just released an interim report into a review of the NSW Curriculum.  This report recognises that what and how we teach our young people needs to change.  Professor Masters reports that the key drivers for such changes are:

• Globalisation and technological advancement – we need to ensure that our young people are employable in the future;
• The growing proportion of 15-year-olds with only low-level literacy and numeracy skills – the future workforce, however, will require high-level literacy and numeracy skills;
• Crowded syllabuses which deny students the opportunity to learn deeply, favouring instead learning that is broad and superficial;
• Growing awareness of the need to better cater to the learning needs of individuals;
• Requirements for better links between ‘academic’ learning and workplace skills; and
• Reconsidering the extent to which a focus on ATAR results (wanted by universities) influences learning priorities in schools.

These are issues which affect our children into the future.  If you get an opportunity, familiarise yourself with the issues the review panel is considering.  We at St Greg’s will be submitting our own feedback to the panel and I would welcome any suggestions from parents and students who have read the report findings; the review panel are only seeking feedback on matters raised by the review.  So if you’re interested:

1. Read more detail about the interim findings of the curriculum review here.
2. Drop me a brief email, outlining your own response, before the end of December.

3D Augmented Reality Sandbox

For quite a long time now, several students have worked with Mr Perna, the maintenance crew, and Mr Bonfield, to build a 3DAR Sandbox for the College.  Students have come and gone from this challenging project, but it is just about near to completion!

A Sandbox is an educational tool for visualising landscape topography (from which lots of other applications can then be extrapolated).  It is indeed… a box with sand in it!  But importantly, it uses a 3D projector to enable representation of the sand as a landscape.  The building and calibration of this tool is no easy task; hence it is much more common to find such projects in university labs than in school settings.  The process of building the sandbox is just as important as the process of using it.

To see a completed sandbox in action, view a video here.

We’ve got one last tweak of the system to get our own sandbox up and running; at the moment, the landscape is a teensy bit upside down!  But from the images attached, you can see how wonderful it is going to be.  Many thanks to the wonderful minds of the collaborative team involved.

Mrs Louise Millar

Director of Teaching and Learning